Template Customizations
To support consistent planning, assessment, and reporting, Outcomes provides three customizable, site-wide templates that reflect your institution’s language and assessment practices. These templates standardize how data is collected while allowing flexibility across academic units.
Understand the Three Core Templates
Here’s an expanded and clearer version of “Understand the Three Core Templates” that provides more guidance without becoming overly prescriptive, and keeps a consistent, client-facing tone.
Outcomes (Learning Outcome) Template: This template captures information about the learning outcome statement itself and is used and visible consistently across Outcomes. This template defines what students are expected to know, do, or demonstrate.
Assessment Template: This template documents how learning outcomes are measured. It captures details about the assessments or assignments used to evaluate student learning and provides transparency into the methods and expectations behind each measure.
Results Template: This template captures what was learned from the assessment process and supports analysis, reflection, and continuous improvement. This template connects performance data to interpretation and action, enabling institutions to demonstrate accountability and close the loop on assessment activities.
Determine Template Names
Templates can be named to reflect the assessment terminology used at your institution. While these templates are titled Outcomes, Assessment, and Results by default, institutions can rename them to align with local language and practice—such as Competencies, Performance Indicators, Skills, or similar terms. Establishing consistent, familiar terminology helps improve clarity, faculty adoption, and shared understanding across the institution.
Determine Required Information
Before configuring templates, identify what information your institution will ask to be provided and what will be required to support consistent, meaningful reporting across the institution. Template field settings—such as visibility and required status—can be adjusted at granular levels within the Institutional Hierarchy. This allows institutions to enforce consistency where needed while accommodating variation across disciplines, programs, or reporting units.
Draft Clear, Concise Instructions
Well-written instructions within each template field help ensure consistent interpretation and completion across departments and programs, improving data quality and usability.
Things to Consider
Balance Standardization and Flexibility. Templates should collect enough consistent data to support aggregation and reporting, without overburdening faculty with unnecessary fields.
Focus Results templates on insights and next steps, not just data capture, to support continuous improvement and accreditation needs.
Involve assessment leaders, faculty representatives, and governance groups when defining template fields and instructions to build buy-in and ensure relevance.
Resources
Learning Outcomes Statement Framework
A well-defined learning outcomes framework provides the foundation for meaningful outcomes assessment and alignment across the institution. Outcomes for Blackboard allows institutions to relate and align outcomes, skills, and competencies throughout the Institutional Hierarchy—connecting outcomes to courses, assessments, and programs to reflect how learning is designed and measured.
Establishing a clear outcomes framework early helps institutions avoid rework during implementation and supports consistent alignment, assessment, and reporting over time.
Review and Finalize your Outcomes Statement Structure
Establish a consistent structure for learning outcomes by using a common format (such as an action verb paired with a learning demonstration and context), ensuring outcomes are clearly measurable and assessable, and defining outcomes at each level while identifying the highest level at which each outcome will be measured.
Validate Relationships Across Levels
Identify and document how learning outcomes connect across levels of the curriculum, ensuring for example that Course Learning Outcomes (CLOs) align to Program Learning Outcomes (PLOs) and that PLOs connect to Institutional Learning Outcomes (ILOs) where appropriate. Establishing and documenting these relationships through an alignment crosswalk or mapping exercise creates clarity and efficiency during implementation, reduces rework, and ensures Outcomes will automatically generate curriculum maps that clearly show how learning outcomes connect and progress across courses, programs, and the institution.
Identify Course and Assessments that Support Outcomes
Identify and document the courses and assessments that provide evidence for learning outcomes, including key gateway, milestone, and capstone experiences, to ensure program and institutional outcomes are measured intentionally and consistently.
Things to Consider
Determine who at your institution is responsible for identifying and maintaining outcome and assessment alignments. This may include faculty, program leaders, assessment coordinators, or instructional design teams.
Ensure there is shared understanding between faculty and instructional design teams around how outcomes are written, aligned to assessments, and evaluated within courses.
Engage faculty leadership, program chairs, assessment teams, and instructional designers early to agree on outcome structure, alignment practices, and governance. A shared framework strengthens consistency, reduces implementation friction, and enables more meaningful outcomes reporting and continuous improvement.