Create and Manage Nodes in Institutional Hierarchy

Best practices and advice for building your hierarchy

The following suggestions can help you get started building your hierarchy. 

• Plan ahead. It’s helpful to plan and even draw out your intended structure by hand ahead of creating nodes in the system.
• Budget appropriate time. According to clients, the process of setting up the Institutional Hierarchy takes about four to six hours.
• Reach out. Anthology has professional services to support configuration if you have questions or get stuck. Contact Anthology’s product support team or your account team.

In building out your hierarchy, we recommend the following order:

• Academic structure and campus structure. Begin with building out your course nodes. This enables tool management and departmental reporting.
• Administrators and Managers. Establish appropriate nodes in all branches. This enables delegated management and delegated access to reporting.
• Students. Associate students to programs. Building out your program structure enables program-level reporting.

While setting up the institutional hierarchy may seem daunting, remember you don’t have to create everything at once. Focus on what brings value to your institution.

Manually creating and managing nodes

You can create and associate nodes manually to build the structure of your hierarchy. For larger scale integrations, it is recommended to use SIS integration.

Create, edit, delete, and move nodes

To create a new node:

1. In the Administrator Panel, in the Communities module, select Institutional Hierarchy.
2. Select the branch where you wish to add a node. Select Create Node. This adds a node to your selected branch.
3. Enter a name in the required Name field. For example: “Academic Schools, Colleges and Departments”.
4. The required Identifier field is prepopulated with grayed out text. It is highly recommended to rename your identifier to something descriptive to your institution. This identifier can be used for data integrations. To add context, build out the identifier with the branch path embedded within it. For example: “ASCD”.
5. Select Submit. This adds the node to the hierarchy. You should see the new node displayed on the side panel.

Once you create a node, you can add properties such as Children, Administrators, Courses, Organizations, Users, Tabs, Modules, and Tools to give you functionality at that node level.

The Tabs and Modules tabs are legacy objects that will be removed in July 2024. We recommend using other objects instead. 

Create a child node

Creating a child node adds a descendant node below the node you’ve selected.

1. Select the node you want to create a child node for.
2. In the Children tab, select Create Node.
3. Enter a name in the required Name field. For example: “College of Arts & Sciences”.
4. Enter a descriptive identifier in the optional Identifier field. For a child node, it is recommended to include the parent node ID as part of the child identifier. Doing so adds context as your hierarchy becomes more complex. For example: “ASCD-CAS.”
5. Select Submit. This adds the child node nested under the parent node. 

Delete and edit nodes

1. Navigate to the hierarchy level node you want to delete or edit.
2. Open the node's menu and select Delete or Edit. 

Move hierarchy level nodes

You can move nodes to different hierarchy levels. When a node moves, it keeps the administrators, courses, organizations, users, and descendant nodes added to it.

1. Navigate to the hierarchy level node you want to move.
2. Open the node's menu and select Move.
3. Search for the hierarchy level node you want to move the current node to.
4. Select Submit.

Add an administrator 

For management of Blackboard Learn, and reporting within Blackboard Learn, an administrator needs to be directly associated with any nodes that they need privileged access to. In other words, privileges are not inherited in child nodes. There are two ways to give that user privileges to descendant nodes within Learn:

• A node administrator can be assigned as an administrator to every node down that branch. For example, an instructional designer can be given node access to an academic department to review its courses for adherence to a new course design. Then they can gain editing access further down the hierarchy to a few specific courses to implement changes.  
• All descendant nodes can be associated with a user up the hierarchy. For example, college dean of students can send announcements within Blackboard Learn to students enrolled in a College of Arts and Sciences course. Each new student user associated to a course node within that college could then have a node association up the hierarchy to the College of Arts and Sciences. That way, the dean doesn’t need to add privileges for each new CAS course or student. 

Anthology Illuminate (formerly Blackboard Data) and Ally reporting. For reporting from Anthology Illuminate and Ally, node administrators have access to reporting for all descendant nodes within that hierarchy. In other words, privileges are inherited in child nodes.

For example, an administrator for a College of Arts & Sciences (CAS) node has administrator privileges to Ally or Illuminate reporting for the CAS node. This administrator can pull Ally or Illuminate data from nodes under CAS – such as departments, subjects, courses, and users. This administrator doesn’t have access to this data for hierarchy nodes above CAS or “sibling” node branches (such as College of Business (COB) or College of Engineering (COE)). 

To add an administrator:

1. Select the node you want to add an administrator to.  
2. In the Administrator tab, select Add Administrator.  
3. Enter a username in the required Name field. You can browse for usernames as well.  
4. The ROLES area displays system roles that have been created in this environment under Items to Select. Select the appropriate role(s) and move them to the Selected Items field.
5. Select Submit. The selected user is added as an administrator with role-specific privileges associated with that node and its descendant nodes. 

