I sat through the latest Blackboard LMS roadmap webinar so you don’t have to. But honestly, this one was worth it. It was one of the more content-dense sessions, and the team acknowledged as much upfront. If you missed it, the recording and slides are on the community site. But if you want my take on what matters, what’s real, and what you should actually be paying attention to, read on. Note that all of these are approximate timelines and features that don’t have an official date according to Blackboard. Any dates I share are approximations based on the information provided at the time.
Let’s get into it.
Note: Use the links below to go to specific parts of this lengthy blog. It hopefully will help you find the specific things you would like to review.
First, the Company News You Need to Hear
Before the roadmap content even started, there was a fairly significant announcement: Anthology is becoming Blackboard. The sale of their enterprise operations to Ellucian in December, and the sale of lifecycle engagement and student success to Encoura completed in early February. As of this writing, the company name has officially reverted to Blackboard.
Nico (who opened the session) was careful to frame this as “not back to Blackboard” but rather a new Blackboard, fully aligned around teaching and learning. I’ll take that at face value. The product portfolio they’re keeping (Blackboard, Ally, Illuminate, and institutional effectiveness) is coherent. Shedding the non-teaching-and-learning products means the entire organization is theoretically focused on us. Whether that translates to faster product cycles and better support is the thing to watch. Speaking of support, a revamp of the technical support experience was mentioned, with details still forthcoming. I’ll believe the rest when I see it.
One more headline worth calling out: Blackboard won the Tech & Learning Awards of Excellence in the Higher Education LMS category for 2025, and Ally won in the accessibility category. Those are legitimate third-party recognitions, not self-reported, and for those of you operating in federal or defense-adjacent environments, Blackboard remains the only higher education LMS holding both FedRAMP certification and IL4 authorization. That’s not a small thing. The biggest thing I took away from this was that Blackboard’s feature improvements are being recognized by the industry, but what that does for increasing the client base is yet to be seen.
Navigation: Learning From The Changes
The January navigation refresh / reworked base navigation, full-page views, new course switcher changes generated a lot of community noise when it dropped. Some of it anxious, some of it enthusiastic. In the first month, the new course switcher was used more than 51 million times. Navigation back to the courses page just to switch courses declined by 41%. Accidental closures, one of the top pain points driving the redesign according to Blackboard, are down 28%. The course switcher will soon include the ability to search for courses directly within the switcher, access favorited courses, and eventually filter by term. The new features will prove a major help for instructors and students.
Phase two of the navigation work goes deeper into the course itself, removing additional panels, introducing breadcrumbs (finally), improving the courses page with better filters and search, and separating course banners from course cards for more institutional control. There’s also a targeted to-do list coming to the courses page, which should help students who open Blackboard and immediately forget what they were supposed to do. (We all know those students. Some of us were those students.)
The course catalog is also getting a full modernization. The current catalog experience, as anyone who’s worked with it knows, still looks like it was designed in a different decade. This update brings a completely refreshed UI with improved performance, smoother navigation, and cleaner enrollment workflows for both learners and admins.
The Content Editor: A Long-Overdue Overhaul
I want to spend some real time here because the content editor update is arguably the most impactful near-term change for instructors. Blackboard is moving to a modern, open-source editor solution, and based on the live demo in the webinar, it addresses a genuinely embarrassing list of long-standing issues: broken nested list numbering, awkward indentation controls, poor copy-paste behavior from Word, and link management that required more clicks than it had any right to.
The demo showed accurate nested ordered list numbering maintained automatically at every level. No more instructors manually forcing list items to restart after a break. Mixed ordered and unordered lists now render cleanly with proper spacing. Indentation via Tab and Shift+Tab works intuitively, and pasting a URL directly into the editor now formats it automatically. There was excitement from attendees during this section.
A technical preview launches next month, followed by a full beta. If you want early access, look for the QR code or sign-up link from the session recording. My recommendation: get your instructional design team in on this one. They will have opinions, and you want to surface them before general availability.
