2025 Release Notes
Illuminate October 2025 Release
Continuous Delivery | Release to Production 8 October 2025
CDM Changes, Data Dictionary, Developer, New Features, Updated Features
New columns
Date (YYY-MM-DD) | Status | Entry | Source | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
2025-10-06 | Added | PERSON, COURSE | A value of '1' indicates the person is active, and '0' means inactive. The field is determined based on the availability indicator and row status of the course user | |
2025-10-06 | Added | PERSON, COURSE | A value of 'True' indicates the person is a student in the course and 'False' means they are not. This is determined based on the course role being 'S' and the person not being either a Preview or Support user | |
2025-10-06 | Added | COURSE, COURSE_ACTIVITY | The start date of the first week in which the course was accessed by any user | |
2025-10-06 | Added | COURSE, COURSE_ACTIVITY | The start date of the last week in which the course was accessed by any user | |
2025-10-06 | Added | COURSE, COURSE_ACTIVITY | The earliest date and time when the course was accessed by any user | |
2025-10-06 | Added | COURSE, COURSE_ACTIVITY | The most recent date and time when the course was accessed by any user |
Europe region migration to Multi-tenant architecture
Instances hosted in Europe region are migrated to Multi-tenant architecture, which is a more reliable data connection method. Migration in US region will follow in later releases.
You can check whether your instance is multi-tenant by viewing CDM_LMS in Snowflake. Multi-tenant instances have data organized in views while single-tenant instances have data organized in tables.
Note
As part of this change, the primary key (ID) field for all rows in all views is updated to be unique across all tenants, therefore any queries that reference specific IDs will need to be updated.
Illuminate August 2025 Release
Continuous Delivery | Release to Production 8 September 2025
CDM Changes, Data Dictionary, Developer, New Features, Reporting, Updated Features
Data Q&A available in Singapore AWS region
Data Q&A is now available for clients hosted in the Singapore AWS region, which covers institutions not only in Singapore, but also in Japan, the Philippines, Hong Kong and more.
Using Data Q&A, viewers can ask questions based on available topics and receive an answer in the form of multiple visualizations, as well as a text-based summary generated by AI.
Key considerations:
Institutional Authentication is required to use Data Q&A. If you don’t have this authentication in your Illuminate instance, you can request it through a support ticket at no additional cost.
To turn on Data Q&A, go to Settings, then Global Settings, and select Opt-in to generative AI capabilities.
For now, Data Q&A is available to users with access to all institutional data.
By default, Administrators and Developers have this permission and can use Data Q&A.
You can grant Data Q&A access to Authors and Viewers users by editing the user in the settings menu and adding the “All reports - Data unrestricted” or “Data unrestricted” permission in the Reports permissions section.
Illuminate June 2025 Release
Continuous Delivery | Release to Production 11 June 2025
CDM Changes, Data Dictionary, Developer, New Features, Reporting, Updated Features
Blackboard source tables available in Snowflake for Illuminate Premium clients in Canada, Sydney, and Singapore
The transactional database for Blackboard is normally only available to Direct Data Access customers. 191 source tables from Blackboard’s Open Database Schema are now available to Illuminate Premium clients in Canada, Sydney, and Singapore. Deployment to the EU and the USA will follow in later releases.
These entities are available in Snowflake as views in a new LEARN schema within the existing Illuminate database. These tables are refreshed every 4 hours. Other canonical data models have an overnight refresh rate.
Note that these are not documented in the data dictionary, but existing documentation is available on our help pages. The new 191 tables included in Illuminate are documented in an Excel file.
Image 1. A query with LEARN schema source tables in Snowflake.
Video Studio data mapped with Blackboard
The existing canonical data model for Mapping (CDM_MAP) was updated to map users and courses between Video Studio (CDM_MEDIA) and Blackboard (CDM_LMS) canonical data modes. Two columns were added to CDM_MAP:
MEDIA_CONTAINER_ID in the CDM.MAP_COURSE table
MEDIA_PERSON_ID in the CDM.MAP_PERSON table
Entities are documented in the data dictionary.
This release also includes the following bug fixes:
Learning
Fixed an issue with Student Summary where some visuals were filtered based on course start date instead of activity date. Minor improvements were also released.
