A well-designed layout can transform any content into a more effective and engaging learning experience. Thankfully, you don’t have to be a design expert to make content that looks appealing and delivers information effectively. With Documents in Blackboard Ultra, it is easier than ever to create learning materials with visual interest to increase student engagement and structure to enhance student learning.

To create a new Document in Blackboard Ultra:

  1. Navigate to your Blackboard Ultra course.
  2. Click the plus sign (+).
  3. Click Create.
  4. Click Document.
  5. Name your document in the top-left corner, then click Save on the Document menu bar.
    (Saving your document puts it into read-only mode; to make changes to the document, click Edit.)

Note: Blackboard Documents no longer save automatically. Your document will not be saved until you click the Save button. If you attempt to close a document without saving your changes, you will be prompted to either Cancel (and return to the document) or Close (and lose any unsaved changes).

Document Layout: Blocks and Rows

Blackboard Ultra Documents are composed of blocks of content. A block is essentially a moveable, resizable container for an individual piece of content. A single block might contain, for example, a few paragraphs of text, or a single image, or a file for students to download.

TIP: Layout works best when you have a reasonable number of blocks to work with. Think about your content and how best to break it down into individual pieces, then place each piece in its own block. More blocks means more possibilities for creating a layout that is both visually interesting and logically fits your content.

Every block sits on a row—a horizontally bound area that can hold up to four blocks side-by-side. As the name suggests, rows are stacked vertically down the document page. Creating a new block automatically creates a new row to hold it.

Blocks can be resized from the default full width down to three-quarters width, one-half width, and one-quarter width.

As you shrink a block horizontally, its vertical height automatically adjusts to accommodate its contents. Accordingly, a row’s height varies based on the contents of the blocks it holds.

Ways to resize a block:

  • Click and drag the purple circle on either side of a block to shrink or expand it
  • Click the block’s six-dot button and select from the menu
  • Move a block into a smaller space to automatically resize it to fit

Blocks can be moved from one row to another anywhere on the document page. A block moved into an open space on a row will automatically adjust its width to fit the available space. Within a row, blocks can also be reordered horizontally by moving a block to the left or right of another block.

Ways to move a block:

  • Click the block’s six-dot button and select from the menu
  • Click and hold on the block’s six-dot button to drag and drop

Try it! Playing with Blocks

As an example, follow the instructions below to create a layout featuring a quarter-width illustration next to a three-quarters-width section of text, with two other sections of text above and below.

Step One: Create a new document following the instructions at the top of this page, then click Edit to exit read-only mode.
Step Two: Create three text blocks and one image block.
  1. Select Content from the list of block types.
  2. Input a paragraph of text into the new block’s text editor.
    A screenshot of text input into a content block.
  3. Click the Add [+] button on the left side of the document menu bar to open the blocks menu.
  4. Repeat steps 1–2 until you have three blocks of text.
  5. Repeat step 1 to create a new block to contain the image.
  6. In the fourth block’s text editor, click the image button.
    A screenshot highlighting the image button on the text editor toolbar.
  7. Add an image: upload an image from your computer, or use Blackboard’s built-in stock image search or AI generator.
  8. Name your image; provide a suitably descriptive alternative text for your image or mark it as decorative; and choose whether students can view only, download only, or view and download the image; then, click Save.
Step Three: Resize the middle text block to three quarters width.
  1. Hover your cursor on the block to reveal its purple border and buttons.
  2. Drag the purple circle on the right side of the block to the left and drop at the first of the gray lines demarcating the quarters of the row.
    A screenshot demonstrating block resizing.
Step Four: Move the image block into the one quarter width space you just freed up in the second row, to the right of the middle text box.
  1. Hover your cursor over the block to reveal its purple border and buttons.
  2. Drag the purple six-dot button to move the whole block toward the empty space and drop when the empty space turns light purple.
    A screenshot of the finished document layout.
    There you have it: an image next to a section of text, with wider sections of text above and below.

Our demonstration document may not look like much, but it’s only meant to give you a sense of what you can do. Given a little formatting (using the toolbar in the content block text editor), it could look spectacular.

More importantly, you are now ready to resize and move blocks to create engaging and effective layouts for your course content!