Activating Study Materials

Here you will find some ideas on how you can make your study materials more interactive and add a social learning component, to encourage deeper student engagement with the materials.

You can easily create interactive videos, interactive documents, or interactive audio files with the FeedbackFruits tool suite, which is integrated into Blackboard Ultra.

You can integrate 3 types of learning dynamics to guide students' class preparation.

  • Practice Questions

    Both multiple choice and open questions can be added. You can also lock the questions, so that students can only continue reading, viewing of listening after they have answered the questions. You can also allow students to create questions.

  • Discussion Topics

    You can include discussion threads for students to participate in. While the students are working through the material, they will see annotations by the professor or their peers. They can comment and respond on the contributions and upvote their preferred discussion threads. You can also allow students to create discussions.

  • Reflection Questions

    A reflection question can be added to the assignment to be completed after the main assignment. You can set a separate deadline for this step, define min and max word count and include additional instructions.

Customize interaction for your teaching

Self-study or social learning?

Depending on your objectives, you can promote different types of student engagement
(1.) with the study material (content),
(2.) with their peers and/or
(3.) with the professor.

Monitor student progress

You can see how students advance and gain insight into their level of understanding of the materials. You can also interact directly with students and respond to questions.

Grading & groups

You can configure any of the activities for summative assessment. Once published, the grades will automatically be pushed into the grade book in Blackboard Ultra. For bigger groups, you can also create student groups to avoid clutter.

Getting started with building your own interactive study material!

Are you wondering how much time you need to invest to build your material? The answer is... it depends! It depends on the complexity of interaction you are designing and the amount of study material you plan to build. The good news is that once you have done the work, you can easily deploy the material in different courses and sections.

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