Fixed an issue with Social & Collaborative Engagement which excluded inactive students due to date filtering based on last access instead of course creation date.
Leading
Fixed an issue with Learning Tools Adoption where some tool types were not included.
Teaching
Fixed an issue with Course Summary where the Student Engagement and Performance tab included data from non-student roles.
Illuminate Developer Canonical Data Model changes
Continuous Delivery | Release to Production 11 June 2025
CDM Changes, Data Dictionary
Date (YYYY-MM-DD) | Status | Entry | Source | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
2025-06-10 | Added | Anthology Illuminate | Foreign key that references the primary key of the CDM_MEDIA.PERSON entity. | |
2025-06-10 | Added | Anthology Illuminate | Foreign key that references the primary key of the CDM_MEDIA.CONTAINER entity. |
Illuminate May 2025 Release
Continuous Delivery | Release to Production 26 May 2025
CDM Changes, Data Dictionary
New canonical data model for Video Studio (CDM_MEDIA)
Video Studio is a Premium Blackboard capability that allows instructors to create accessible and engaging video content for their courses.
Now, Video Studio data is available in Illuminate. Developers can explore Video Studio data in Snowflake to analyze this tool's usage and adoption in their institutions.
We added a new canonical data model for Video Studio (CDM_MEDIA). The canonical data model contains 6 tables:
ACTIVITY: User interactions with videos such as load, playback, pause, and resume, as well as the duration of the action.
CONTAINER: Information about where videos are allocated.
INSTANCE: Video Studio instance, one per Blackboard tenant.
MEDIA: Video information such as duration, size, type, and creation date.
PERSON: User identifier for both owners and viewers of videos.
SESSION_ACTIVITY: Aggregation of all the actions from the ACTIVITY table per user session, giving an overview of the duration played back in each unique session.
Tables and data details are in the data dictionary. We published a Video Studio query in our queries repository in GitHub. You can use this query as a base to start exploring Video Studio data.
This change is retroactive. Historical data for Video Studio is available.
Image 1. A Video Studio query in Snowflake is searching the MEDIA table.
Illuminate Developer Canonical Data Model changes
Continuous Delivery | Release to Production 26 May 2025
CDM Changes, Data Dictionary
Date (YYYY-MM-DD) | Status | Entry | Source | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
2025-05-26 | Added | Video Studio | A new canonical data model for Video Studio data. |
Illuminate April 2025 Release
Continuous Delivery | Release to Production 14 April 2025
CDM Changes, Reporting
New events in CDM_TLM.ULTRA_EVENTS and Activity Log report
We added new Blackboard telemetry events to the Telemetry Canonical data model (CDM_TLM) in the ULTRA_EVENTS table.
This gives deeper insights into user interactions within Blackboard. New events help to inform decisions in academic disputes and aid in troubleshooting.
This update introduces 3 new event types:
PAGE_VIEW: Captures when a user navigates to a new page by recording when the page URL changes.
PANEL_CLOSED: Captures when a user closes a panel.
CHANGE: Captures user modifications made to items within Blackboard.
We also updated an existing event:
CLICK: Previously, click events were limited to specific interactions, such as closing tabs, accessing files, or opening links. Now, click events capture all user interactions with any clickable element.
New click events are included in the Activity Log report, found in the Student Summary section of the Learning reports. However, the other new events haven’t been added to the report yet.
This change is retroactive and historical data for these 4 events is available. You can review past activity to determine what click events occurred in the past.
Image 1. The new events are in the CDM_TLM.ULTRA_EVENTS table in Snowflake.
Image 2. The new click events are in the Activity log report in Illuminate.
Illuminate Developer Canonical Data Model changes
Continuous Delivery | Release to Production 14 April 2025
Developer, CDM Changes, Data Dictionary
Date (YYYY-MM-DD) | Status | Entry | Source | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
2025-04-14 | Modified | BLACKBOARD_DATA.CDM_TLM.ULTRA_EVENTS.EVENT_TYPE | Added new event types in the CDM_TLM_ULTRA_EVENTS table. The event types that are now included are PANEL CLOSED, PAGE VIEW, and CHANGE. The existing CLICK event now captures all user interactions with any clickable element. |