Integration, Extension, and Management
Administrator Login As Tool – 3900.58
Blackboard Learn SaaS
Ultra Experience
Original Experience
Impact: Administrators
Institutions want a way to maximize support to their end users. This needs to happen without sharing or exchanging login credentials. In the past, Blackboard Learn administrators might have used a community-created Building Block (B2)—LoginAs and Impersonate are two examples. These allowed an administrator to impersonate an end user for troubleshooting purposes. This category of third-party add-ons had the highest adoption volume in our global client base. The request to add this feature to Learn was ranked #1 in our Idea Exchange for more than 12 weeks in 2022.
We prioritized client feedback and are happy to share that the ability for an admin to log in as a user is now available.
Administrators can:
- Search and select a user to login as.
- Add in a reason for logging in as that user for institutional audit purposes.
- This is optional. Institutions may wish to determine a policy for the use of this feature.
- Start the session as that user.
To login as a user:
- Search for a user in Administrator Panel > Users.
- Open the dropdown menu for the user.
- Select the “Login As” option.
- When done, logout.
Image 1. Search for a user and select the Login As option
Image 2. End user acknowledgement and Session Start
For administrators: This release has certain constraints:
- “Login as” is available only for the full System Administrator (Z) role. We have plans to support permissions that can be assigned to other support roles.
- Administrators can access log data, including who logged in as whom and reasons for login, using the Learn “Sessions” public API. Documentation is at https://developer.anthology.com/portal/displayApi . We have plans to provide access to this data in the admin user interface.