Instructional Design: Meaningful Additions for Course Builders
A handful of updates here that deserve attention:
Block stacking in the content designer is available now. Users can now place multiple content blocks in a single row or create side-by-side layouts, all with reduced white space in Ultra documents. It’s a cleaner, more professional authoring experience that your instructional designers have probably been asking about for a while.
Duplicate content items. Presenters announced the ability to copy a single item or an entire folder structure in a single click is coming soon. If your institution has courses that follow a weekly template structure, this will save time when developing or replicating course content. The manual rebuild of the same folder/document/discussion pattern every week is tedious, error-prone, and takes time that many designers and instructors need for other activities.
Descriptions for discussions and journals are (thankfully) coming as well, bringing those content types into alignment with an important standardization within Ultra. Small thing, but it is important for instructors who want to set clear expectations before students engage.
The Learning Object Repository (LOR) continues to add features. Currently, the tool has 12,000+ objects, 1.2 million associations, 230+ institutions, according to Blackboard. The integration with Ally is expanding, so you’ll soon be able to identify and fix accessibility issues on institutional materials directly in the LOR, with changes automatically propagating to every course using that content. Institutional hierarchy support is also coming to the LOR, meaning each node can have its own repository with access controlled by user and course associations. This feature has been something I’ve been waiting for before launching the LOR broadly at my institution. This addition brings the right balance of central oversight and local ownership. The exact thing decentralized content development teams at institutions needed.
The next big feature to impact this area, course templates, has completed backend architecture work, according to the team. The next step, front-end UI development, is coming as they expand to additional object types. While many are excited for this much-needed feature, patience is warranted. The development team continues to build it carefully, and that’s the right call for something with this much institutional impact.
Video Studio: Solid Adoption, Good Next Steps
The Video Studio (a premium product) numbers shared in the webinar are genuinely impressive: 166,000+ videos uploaded, 32,000+ unique content creators, and nearly 900,000 minutes captioned. If you are looking for a video hosting solution solely for the learning management system, Video Studio is a serious solution to consider.
Coming soon: playback speed control (students can slow down or speed up content), audio descriptions (spoken explanations of key visual elements for learners with visual impairments or audio-only contexts), and interactive knowledge checks embedded directly in video content.
The longer-term roadmap includes automatic ingestion of all existing Blackboard videos into Video Studio the moment a license is activated. Every video uploaded anywhere in the LMS, including ones from years ago, will automatically move to Video Studio’s unlimited storage. This eliminates the storage management headache and ensures consistent accessibility and analytics across the board. That’s a significant operational simplification for institutions managing large video libraries.
AI: Real Usage Data and What’s Actually Next
The AI section led with something I appreciate: actual adoption data. The AI Designer and AI Conversations features have seen steady, consistent growth, and the AI suggestion acceptance rate has held at around 50%. That number, half of AI suggestions being applied to courses, is a meaningful signal. It means instructors are doing two things. One, actively reviewing and making judgment calls rather than rubber-stamping AI output. And secondly, instructors are becoming more comfortable bringing the AI features into their course development. That’s healthy. A higher rate would bring concerns.
Coming in the March release (out now as of this blog post release): AI-generated knowledge checks within documents, using the document’s existing content as context. That’s a practical, well-scoped addition.
Coming further out for AI Conversations: instructors will be able to set expected interaction counts (addressing the “students don’t know when to stop” problem when developing activities like this), rubrics will integrate directly into the conversation workflow for grading transparency, and a language selector will enable bilingual course configurations.
AI Agents and academic integrity got a dedicated section, which is appropriate given recent presentations I’ve attended. AI “experts” state that the rise of agentic AI continues and is not at its peak yet. Blackboard has published a blog post and created a dedicated community page outlining why AI agents represent a genuine academic integrity threat, what the technological limitations of detection are, and what a collective industry response looks like. What I was disappointed with was no discussion providing instructors the ability to create AI agents to answer student questions and provide tutoring guidance on activities and/or exercises. I’ve got faculty already doing this and the inability to have this native in Blackboard concerns this admin.
