For the past year we have been committed to upgrading our Blackboard experience, assisting over 550 colleagues with their migration to the latest, more enhanced and accessible version of the platform, Blackboard Ultra.

With almost 1000 modules already on Blackboard Ultra, both the first and second migration waves are complete. We are now eager to support those colleagues who will be part of our third and final migration.

For this migration, all remaining modules will need to be on Ultra ready for the next academic year (2025/26), including:

• Year 2 Semester 1 and year-long modules
• Year 3, 4 and 5 modules
• All postgraduate modules

This means, from Monday 29 September 2025, all module leads will be delivering their modules on Blackboard Ultra.

If this includes your module, please take the time and go through the following checklist to support your migration. From Monday 28 April, 2025/26 Blackboard courses will be provisioned in line with the Blackboard Universal Standards, and you will be able to start working on your module.

Your migration checklist

Set time aside for your migration

• It’s important to dedicate some time as there is no automatic rollover for your first-time migration of a module. By migrating your content ahead of time, this will help alleviate your workload and provide you with an opportunity to properly consider what you want to achieve as part of the students’ learning experience.

Sign up to our training sessions

• The Staff Development Programme provides training sessions covering a range of topics to support your needs. We will be including additional topics involving specific tools, groups and documents. We strongly encourage you to sign up to these sessions to help build your knowledge and understanding of Blackboard Ultra.

Check your module information is up to date

• We are updating the Blackboard course enrolment process for the next academic year (2025/26), following valuable feedback from staff. When we provision the 2025/26 Blackboard courses from 28 April, we will enrol module leads via Worktribe. We recommend that module leads log into Worktribe and check that your details are correct. To understand how to do this and learn more about this change, please visit this eLearn guide.

Further information

Please visit the Blackboard Ultra SharePoint site for more information or if you have any questions, please contact the project team via blackboardultra@soton.ac.uk