Faculty Workshops Available for New Blackboard Tool

The new Blackboard tool, Ally, will be officially activated for all spring 2022 courses. So far, 61 instructors have been trained and 344 fall courses have been enabled with Ally.

Both faculty and students will benefit from this tool. Faculty will have the ability to perform accessibility checks on course content and edit materials posted in Blackboard that need improvement. Students will have the ability to choose from several course content formats such as MP3 text-to-speech, e-reader supported files and Beeline Reader files which help readers keep track of their place in text.

Training sessions for faculty have begun and will continue through October. Faculty are urged to sign up for workshops in order to understand how to make course content more universally accessible and gain experience in Ally before the spring semester. Registration and schedule of available workshops can be found here. Many workshop dates and times have been added or changed to accommodate teaching schedules. Preregistration is required so that Ally can be enabled in participants courses to provide guided training. Other helpful links are Learning Technology’s support web page, which can also help answer any questions.