Meet AVA: Blackboard’s AI-Powered Virtual Assistant for Faculty

This fall, UMBC faculty will have the opportunity to test Blackboard’s new AI Virtual Assistant (AVA), a suite of tools designed to support common teaching tasks. 

AVA Feedback Assistant will launch in early fall. This tool offers two functions to help instructors save time while maintaining high-quality, student-centered communication:

• Summarize Feedback generates a clear summary of rubric-based grading. AVA does not read student submissions and cannot evaluate student work. 
• Rewrite Feedback transforms short grading notes into polished, constructive responses.

Instructors must choose to activate AVA each time they want to use the functions.

Coming later this year, AVA Responses will help address frequently asked student questions send via Messages by generating real-time answers based on your course content. Whether it’s a question about deadlines or grading criteria, responses are linked to the original source in the course and shared with the instructor, who can review, confirm or correct as needed.

AVA will be available for faculty use through June 30, 2026, and ongoing feedback about these tools will be essential in evaluating the effectiveness of AVA and its long-term potential at UMBC. 

An information session will be scheduled in September when AVA is available. As with all of Blackboard’s AI tools, instructors must choose to activate AVA each time they want to use the functions.

About Blackboard’s AI Tools

UMBC currently uses Blackboard’s Course Design Assistant tools, which include AI support to:

• Define a course structure including learning modules, titles, descriptions.

• Generate images based on keywords for learning module thumbnails or course content, or search the Unsplash stock image gallery.

• Generate test questions and question banks, authentic assessments, journal and discussion prompts based on selected content in the course or other inputted keywords.

• Create rubrics drawing on an assessment, discussion, learning objectives, or selected course content.

• Create Socratic or roleplaying AI conversations around a topic or scenario to engage your students.

• Design attractive layouts for Ultra Documents that include images, knowledge checks, and helpful headings.

All AI tools and features are optional and available under Anthology’s AI Trustworthy Framework, giving instructor full control over how and when they use them. 

For more information about Blackboard’s AI tools, please contact Instructional Technology via RT ticket.

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