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Illuminate Core and Premium Features

Illuminate offers a flexible subscription model to support your institution's needs:

  • Illuminate Core: Blackboard LMS customers in supported regions receive standard functionality at no additional cost.License Entitlements and Feature Availability

  • Illuminate Premium: Institutions aiming to advance their data-informed decision-making can purchase modular premium enhancements.

Illuminate Core

Illuminate Core provides the following functionality across the two tiers of Developer and Reporting:

Developer

  • A Canonical Data Model (CDM) combining data from across your eligible licensed Blackboard solutions and restructuring it for easier querying.

  • A Data Dictionary that provides detailed information about every table and column in the canonical data model and the interactive Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs).

  • Access to Telemetry data from the eligible licensed Blackboard solutions providing more granular click-stream data.

  • Read-only, direct access to query this database using standard SQL in Snowflake.

  • A self-managed service account that can be used to connect third-party solutions, such as BI tools to Snowflake.

  • 350 Snowflake credits per month.

    • A Snowflake credit is approximately one hour of query processing in Snowflake, and so over 11 hours per day of processing time in this quota are provided.

    • The number of credits remaining in the current month is shown on the Settings page.

Note

Although Snowflake is used to provide Illuminate Developer benefits, not all Snowflake features are available and supported.

Important

If the monthly 350 Snowflake credits run out, no queries can run until the credit count resets at the end of the month.

Reporting

  • A suite of pre-built reports that are designed to support data-informed decision-making by end-users such as academic management, EdTech leadership and student support.

  • 30 Viewer seat licenses for read-only access to the reports.

    Note

    Institutions with native authentication have 20 seat licenses instead of 30. To request institutional authentication at no additional cost, create a support ticket.

  • Role-Based Access that enables securely limited access to reports based on a user’s role at the institution (e.g. Dean of Humanities can only access data from Humanities courses)

  • The ability to export data, download reports as PDF for sharing and printing, and exporting visuals as CSV for further analysis.

  • Data Q&A functionality that enables Administrators, Viewers, and Authors to explore available data across curated "topics” in natural language and generate visualizations in answer to their questions in real-time and without technical expertise.

    Note

    Currently, one topic is provided – Student Activity, Engagement and Performance.

    Tip

    If Illuminate Reporting is not accessed for 30 days, the system will enter sleep mode and must be “woken up” when a user next attempts to access a report.

    Platform Capabilities

    Important

    Illuminate Core features are subject to change at Blackboard’s sole discretion.

    Illuminate Premium

    Our premium packages include all core features, plus additional reporting capabilities.

    Premium Reporting

    • Custom Reports functionality that enables institutions to build reports tailored to their specific data reporting needs, using the embedded BI tool Amazon QuickSight. Custom reports are deployed alongside the Core pre-built reports, having the same look and feel.

    • Author seats for creating and managing custom reports. (Total number of seats determined by the package size purchased.)

    • Additional Viewer seats based on the package size purchased to enable broader deployment of the Core pre-built reports.

    • Access to a selected set of Blackboard LMS source tables to enable broader data access and deeper analysis.

    Note

    Sleep mode (described above) is not applied to Premium Reporting.

    Comparison of Feature Packages

    These are the modules and packages currently available to purchase in Illuminate Core and Premium.

    Edition

    Core

    Premium

    Package

    Lite

    Standard

    Pro

    Enterprise

    Pre-Built reports*

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Reporting and data permissions

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Snowflake credits per month

    350

    350

    350

    350

    350

    Snowflake Service Accounts

    1

    Multiple

    Multiple

    Multiple

    Multiple

    Data Q&A

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Custom report creation

    No

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Author Seats

    0

    2

    5

    10

    20

    Viewer Seats

    30

    50

    100

    200

    500

    Access to a set of Blackboard LMS source tables

    No

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Note

    *Reports included are standard across all package sizes

    Current availability of Illuminate features by region

    Table 1. Current Illuminate and Reporting Availability

    Blackboard LMS

    Hosting Region*

    Illuminate Technical Availability

    Illuminate Developer

    Illuminate Reporting

    US-East-1 (USA)

    ✓

    ✓

    ✓

    CA-Central-1 (Canada)

    ✓

    ✓

    ✓

    EU-Central-1 (EU-Frankfurt)

    ✓

    ✓

    ✓

    AP-Southeast-1 (AP-Singapore)

    ✓

    ✓

    ✓

    AP-Southeast-2 (AP-Sydney)

    ✓

    ✓

    ✓



    *Important Note: Illuminate can only access your Class Collaborate data if it is hosted in the same region as your Blackboard LMS.