A review of how the UMBC campus community accessed, used, and engaged with myUMBC during the 2025–2026 academic year.
myUMBC is a required part of daily academic and administrative life — students register for classes here, faculty manage their schedules, and staff complete core HR and financial tasks. Login counts reflect the rhythms of the academic calendar: a busy fall start, a quieter winter break, and a surge in April and May as advising and registration activity peak.
Using homepage views as a proxy for overall portal access, desktop dominates across all populations, but the split varies by role. Faculty and staff are almost entirely desktop (95–96%); undergraduates are the most mobile, with about one in four homepage visits from a phone. Graduate students fall in between.
Once logged in, users spend most of their time on the portal homepage and their student profile. Over the reporting period, authenticated users generated 8.84 million page views across 50,856 distinct people. Undergraduates account for roughly two-thirds of all views, consistent with their share of logins. The pages people return to most — registration, grades, degree requirements — point to the portal's role in the core academic workflow.
The four populations use the portal differently. Students center on the academic self-service workflow — registration, grades, degree requirements. Faculty and staff use it more as a launchpad, with the resource Guide ranking second for both. Bars show each page's share of that group's own page views, so the patterns are comparable despite very different total volumes.
myUMBC serves as a gateway to dozens of university systems — Blackboard, PeopleSoft, Google Workspace, timesheets, billing, and more. Go-links (short redirects accessible via my.umbc.edu/go/) are used throughout the portal's navigation, profile pages, and resource guide. Because nearly all in-portal resource links route through go-links, click volume is a reliable proxy for which tools the campus community relies on most. Over the reporting period, authenticated users clicked through to university systems more than 4.7 million times.
Go-link clicks offer a candid picture of what each part of the campus actually relies on day to day. Because the four populations come to myUMBC for different reasons, their most-used tools diverge in ways that track closely with their roles at the university. The tables below rank each group's eight most-clicked resources; reading them side by side shows where the populations overlap and where their needs pull apart.
| Resource | Clicks |
|---|---|
| Blackboard | 622,879 |
| Blackboard Course | 441,428 |
| Student Schedule & Registration | 366,909 |
| Google Mail | 245,305 |
| Schedule Builder | 121,070 |
| Payments & Billing | 111,136 |
| Class Search | 109,123 |
| Degree Audit | 95,691 |
| Resource | Clicks |
|---|---|
| Blackboard | 82,700 |
| Blackboard Course | 69,336 |
| Google Mail | 54,314 |
| Student Schedule & Registration | 25,028 |
| Class Search | 24,080 |
| Payments & Billing | 24,544 |
| Transcript (Unofficial) | 13,905 |
| Employee Time Sheets | 10,905 |
| Resource | Clicks |
|---|---|
| Google Mail | 151,239 |
| Teaching Schedule | 78,474 |
| Blackboard | 65,750 |
| Blackboard Course | 59,772 |
| Advising Center | 57,638 |
| Employee Time Sheets | 43,569 |
| Class Search | 27,383 |
| Electronic Time Sheet (Supervisors) | 15,070 |
| Resource | Clicks |
|---|---|
| Google Mail | 138,777 |
| Employee Time Sheets | 82,621 |
| Human Resources System | 51,678 |
| Campus Solutions (SA) | 50,050 |
| PeopleSoft: Finance | 49,991 |
| Paw Procurement System | 47,205 |
| Box | 28,085 |
| Google Calendar | 22,840 |
Blackboard and Google Mail anchor all four lists — the learning management system and campus email are universal. Beyond that shared foundation, each population's tools read like a job description.
Students lean on the academic workflow — registration, scheduling, grades, billing — with graduate students adding time-sheet access that reflects how many also work for the university. Faculty tools center on teaching and advising, while staff use myUMBC like an enterprise workplace, dominated by HR, finance, and procurement systems students rarely touch. The same portal serves as a registration desk for students, a teaching console for faculty, and a back-office workspace for staff.
Search is now fully established across the academic year, with 168,578 searches performed by 19,474 distinct users. Undergraduate students account for nearly half of all searches (49%), though staff search most intensively on a per-person basis — averaging 27.8 searches each versus 9.5 for undergrads. AI-generated answers ran the full year for the first time — 66,404 answers generated, up from 12,818 in the partial prior year. Average response time improved from 8–10 seconds to 5–7 seconds.
Role attribution in this section uses the same faculty > staff > graduate student > undergraduate student priority hierarchy applied elsewhere in this report. The query analysis was conducted separately and role counts may differ slightly from login-based figures in other sections due to methodology differences in how roles are snapshotted.
Blackboard is the most-searched term by far at ~16,500 queries, nearly 6× the next highest — largely a navigation habit, with users typing "blackboard" into the search box instead of using the tray or go-links. After it, the common themes are transcripts, email, housing, financial aid, dining, tax documents, and HR tools.
