The Center for Instructional Technology (CIT) will enable select Blackboard AI Design Assistant (AIDA) features for UA instructors on Monday, August 4, 2025.
Need-to-knows
- The Blackboard AI Design Assistant helps you build your course and saves time. It is exclusively available in Blackboard courses using Ultra Course View.
- The AIDA features generate suggested content for instructors to review and edit before making it available to students. The instructor is in control.
- The AIDA’s suggestions are based on the instructor’s course content and inputs.
- Anthology has partnered with Microsoft to provide this service. Only limited course information is provided to Microsoft for the Azure OpenAI Service, and Microsoft does not use UA data to improve the OpenAI models. You can find more information about Anthology’s Trustworthy AI Principles and Microsoft’s data privacy practices in this article: Blackboard Help Center: AI Design Assistant
- UA is not enabling the AI Conversations feature at this time.
About the AI Design Assistant
The AIDA is a set of features that help instructors create and design courses, using generative AI to help create learning modules, assignment, discussion, and journal prompts; test questions and question banks; grading rubrics; images; Document layouts; and more.
Using simple inputs like a course name, description, learning objectives, syllabus, or other course content, the AI Design Assistant provides these generative AI-facilitated functionalities in Blackboard Ultra courses:
- Generates keywords for the royalty-free image service powered by Unsplash – Suggests keywords to the Unsplash search for efficiency.
- Generates learning modules – Assists instructors by suggesting a course structure.
- Generates learning module images – Creates and suggests images for each learning module.
- Generates authentic assignments – Provides suggestions for assignments using your course content.
- Generates test questions and question banks – Inspires instructors by suggesting a range of questions in a test or building a question bank.
- Generates discussions and journals – Provides instructors with prompts to encourage class interaction.
- Generates a rubric – Suggests a grading rubric with structure and criteria against a given assessment.
- Generates Document images – Generates images to use within a Document, making Documents more visually appealing to students.
- Generates Document layouts – Provides suggestions and visually appealing layout options with headings, images, and knowledge checks.
Here’s how it works:
- Select Auto-Generate item or Generate to begin.
- Enter a description or select course items on which to base the suggestions.
- Where present, select the desired cognitive level and adjust the complexity.
- Make any other adjustments, such as specifying the number of items or output language.
- Choose the content you’d like to add to your course, then select Add.
- Review and edit the content before making it Visible to students.
Learn more:
- CIT Knowledge Base: Blackboard AI Design Assistant Tools
- CIT Knowledge Base: Blackboard AI Design Assistant FAQ
- CIT Knowledge Base: How do I generate content with the AI Design Assistant?
- Blackboard Help: AI Design Assistant
- Video: Blackboard Learn’s AI Design Assistant – Powered by Azure OpenAI Service
- CIT recorded session: Blackboard AI Design Assistant (August 2025, 18:25)
- Additional CIT-led AI Design Assistant workshops and webinars coming soon.
Please contact CIT for questions, concerns, and assistance.