LTS Campus Update: Fall 2026
An Update by the Numbers on Our Campus Learning Technologies: Fall 2026
As we head into a new academic year, our approach to academic technology is guided by a simple principle: learning data isn't just a record of what happened yesterday; it can help shape what we do tomorrow.
My goal is to make sure we aren’t collecting metrics just for the sake of it, but using them to make better decisions. By examining the LMS adoption, student engagement, and digital accessibility, we can identify where students are succeeding and where we can better support your teaching.
The numbers below reflect how much our campus has adapted over the past year and give us a clearer picture of where we’re making progress and where there’s still work to do.
The Canvas Transition: Canvas Takes the Lead
This summer, we reached an important milestone: Canvas officially overtook Blackboard as our primary Learning Management System.
During the Summer 2026 term, Canvas hosted 343 active courses, compared with Blackboard’s 272.
The Final Term for Blackboard
Fall 2026 is the final term Blackboard will be available for teaching at UIC. If you still have course materials there, please plan to move them as soon as possible. Our instructional design and support teams are available to help make that transition easier.
Here’s where we stand in that transition:
- 4,868 core courses were targeted for migration by departments and instructional designers, as of this newsletter.
- 2,515 of those courses have already been migrated and restructured.
- The remaining 1,810 courses are in progress and being prepared for the start of the term.
If you need help with a remaining course migration, please reach out to the Learning Technology Solutions (LTS) team.
Classroom Updates: Modernizing Our Physical Spaces
We’re also continuing to invest in physical classrooms and campus AV infrastructure to support active, collaborative learning.
Floors 1 and 2 of Lincoln Hall have been fully renovated, with new audiovisual equipment in every room. The goal was consistency: an intuitive, predictable setup so instructors can walk into any room and know what to expect.
In the updated medium-sized classrooms, features include:
- Accessible Lecterns: Height-adjustable stations designed to accommodate instructors.
- Ceiling Microphones: Ceiling microphones that can automatically pick up the instructor at the podium or students asking questions in the room.
- Cameras & Displays: Auto-tracking cameras that follow instructors as they teach, paired with high-definition laser projectors and touchscreen monitors.
- Flexible Connectivity: Plug-and-play laptop connections and wireless screen sharing allow instructors and students to present without special adapters or software downloads.
- Hybrid Teaching Support: Integrated lecture capture and video conferencing tools support in-person, remote, and recorded instruction.
Work in Lincoln Hall will continue next summer with renovations on the third floor.
Cinema and Specialty Spaces
Specialty spaces are getting attention, too. Burnham Hall (BH-B6) has been retrofitted as a cinema and screening space, with upgraded video display technology and a 7.2 surround sound system for film screenings and media-rich presentations.
Looking Ahead: Taft Hall
Taft Hall classroom renovations are also underway and on track to open to faculty and students at the start of the spring semester.
The ARC AV Project: We have also begun a three-year effort to modernize audiovisual resources across campus.
At the same time, our in-house AV Engineering team has developed the expertise to build its own plug-and-play classroom setups. That helps us rely less on external vendors, manage costs, and tailor classroom technology more directly to the needs of UIC faculty and students.
Classroom Interactivity: Polling and Attendance
To support classroom engagement and simplify some day-to-day tasks, we continue to offer two classroom response platforms that integrate with our campus environment:
- Acadly: Fully funded by the university, Acadly offers automated, Bluetooth-based attendance (no GPS tracking required), real-time polling, and in-class discussions. It syncs directly with the Canvas gradebook and is available at no cost to UIC instructors and students.
- iClicker: If you prefer iClicker Cloud for polls, quizzes, and attendance, students can participate using their mobile devices, tablets, or laptops at no cost. Just make sure your courses are set up with “University of Illinois Chicago” as the designated institution.
Enterprise Tool Renewals: Grammarly and Perusall
Based on faculty demand and student usage, we have renewed our university-wide licenses for two key platforms:
- Grammarly: Our enterprise license gives more than 22,000 active UIC users access to real-time writing support and feedback across disciplines.
- Perusall: Since our pilot last fall, faculty adoption of this social annotation tool has nearly tripled. It remains a useful way to help students engage with course texts and collaborate before class.
Fall 2026 Technology Updates
Several other technology updates are also in place for the fall semester, including new Canvas integrations, improvements to grade submission, and updates to campus systems and research tools.
- New Canvas Integrations: ALEKS, Enflux, Labflow, and ClassRanked, which replaces ClassClimate, are now available in Canvas.
- Explore the LTI Catalog: The LTI Catalog gives instructors one place to browse approved academic technologies and discover tools that can be added to Canvas courses.
- Canvas and Banner: With Banner ILP, midterm and final grades can now sync directly from Canvas to Banner, simplifying a familiar end-of-term process.
- Security and Access: SailPoint strengthens identity and access management across UIC systems.
- Assessment and Research: ExamSoft is now accessed exclusively through Canvas, while iThenticate has been upgraded to support graduate research workflows.
A Measurable Commitment to Accessibility.
Our work to make UIC’s digital learning environment more accessible is showing measurable progress. By focusing on universal design and reducing barriers in course files, we’re seeing more accessibility work across campus:
- Alternative Format Downloads: Student downloads of alternative formats, such as tagged PDFs, HTML, or electronic braille, increased by 18.01% over the summer.
- Files Processed: The number of files processed for digital barriers increased by 28.87% this month, from 79,058 to 101,884.
- Accessibility Improvements: Faculty-led file corrections increased by 58.85% this month, from 10,032 to 15,936 individual improvements.
Our automated tools also identified more than 1.17 million accessibility issues across our digital repositories. The increases in file processing and faculty-led corrections show that more of those barriers are being found and addressed across campus.
We have also embedded automated machine-learning captioning, translation, and audio description tools directly into Panopto, Echo360, and Canvas Studio to make video content more accessible with less manual effort.
Practical AI: The Google AI Accelerator
UIC is currently participating in the Google AI for Education Accelerator program. Our goal is to evaluate safe, reliable AI applications that can reduce administrative workloads for faculty while supporting student learning. This includes university-wide access to Google Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Coursera Google Certificates, and Gems. Rather than chasing every tech trend, we are focusing on practical, secure integrations and will share our findings and resources as the program develops.
Support and Resources
Whether you want to polish your Canvas site, set up Acadly, learn how to auto-caption your lecture videos, or explore how to use AI safely in your classes, our instructional design and technology support teams are here to help.
Thank you for the work you’re doing to create strong, supportive learning environments for our students.
Have a great start to the fall semester!