Blackboard Learn Ultra Adoption Builds Momentum Worldwide

Strategic investment, client involvement accelerate feature delivery as Learn Ultra adoption rises 30%

DUBAI, UAE, Oct. 18, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Anthology, a leading provider of education solutions that support the entire learner lifecycle, today announced a 46 percent increase in the number of courses designed using Blackboard® Learn Ultra, and a 30 percent increase in the number of institutions deploying Learn Ultra courses, year over year.

Following the merger with Blackboard, Anthology tripled Learn Ultra development resources and increased opportunities for client feedback in the development process, a strategy that continues to power a rising cadence of new features and enabled the largest Learn Ultra release to-date delivered this July. These new features are accelerating adoption and helping institutions leverage data to better serve students when used alongside new tools like Blackboard Data Reporting.

In just the last six months, institutions in the United Arab Emirates that have selected or upgraded to Learn Ultra include the British University in Dubai and Al-Khawarizmi International College, among numerous others.

"Blackboard Learn Ultra supports a more engaging teaching and learning experience through its intuitive, user friendly interface and ability to connect faculty with students, and vice versa," said Abdullah Esmat, IT Department System Administrator for Khawarizmi International College. "We're prepared to support in-person, remote and hybrid learning environments long term because of the flexibility the Learn Ultra offers our institution."  

With a research-informed approach that involves clients throughout the development process, Blackboard Learn Ultra users benefit from significant improvements to the learning experience aligned with the pedagogical preferences of instructors. The most recent releases of Learn Ultra have delivered new enhancements driven by this inclusive process, including:

• An improved and more personalized student test-taking experience, including student visibility into progress during a test, the option to hide the timer to help with test anxiety, filters to accommodate different test taking strategies and reminders about unanswered questions.
• Increased instructor control around how tests and assignments are displayed, like the ability to display one question at a time and prevent backtracking, and more engaging assessment experiences through inline file rendering. New features also increase instructor control over how a test should behave, allowing them to determine when the student can view their submission, instructor feedback and grades.
• Greater flexibility to support student self-expression, including the opportunity to provide a preferred name, record a name pronunciation, and more control over how this information is presented to peers.

In conjunction with accelerating feature development and deployment, Blackboard Data Reporting is now widely available to Learn clients to help institutional leaders tap learner data for actionable insights. Designed to lower the barriers to data-informed decision-making, Blackboard Data Reporting generates reports, dashboards and visualizations that look across all courses, instructors and students. This comprehensive view provides understanding about tool adoption, course design and student engagement, and ultimately enables leaders to build an experience that fuels learner success.

"Anthology's Blackboard Learn Ultra is so much more than an LMS. When integrated with other core systems on campus, it becomes an essential tool in delivering the insights that institutions need to create more personalized experiences for students, and it will play a critical role in our Anthology iX™ product vision," said JD White, Chief Product Officer at Anthology. "We've tripled the size of our Learn development team in the last year and are working with universities in more than 70 countries to help them realize its full capabilities. This is just the beginning of what we expect to see ahead."

Anthology offers the largest EdTech ecosystem on a global scale for education, supporting more than 150 million users in 80 countries. With a mission to provide dynamic, data-informed experiences to the global education community through Anthology Intelligent Experiences™, we help learners, leaders and educators achieve their goals by offering over 60 SaaS products and services designed to advance learning. Discover more about how we are fulfilling our mission for education, business and government institutions at www.anthology.com.

Media contact: Heather Phillips, heather.phillips@anthology.com

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