Democratize Insight with Role-Based Access in Anthology Illuminate

Illuminate has provided actionable reporting for some time now, but few institutions have taken up all 30 seat licenses included with their Blackboard® Learn SaaS license. This is understandable, as very few people within an institution are typically allowed to view the data of students, courses, and instructors across the entire organization. We have been working towards a solution for over a year, and some clients have been able to adopt this feature, called Role-Based Access, already. Our April release achieves general availability for this feature, as all clients, regardless of identity provider, can now apply and manage Role-Based Access in Illuminate. Allow us to explain how this works.

Role-Based Access involves applying a "restricted viewer" role to a given Illuminate Reporting user, and then selecting one or more institutional hierarchy nodes that they are allowed to see in reports. A new feature is that you can also decide which reporting area(s) – Learning, Teaching, Leading – the user can access. Once these permissions are set, the end user will only see reports in reporting areas to which they have access, and when they access the report, they will only be able to select institutional hierarchy nodes in the filters, and therefore access data, that they are allowed to see. This would enable use cases such as:

• A dean of humanities only able to see courses, students, and instructors from the School of Humanities
• An advisor only able to see reports in the Learning reporting area

As well as various permutations in between. And clients with the Enhanced Reporting premium upgrade can reuse this set of access permissions in custom reports, and further democratize access to insight with additional seat licenses. We will continue to improve these capabilities and provide more granular control over permissions.
 
In order to enable this, there are some steps that you may need to take to optimize your Illuminate setup:

1. Provision Illuminate: All Learn SaaS clients in supported regions are entitled to Illuminate, but it needs to be provisioned. This can be requested via a support ticket.
2. Adopt Institutional Authentication: This is single-sign-on (SSO) between your institution (or Blackboard Learn) and Illuminate. This will happen within the provisioning process for institutions enabling Illuminate for the first time, but there are many institutions still using the legacy authentication method. Upgrading to Institutional Authentication enables Role-Based Access and other additional features, and is recommended for improved security.
3. Configure Institutional Hierarchy in Blackboard Learn: This is perhaps the most complex step, but many institutions have already done this, it isn't technically challenging, and it provides additional benefits in both Learn and Anthology® Ally. Note that this step is not required to enable reporting area permissions.

 
Once this is complete, the Illuminate administrator will be able to manage role-based access and reporting area permissions for each user in the Settings page of Illuminate. For full details of Role-Based Access setup and functionality, see our help pages.
 
We strongly encourage all eligible Blackboard Learn SaaS clients to adopt Role-Based Access and realize the full potential of Illuminate Reporting.


Juan Lopez / Steve Bailey
Product Marketing Manager / Director of Product Management
Anthology

 

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