Collaborate Ultra Features for Active Learning in Online Classes​

Blackboard Collaborate Ultra is a browser-based web conferencing tool that allows faculty to synchronously communicate online with students anywhere. It’s one of the tools that faculty can use to conduct their online classes.

Collaborate Ultra provides multiple features that instructors can use to engage students, receive their input, and conduct collaboration activities. If you are using Collaborate Ultra for your online class, then learning its features and associated pedagogies is a crucial element to facilitate student engagement.

Below are some of the Collaborate Ultra features that can engage students during an online class.

Virtual raise hand: The raise hand feature is a great tool to let your students quickly show agreement or get your attention. Ask students to raise their hands to confirm that they can hear your audio, see your shared content or agree with some statement. Students can also raise their hands if they want to get your attention to ask a question or answer a question that you’ve shared.

Share feedback: Let the students express their feelings about today’s activity or topic. Students can select from multiple feedback emoji faces (happy, surprised, sad, etc.) or (Agree, Disagree). This feature provides a short fun activity during the online class, and students will like it!

Everyone in the session can see the shared feedback or raised hands which facilitates a sense of being part of an online community..

Polls: Keep your students’ attention by giving them opportunities to participate. Start a discussion by asking your students their opinion on something. Ask questions to see how well they understood what you presented. Or use reflective questions to help them retain what you presented.

Breakout groups: Set your students into breakout groups for a collaboration activity. Students in the breakout groups will have their own private audio, video, whiteboard, application sharing with annotations feature, and chat. You can join the groups to moderate and facilitate progress.

Finally, as in most of the web-conferencing tools, students and instructors can communicate by sharing video, audio and posting chat messages.

View the below video about Collaborating in Blackboard Collaborate Ultra.

If you are interested in learning more about Collaborate Ultra, enroll in courses “Collaborate Ultra for Online Classes (Basic)” and “Collaborate Ultra for Online Classes (Advanced)” in PD Dashboard.