Data Requirements
Institutions will be required to establish an Institutional Hierarchy and curricular structure to utilize Outcomes for Blackboard. This foundation creates a clear, connected framework for measuring and aligning student learning—starting at the course level and extending across programs and the institution. By organizing learning in a way that reflects how learning occurs, institutions can assess progress, track outcomes over time through longitudinal reporting, and use consistent, meaningful data to support continuous improvement, accreditation, and informed decision-making.
Institutional Hierarchy & Curricular Structure
Ensure your Institutional Hierarchy and curricular structure reflect how your institution actually organizes academic oversight and assessment. Effective use of Outcomes relies on accurate, well-defined curricular structures to support course-to-department and course-to-program alignment for meaningful outcomes measurement.
Verify Your Institutional Hierarchy
Colleges, schools, and departments accurately represented
Organizational units align with how academic oversight and assessment are managed
Review Consistency & Naming Conventions
Standardize naming for departments, programs, and units
Confirm hierarchy units align with structures used for reporting, accreditation, and analysis
Confirm Subject Areas are Well-Organized and Current
Standardize subject codes (e.g., MATH, ENGL)
Verify subjects align to correct Institutional Hierarchy node
Each subject can be aligned to one institutional hierarchy node, but can be aligned to multiple programs for outcome measurement. Refer to Programs for more details.
Things to Consider
Support for Full Institutional Outcomes Assessment: Outcomes supports learning wherever it occurs—both inside and outside the classroom. If your institution plans to assess co-curricular learning, ensure your Institutional Hierarchy includes areas such as Student Affairs, Advising, or Housing so outcomes can be aligned, measured, and reported alongside academic programs.
Using Outcomes Within Your Existing Blackboard Hierarchy: Institutions often use Blackboard’s Institutional Hierarchy for multiple operational purposes. Outcomes allows you to hide hierarchy nodes that are not relevant for assessment, enabling focused reporting while preserving your existing Blackboard configuration when needed.
Design for Assessment, Not Reporting Lines: Institutional Hierarchy and curricular structure should reflect how academic assessment is organized and reported—not people management or administrative reporting lines. Structures should be built around how learning is delivered, measured, and aggregated over time to ensure data is meaningful, consistent, and usable for accreditation, analysis, and continuous improvement. Granular permissions for different roles can be applied across both hierarchy and curricular structures to control access to outcome data and reports.
Subjects Must Use the Dedicated Subjects Feature: Some institutions previously represented subjects as nodes in Blackboard within the Institutional Hierarchy. For Outcomes, subjects must be managed using the dedicated Subjects feature to ensure accurate alignment, aggregation, and reporting of learning outcomes.
Outcomes does not support Blackboard Merged Courses: Some institutions utilize the functionality of merging courses in Blackboard, however to accurately align, aggregate, and report learning outcomes Outcomes does not recognize merged Blackboard courses.
Resources
Creating and Managing Nodes to build your Institutional Hierarchy
Terms & Term Types
Terms and Term Types provide the time-based structure needed to organize learning and assessment data accurately in Outcomes. Outcomes relies on terms and term types to tie results to academic cycles, allowing institutions to track and compare learning outcomes over time through meaningful longitudinal reporting, trend analysis, and continuous improvement.
Create Annual Term
Annual Terms enable multi-term rollups and serve as the foundation for longitudinal reporting.
Define annual terms (e.g., AY 2025–2026)
Map all applicable academic terms to the appropriate annual term
Align annual terms with institutional reporting and accreditation cycles
Annual terms must have a start and end date cannot be continuous
Assign Term Types
Term Types define how learning periods are categorized and compared.
Examples include: Semester, Quarter, Trimester, Module
Ensure every active term is assigned a term type in Blackboard
Review and Standardize Terms
Clean, consistent term data improves usability, reporting accuracy and reduces downstream issues.
Standardize naming conventions (e.g., Fall 2025 vs. FA-25). Remember that these term names will now be visible beyond Blackboard to Provosts, Deans, Assessment teams, and even in accreditation reports.
Verify start and end dates align with the academic calendar
Create a Term Hierarchy
Term hierarchies define how learning periods roll up for reporting.
Identify which terms belong within each annual term
Confirm parent-child relationships reflect how learning occurs across the academic year
Things to Consider
Annual terms should reflect course delivery, institutional reporting, and accreditation cycles.
You are not required to retroactively assign term types or create annual-term relationships for old or unused terms. Unless your institution plans to do historical outcomes reporting.
Outcomes recognizes only one child-to-parent relationship, where a term rolls up directly to an Annual Term. Nested or multi-level term relationships (for example, child → parent → annual term) are not supported.
Annual terms cannot be continuous
Child terms may be continuous, but results will be reported within the boundaries of the associated annual term
Resources
Programs (Optional)
Programs provide an additional curricular layer that allows institutions to measure learning outcomes across groups of courses or subjects that may span multiple areas of the Institutional Hierarchy. Programs do not change course or subject ownership within the hierarchy; instead, they enable outcome measurement across multiple programs when learning contributes to more than one area of study.
Understand What Programs Are
A Program represents a collection of courses or subjects used for outcomes assessment
Courses and subjects may be included in multiple programs
Programs do not own courses or subjects in the Institutional Hierarchy (the IH node owns the subject)
Use Programs to Support Cross-Program Assessment
Programs allow outcomes to be measured wherever learning contributes, without duplicating curricular structures.
A single subject or course can support multiple programs simultaneously
Example: A math course may contribute to a General Education program, a Mathematics program, and an Engineering program—and can be assessed within each of those programs, not only within the Department or Math that owns the Subject within the Institutional Hierarchy
Program-Level Outcomes & Assessments
Programs support full Outcomes functionality, including:
Creating or copying learning outcomes at the program level
Requesting assessment data or entering results directly at the program level
Reporting on outcomes performance across all contributing courses or subjects
Granular permissions for users
Things to Consider
Using Programs is optional and can be added to your curricular structure at any time. Institutions only need Programs when a course or subject must be assessed within more than one program.
Programs do not alter course or subject ownership in the Institutional Hierarchy. Instead, they create additional data pathways that support outcomes measurement beyond traditional departmental or organizational reporting structures.
Programs support how learning actually contributes across curricula—enabling institutions to assess shared learning outcomes (such as General Education or interdisciplinary programs) without restructuring their Institutional Hierarchy.
If your institution supports General Education, interdisciplinary programs, or shared curriculum across departments, consider using Programs early in implementation to reduce duplication and ensure outcomes are measured consistently across all applicable areas.