Institutions can demonstrate that their programs and curriculum are effective by aligning course content and activities with goals in Blackboard Learn.

Get started with goals

To get started, you have to create or import goals into your Blackboard Learn environment. Although instructors can align goals to their course content, instructors don't have the ability to create the goals. You can create goals to provide clarity on learning objectives, collect student performance data and measure it against standards, and monitor student activity to support retention efforts. For more complex goal sets, you may want to create goal maps. Mapping saves time by establishing connections and relationships between two separate goal set's attributes.

More on how to create goals in Blackboard Learn

More on how to import goals in Blackboard Learn with XML

Ready to share goals with instructors? As soon as you finish creating goals, they're available to all instructors in the system unless you inactivate or restrict the goal. You may want to provide instructors with a brief tutorial on why goals are important and how to align course content with the goals you created.

More on how instructors use goals in their courses

Students, instructors, and administrators can keep track of goals within courses with the Goal Performance Dashboard. The dashboard helps to support competency-based education curriculums and can also help keep students on track to meet the achievement expectations that you've established.

Install and configure the Goal Performance Dashboard

How students view the Goal Performance Dashboard

How instructors view the Goal Performance Dashboard


Goal reporting

Instructors can run two reports about goals in a course. On the Control Panel, expand the Evaluation section and select Course Reports.

  • The Course Coverage Report presents data on how a course’s content covers goals and where gaps exist.
  • The Course Performance Report lets instructors set acceptable performance target values and ranges for goals. The report shows how students' work that's aligned to those goals measures up to the target value.

More on course reports for instructors

Administrators can run reports on goal coverage across all courses in the system. Goals report data is refreshed automatically every 20 minutes, but you can also refresh the data manually.

To run a report on goal performance in a Blackboard Learn environment, go to Administrator Panel > Goals > Run Reports. Locate the report you're interested in and select Run in the report's menu.

The Full Coverage Overview report shows aggregated coverage information across courses for all active goal sets within the source and goal types you select. The report shows an overview of the types of content items aligned to these goals. You can view goal information for all courses within the system, all available courses, or all unavailable courses. View the report's contents in the browser or select Download Report to export the results to an Excel file.

More on running and saving system reports