AVA (AI Virtual Assistant) premium capabilities are worth noting: grading assistance (rewrite and summarize for instructor feedback), automated responses to common student messages with instructor oversight, and the new AVA Playground, which is a big win. This provides a unified, institution-controlled launchpoint for AI model access. The Playground is positioned as an equity play: if students at your institution have unequal access to AI tools, the Playground gives you a standardized, licensed, and policy-aligned way to provide consistent access to everyone. This is good, as pricing for institutional student access to AI models could bleed IT budgets. However, there is no word if any non-AWS models will be available. Having various models (even older open-source models or, better yet, custom-generated LLMs) could add a lot of value to institutions.
Assessment: Community Requests Delivered
Assignment submission type specification hopefully is near the finish line, a much-awaited feature according to many of my instructors. The feature can define whether students submit a file or text and then specify which file type (Word, PDF, or Excel). No more Apple Pages surprises that can’t be graded inline and clear expectations for students before they submit.
Multiple-choice enhancements: removing the 100% partial credit cap, locking answer positions (critical for “all of the above” / “none of the above” options with randomization, which has been a needed option since Blackboard’s initial creation), and answer-level feedback. These are overdue and welcome.
WebSockets-based assessment integrity: Blackboard will automatically enforce a single active attempt per student in test and assignment workflows. Students won’t be able to run the same assessment in parallel sessions. This directly addresses coordinated answer sharing and impersonation during live exams without requiring a third-party proctoring tool. A powerful feature that I hope will quickly come to production environments.
Multiple rubrics per assignment are coming in the 6+ month timeframe. If you’re supporting programmatic or accreditation assessment workflows, most curriculum and assessment folks already know why this matters—one submission often needs to be evaluated by multiple rubrics, and doing that elegantly inside the LMS has never worked well.
Printable rubrics, export/import for rubric sharing, and timer extensions during in-progress assessments are also in the pipeline.
Individual grades within group submissions are on the way. A feature many faculty have waited years for is this option. Being able to assign different grades to group members based on actual contribution is foundational fairness, and it’s good to see it getting addressed.
Anonymous grading is getting a controlled privilege to lift anonymity when legitimately necessary (student distress, potential collusion, non-submission follow-up), with a fully logged and audited workflow. That’s the right balance between protecting grading integrity and supporting real-world instructional needs.
The new gradebook grid view continues to progress through technical preview. If you’re not already signed up, consider participating. The improvements promise better performance, more rows and columns visible, flexible name display, direct grade entry, and new panels for assessment details and grade details, making the change worthwhile and important to provide feedback to make sure the team gets it as close to perfect as possible. The community feedback loop on this has been active for 8–12 months, and it shows.
Outcomes: Now Included in Core. Pay Attention.
Outcomes for Blackboard is coming in March and will be included in your existing core license at no additional cost. That’s the headline.
The full capability set, embedding outcome assessments into native course tools, mastery insights for faculty, student-facing outcome progress visibility, program and institutional alignment, auto-generated curriculum maps, and accreditation-ready longitudinal reporting is significant. If your institution is doing any kind of programmatic assessment or accreditation work, this changes what’s possible without requiring a separate tool.
The performance results scale (exceeds / meets / approaching / does not meet, with configurable thresholds at the assignment level) integrates with Outcomes to give you consistent measurement across courses and programs while preserving instructor flexibility in assessment design.
The downside is for institutions that have already built this structure and architecture into the previous Outcomes tool within Blackboard. The company, at this time, has provided no good way to convert from the previous/existing product to this new one. That’s a huge roadblock, recreating all of this for institutions where teams are already stretched thin. I doubt the adoption of this tool will be as quick as Blackboard wants it. Note to the teams and leadership. The easier the adoption / conversion from current Outcomes to the new product. That will ensure more adoptions at a faster timeline of this new Outcomes 2.0
Communication, Notifications, and Group Management
A few highlights from the communication section:
Two due dates for discussions are coming—with separate participation requirements for each, visibility improvements across the UI, and updated needs grading triggers. This is the top-voted idea in the communication category on the idea exchange, and it’s getting a real implementation, not a workaround. Having this feature will be a game changer for discussion board usage in the application.
