Microsoft Education Integration

The integration supports an Ultra course view enrollment size up to the same user limit Microsoft has determined for Microsoft Education. A Microsoft 365 Education plan is required.

The Microsoft Education integration is available for Ultra Course View courses only. Your institution needs to complete these requirements to use it:

Completing all but the final two steps allows instructors and students using Blackboard Ultra Course View can access Microsoft Education tools from the Content Market and the Books & Tools section of the Details and Actions Panel.

For optimal use, completing the final two steps allows users to access the tools from Open Microsoft Education on the Details and Actions panel. From here, users can access the Microsoft Education Dashboard.

Clients who want to test the Microsoft Teams classes integration in their Blackboard Test and/or Staging instance are highly recommended to follow these steps:

Ensure that you have successfully setup the Institution Email field in your SIS.

Blackboard has created a new Institution Email field, in both the Student Information System Framework integration and public REST APIs. This allows institutions to manage the data synchronization process effectively between Blackboard and Microsoft Azure Active Directory.

The Institution Email field allows customized field mappings between a client’s externally supported data sources and Blackboard. In the case of data sources that are cloud providers, such as Microsoft, the User Principle Name (UPN) is a primary unique identifier for each user consisting of a UPN prefix (the user’s account name) and a UPN suffix (a DNS domain name) joined together with an @ symbol. This creates a unique email address for each specific user within the Microsoft Azure Active Directory.

To ensure data is accurate and enrollments or memberships between Blackboard and Microsoft Education are correctly achieved, a user’s email address must match between both systems. In Blackboard, a user can change or override their existing email address in the user interface, which could result in sync errors occurring and the user not being correctly added to a class Team. The Institution Email field mapping ensures this level of security and validation checking can be correctly managed, regardless of if the user has changed their Email within Blackboard or not.

When two email addresses are different, either:

The Institution Email field mapping is now available for all existing SIS integration types at Advanced Configuration Settings, then Users Learn Object Type, and then Field Mapping.

This is an example LIS 2.0 script for populating the institution email field using the Use a custom script text box:

(function() {
       var v = data.person.extensions.get('inst_email');
       return v ? v.value : null;
}());

If you already have deployed the Microsoft 365 LTI tool integration and don’t want to lose any late update, you can synchronize the latest changes.

All changes made in the integrations through the developer portal that are deployed in Blackboard will be updated.

In Blackboard we use Placements as to the location where an LTI tool appears within the interface. The Microsoft 365 LTI tool has a configuration prepopulated to use the same locations we have for the legacy Microsoft Teams Meeting. You can double check the tool placements:

If any placement is missing,

Go to Learning Tools Interoperability for more information instructions on managing placements for your LTI.

From the Administrator Panel, navigate to Integrations and select Cross-origin Resource Sharing.

You must launch the app for the first time with the System Administrator role to complete the configuration for your deployment and activate the Microsoft Education LTI tool. Users don’t have access until you complete this step.

You can complete the consent workflow directly within Blackboard. It’s no longer necessary to manually register the application in Azure.

Completing these steps allows instructors and students using Blackboard Ultra Course View can access Microsoft Education tools from the Content Market and the Books and Tools section of the Details and Actions Panel.

To create access to the Microsoft Education Dashboard from the Details & Actions panel, complete the final two steps.