Taking Higher Education Sky-High

Together with our client, we worked on new, intuitive workstreams for the Ultra product that aligned with the needs of both teachers and students. This personalized experience is web-based and responsive, fit for any device.

While working together, we leveled-up agile team practices by demonstrating the effectiveness of modern practices, collaborative teamwork, and visualizing work. We also bolstered user-centric product thinking by bringing product management, design, and engineering together. As a result, we were able to encourage the use of a product owner role to keep the user’s needs at the forefront of decision-making conversations.

We set our client up for the future by creating new flexibility around integrations, fixing critical bugs, incorporating performance testing, and implementing a microservice architecture. Microservices allow Blackboard to make updates to smaller parts of their application without having to change the entire system, which enables the app’s capabilities and longevity to be extended.

We collaborated with Blackboard’s DevOps team to create new types of delivery pipelines, so the code could more quickly be deployed to end users. This was a new type of partnership between development and operations for our client and it resulted in a shared responsibility of maintaining the code as it was released to customers.

Major Features We Worked On:

• Batch editing of class materials that saves instructors time and effort
• A new text editor that was a key feature request by some institutions
• Localization services that enable our client’s global presence by making it cost-effective for institutions around the world to customize the product
• An important feature that allows instructors to copy the content of one course into a new course
• Tools, like video feedback, that support the accessibility experience – inclusive and accessible design is a tremendous focus in the education world