Search terms reveal what each population is trying to reach. The lists below show the ten most common queries for each group. Undergraduates lean heavily on Blackboard and the essentials of student life — housing, transcripts, dining, grades. Graduate students share that academic core but add international-student and tax resources. Faculty and staff search mostly for administrative and operational systems — human resources, travel and procurement tools, job postings, and DocuSign.
| Query | Searches |
|---|---|
| blackboard | 12,249 |
| transcript | 1,694 |
| housing | 1,409 |
| parking | 1,160 |
| library | 1,118 |
| housing portal | 807 |
| gmail | 730 |
| meal plan | 666 |
| grades | 541 |
| 1098 | 522 |
| Query | Searches |
|---|---|
| blackboard | 954 |
| library | 423 |
| gmail | 186 |
| parking | 185 |
| docusign | 142 |
| isss | 141 |
| 1098 | 110 |
| transcript | 109 |
| grades | 108 |
| retriever essentials | 102 |
| Query | Searches |
|---|---|
| library | 462 |
| sa | 451 |
| docusign | 404 |
| blackboard | 220 |
| academic calendar | 207 |
| parking | 199 |
| human resources | 176 |
| travel | 137 |
| aok | 115 |
| campus solutions | 114 |
| Query | Searches |
|---|---|
| human resources | 741 |
| jobs | 605 |
| concur | 334 |
| procurement | 329 |
| 310 | |
| parking | 264 |
| dining | 254 |
| pageup | 245 |
| docusign | 226 |
| posc | 215 |
Users can rate AI answers as helpful or not. Of the 66,404 answers generated, fewer than 200 received explicit user feedback — a very low response rate, which is common for optional feedback. Among those, 77 were rated positive and 121 negative. The volume is too small to draw firm conclusions about answer quality. Separately, a subset of queries are phrased as direct questions ("who is my advisor," "what is my GPA," "when are finals"), indicating that some users engage with search expecting a direct answer rather than a list of links.
This year, AI-generated answers include automatically assigned topic categories for the first time, making it possible to understand what the campus community is asking about at scale. Advising and classes dominate — consistent with the top search queries. Categories are AI-assigned and multiple categories may apply per answer.
The older search interface — which searches only groups and people — received 27,055 queries this year, down from 34,988 the prior year, as the newer search experience has become the primary way people search myUMBC.
myUMBC hosts the university's community platform — a network of groups spanning institutional departments, registered student organizations, and interest communities. Groups publish posts and events, and members can RSVP, check in, react, and comment. This section covers publicly visible groups, which represent the community's shared life on campus. Private groups are addressed separately below.
The baseline reflects the current state of all active group memberships, regardless of when they were created. Faculty and staff accumulate memberships over time and rarely churn out; student memberships reflect current enrollment since roles are updated when students graduate.
Year-over-year data covers only activity during the reporting period — new groups created and new memberships formed. This is how the community grew and changed this year.
Of the 700 active public groups, 327 (47%) did not publish any posts this year. Among those that did, activity is concentrated: 26 groups published 51 or more posts, accounting for a disproportionate share of total post volume. Content creation is primarily driven by faculty and staff — together responsible for 3,843 of 6,103 posts (63%) and 3,990 of 6,787 events (59%). Graduate and undergraduate students publish less overall, contributing 851 and 747 posts respectively.
| Group | Type | Posts | Events | Total |
|---|
Student Affairs can mark an event as featured, which gives it higher placement on the events calendar. This is an editorial curation function — events are selected by Student Affairs rather than flagged by the groups that created them. This year, 233 events were featured — about 3% of all public events — drawn from 77 different groups. Featuring is used selectively, concentrated around the start of the fall semester when welcome and orientation programming is highlighted.
Event check-ins and RSVPs are opt-in features — not all groups use them, and not all events require advance sign-up. These numbers reflect groups and organizers who actively use attendance tracking, not total campus event attendance.
Groups can promote a post or event to the myUMBC homepage, where it reaches the broader campus community beyond the group's own members. Promotions go through a moderation workflow. This year, 958 items were promoted to the homepage by 147 groups. Events were promoted nearly twice as often as posts. All promoting groups were institutional departments — student organizations and interest groups did not use homepage promotion this year.
148 active private groups use myUMBC for internal coordination — scheduling, document sharing, and member-only communications not reflected in the public numbers above. During the reporting period they published 1,298 posts and 2,330 events.
Every time a member of a group publishes a post, event, or file, myUMBC automatically sends email notifications to group members who have elected to receive them. This is separate from the targeted messaging system used by university offices — it is organic, community-driven email traffic generated by 510 active groups. Over the reporting period, this system sent nearly 9.9 million emails.
| Group | Type | Notifications | Emails Sent |
|---|
myUMBC's messaging system allows authorized university offices to send targeted messages to specific campus populations — students, employees, or defined subgroups. Messages are delivered by email and are also accessible through the myUMBC portal. Over the reporting period, 423 messages were sent by offices across campus, reaching community members approximately 814,000 times in total.
| Category | Messages | Recipients | Avg Recipients |
|---|
myUMBC allows students to grant parents, guardians, or other authorized representatives access to specific sections of their student profile — such as billing, grades, financial aid, and registration. Each access grant is student-initiated and can be customized to specific sections. 1,043 new delegations were created during the reporting period, with a pronounced spike in August at the start of the academic year.
myUMBC is publicly accessible — the portal homepage, group pages, posts, and events are all visible without logging in. Public traffic is substantial: combining portal page views with community content views, unauthenticated visitors generated over 38 million page views during the reporting period. The majority of this traffic comes from search engines and direct links to content, not from the UMBC campus network. This section and the next look at how myUMBC content reaches people who are not logged in.
UMBC's departmental website environment — Sites — runs on WordPress and allows departments to embed live myUMBC content directly on their pages. When a visitor loads a departmental page that includes a myUMBC post or event feed, a tracking pixel records the view in myUMBC's activity logs. These are not guest or authenticated user views — they are content renders driven by the departmental website infrastructure, and they represent myUMBC content reaching audiences who may never visit myUMBC directly.