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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 may be aligned to multiple programs for outcome measurement (see 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.

Resources

. Help Documentation