October 20, 2026 4 minute read
October. The month when good weather packs its bags and heads for the southern hemisphere, when Halloween announces the start of the festive season, and when all of us scratch our heads and wonder where on earth the year went.
It’s also a BIG month of new capabilities for Blackboard LMS. This comes hot on the heels of the September release, which introduced key developments for the new Content Editor, the opportunity for faculty to view student mastery outcomes in the gradebook, and the ability to restrict file types for assessment submissions.
AVA Pulse Quiz is now available in production
We know there’s a lot of excitement for this one! Pulse Quiz is a new activity within the AI Conversation, which delivers a personalized quiz to students based on course content. This is perfect for test preparation and other low-stakes tasks, as it tailors questions based on each student’s responses to further advance their learning. A summary is provided at the end to offer further direction to the student, while their instructor maintains full visibility over the task.
The new Pulse Quiz activity in the AI Conversation – exclusively available with an AVA license.
AI Conversations are now even more immersive
Staying with AI Conversation, these will now open in a more focused view. Once the student begins the conversation, they will be greeted by a dedicated screen which allows them to concentrate on the conversation activity, with less disruption from task settings and configuration. This applies across all three conversation types, including the Pulse Quiz detailed above.
The new immersive experience when students participate in an AI Conversation activity
Instructors have a dedicated Course Rubrics page
To promote best practices and make it easy for faculty to use rubrics, a dedicated Course Rubrics page provides a single destination to manage all rubrics associated with their course. This replaces the previous workflow, where rubric management was done within the Gradebook Settings and Assignment Settings panels.
This is supported by another key October addition – the ability for instructors to export and import rubrics. This allows faculty to easily reuse rubrics from other courses and can be actioned directly from the Course Rubrics page.
The Course Rubrics page displays all rubrics in a sortable, searchable table.
We continue to evolve the New Content Editor (beta)
As noted in the September video, we are making iterative improvements to the beta Content Editor, all designed to deliver a faster and more accessible experience for users. October brings several more crucial updates, spanning keyboard navigation, list behavior, file and image handling, and new math authoring support, giving instructors a more reliable and intuitive editing experience. Check out release notes for all the details on the improvements here.
The List menu in the beta Content Editor now includes the section headers Bulleted and Numbered.
For full details on new capabilities coming to Blackboard LMS, join our Roadmap webinar series up in early December!