Edit or remove a hierarchy level administrator

1. Navigate to the hierarchy level node you want to add an administrator to.
2. Select the Administrators tab.
3. Find the administrator you want to edit or remove and open its menu.
4. Select Edit or Remove.

Add courses, organizations, and users to a node 

It may be easier to add courses, organizations, or users through SIS integration rather than the manual approach.

After a hierarchy level node is created, you can add courses, organizations, and users to it. Courses, organizations and users are all added the same way. Each course, organization, or user is added by selecting the corresponding tab once you’ve selected the node you wish to build out. From there, Administrators search for courses, organizations, and users that already exist in Blackboard Learn.

To add an object to a hierarchy level node:

1. Navigate to the hierarchy level node you want to add a course/organization/user to.
2. Select the Courses/Organizations/Users tab based on what object you are adding.
3. Select Add Course/Organization/User.
4. Search for a course/organization/user to select and select Submit.

Courses, organizations, and users can also be added to a hierarchy level node from their create/edit page.

Managing nodes through SIS integration

While manually building out the hierarchy is not overly difficult, you can save time by integrating data through your Student Integration System (SIS). You can use SIS integration to build the structure and associate the data to different levels of the hierarchy. If you build out a data file from your SIS, it's easier to upload and then maintain if you need to make future changes to the hierarchy structure.

You can use SIS data integration as a one-time process or automate the process so that your hierarchy reflects changes in your data sources. You can use a delimited file, an XML file, or you can use one of Anthology’s Learn REST APIs.

Creating a data file

To begin your integration, you need to create an Institution Hierarchy delimited file to build out the structure. They elements of the file include: 

• External node key. This key has to be unique. There can’t be two keys with the same identifier value. For example, “ENG” can’t be used to describe two sibling nodes (for example, “English department” and “Engineering Department”). Additionally, it can’t be used for descendants (for example, “English Department” and a specific English course name).
• Name. This is the name of the object associated with your node.
• Parent node key. This key creates the parent to child relationship for your node.
• Data source key. This is your data source. In this case, Student Information System.

Build out each row by academic school, college and department branch, and then the subject. The elements of your file are defined in the table below.

 Learn Assessment Branch

A best practice for Blackboard Learn configuration is to include a Learn Assessment Branch to your hierarchy. This is a separate branch from your other academic schools, colleges and departments, and anything else you create to mirror your institution.

The Learn Assessment Branch is tied to different reports and solutions connected to your data. We recommend using the ID convention: BBASSESS. Create a file with the following elements in the table below. The example data defines program degrees for a college of business that students could be enrolled in at the institution. In this case, you'd be associating your user accounts to track assessment data tied to these programs.

Uploading a data file for integration

For instructions on uploading your data file, see Snapshot Integration on the Snapshot Flat File page. Once this file is uploaded, another branch to your hierarchy is created.

 Associating Courses 

To associate courses to nodes on your hierarchy, create a file that is separate from the one you use to create courses. This separate file associates previously created courses to levels of the hierarchy.

 The elements in your file include:

• External association key. This is a unique identifier for the course to node relationship. It needs to be a unique value across the system. A best practice here is to concatenate the ID of your course.  
• External course key. This is the identifier for the individual course offering. It appears in the external node key and is separated by a period in this example in the table.  
• External node key. This is the level of the hierarchy you want the course offering associated to. It appears in the external node key and is separated by a period in this example.  
• Is primary association. This will be marked Yes for only one record. This is because only one association should be used for driving the course tool availability for the course. If a course is associated to more than one area of the hierarchy (for example, Chemistry course that is associated with the Chemistry Department, a Pre-Medical Program, and a specific campus), the other node(s) it is associated with are marked No for Is primary association.  
• Data source key. This is your data source. 

For instructions on uploading your data file, see Snapshot Integration on the Snapshot Flat File page. Once integrated, you should see the new data on the side panel of the Administrator Tools page.

If you return to the top-level node (for example academic schools, colleges, and departments) and select Courses, you can see the courses in the file associated with their parent node.  

Once courses are associated with their appropriate hierarchy levels, you can quickly grant users appropriate role privileges to a subset of courses for them to manage. 

If you select a course and select View All Nodes in the menu drop down, you can see its associations and its primary association.

Associating Users

To associate users to nodes on your hierarchy, create a file that is separate from the one you use to create users. This separate file associates previously created users to levels of the hierarchy.

Create a unique identifier for your External Association Key. In the example in the table, the user ID (External user key) is concatenated with the appropriate node (external node key).

For instructions on uploading your data file, see Snapshot Integration on the Snapshot Flat File page. Once integrated, you can select the course offering of a program degree structure, and see the user based on that association.