Course automations: Automated messages based on student activity are already released, and they’re adding course copy support so your automations carry across terms, plus sender name customization and dynamic variables (student names, due dates). If you’re not using course automations yet, this is worth a look. Next, would be great to see an automation template gallery associated with the LOR to share within institutions and hierarchy nodes.
Announcements and Course Messages: Announcements will get improvements in the coming months with the ability to better display images when emailed to users. While tracking each student’s view of an announcement, it will be tracked and displayed in the student overview page. Course messages has a new layout that follows the consistent UI experience that you can find in text, chat, or collaboration solutions, like Microsoft Teams. Enhancements to this tool bring the ability to merge multiple conversations with one person or group of people into a single conversation along with the ability to see some previous messages when adding a new recipient to a conversation.
Group management is getting a full redesign and re-architecture. The new interface is built for scale with a side-by-side view of unassigned students and existing groups, avatars, faster saving even in courses with thousands of students. An early access preview is available next month. Instructors who use the tool in small and large course sizes need to look for the early access
Notifications modernization is beginning by reviewing what gets sent, how often, and whether it actually adds value. The goal is signal over volume. This is the right framing. Notification fatigue is real, and a notification system that students start ignoring is worse than no notification system at all.
Administrative and Integration Updates
Institutional hierarchy improvements continue: LTI and Ultra Extension Framework integrations are becoming node-aware, supporting multiple deployments so each department can manage its own LTI setup. It’s an important feature for administrators who want to limit access to some tools based on a department or division within the institution. Blackboard also hinted that more granular enrollment permissions for node admins are coming.
The Link and Content Service (from OneEdTech) is a new LTI capability that allows external tools to create, update, and remove course content through standard APIs without relying on the LMS interface. If you manage complex integrations with content partners or third-party tools that need ongoing content governance, this is worth tracking closely.
Guest access: Read-only course access for non-enrolled users is coming to Ultra. Institutions will have the ability to control which courses are visible and for how long. The coming feature will be useful for course preview workflows, faculty evaluation, and a handful of other scenarios that currently require tedious workarounds.
Blackboard Assist is being replaced by a dedicated Student Resources tab on the institution page with role-based targeting. Blackboard promises that the new tab will provide the same function but better implementation.
Ultra Adoption and the Retirement Clock
80% global Ultra adoption. That’s a genuine milestone. If you’re in the 20% still on Blackboard Original, the clock is now very visible:
- December 31, 2026: Blackboard Original retirement date
- December 1, 2027: Remaining Original courses become read-only
- Recommended target: Complete your migration by August 2026 to give yourself a buffer
The free support resources available are a dedicated modernization team, collaborative planning sessions, an adoption toolkit, direct faculty training, and train-the-trainer. Use them. If you haven’t started your migration conversation with Blackboard, start it now. August is closer than it feels from where we are in March.
Final Thoughts
This was a substantive roadmap update. The navigation data showing real behavioral change, the content editor overhaul, the Outcomes inclusion in core, the assessment integrity improvements, and the gradebook grid view are meaningful, community-shaped improvements. I’ve been doing this long enough to tell the difference between a roadmap slide deck that’s mostly vapor and one that reflects actual engineering progress. This one felt like the latter.
What I’m watching: the support experience revamp (details still vague), the course templates front-end rollout (backend is done – let’s see how the UX lands), when and/or what roadmap features slip from their current timelines, and whether the company rename to Blackboard comes with the operational focus they’re promising or just a logo change.
The user conference is in Dallas July 13th-15th. I expect to see many of the items discussed implemented or in preview by then.
Technically Yours,
The Blackboard Guru
