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Getting Started with Outcomes for Blackboard

Outcomes for Blackboard makes it easier for institutions to understand how well students are learning expected knowledge and skills and where improvement is needed by embedding outcomes measurement directly into teaching and assessment.

Supporting Institutional Effectiveness and Assessment with Outcomes for Blackboard

Institutions face growing pressure to demonstrate the value and effectiveness of education to accreditors, students and families, and policymakers. Yet many still rely on fragmented tools, spreadsheets, and manual processes that make it difficult to produce timely, trustworthy evidence of student success or connect results back to instruction. Outcomes for Blackboard addresses these challenges by embedding learning outcomes, skills, or competencies directly into the teaching and assessment experience.

With Outcomes, institutions can:

  • Support accreditation and general education reporting with evidence of student success

  • Support competency-based learning and skills measurement

  • Respond more confidently to policy and accountability requirements

  • Replace manual, spreadsheet-driven processes with consistent, auditable insights

And because Outcomes is now included with Blackboard, institutions can implement these capabilities without additional licensing or third-party tools, saving your institution money while streamlining business-critical tasks.

Video Walkthroughs: Outcomes Capabilities and Workflows

The following short videos demonstrate common workflows in Outcomes, from the faculty experience inside a Blackboard course to administrative views across programs and curricula. They can be shared with various stakeholders at your institution to support onboarding, training, or internal discussions while evaluating Outcomes capabilities and then moving forward with implementation.

Faculty Experience for Outcomes in Blackboard

Audience: Faculty. instructional designers, IE and assessment teams

This walkthrough focuses on the faculty experience inside of Blackboard. It highlights visibility of learning outcomes and course measures, taxonomy of outcome statements, and view student outcome achievement and mastery—using insights generated directly from everyday teaching and grading in Blackboard.

Terms and Longitudinal Reporting

Audience: Academic leaders, assessment and accreditation teams

This video demonstrates how Outcomes supports reporting student success measures across academic terms. It shows how institutions can analyze trends over time to understand learning progress, support accreditation, and inform continuous improvement.

Outcomes Hierarchy, Alignment, and Curriculum Map

Audience: Administrators, IE and assessment teams

This video introduces the Outcomes hierarchy and automated curriculum mapping tools. It shows how outcomes align across courses and programs, helping institutions visualize where learning is introduced, reinforced, and mastered.

Create and Align an Outcome

Audience: Administrators, IE and assessment teams

This video shows how to create outcome statements and align them across the institutional hierarchy and related outcome structures, making it easy to aggregate and evaluate student learning at every level.

Permissions

Audience: Administrators, IE and assessment teams

This overview explains Outcomes’ granular permissions and roles. You’ll learn how access is managed for campus administrators, assessment teams, program leaders, and administrators to ensure the right people can view, align, and report on outcomes data.