Senior Blackboard Ultra consultants

Position Overview:

We are seeking a Senior Blackboard Learn Ultra Consultant to take full technical and functional ownership of a live Blackboard Learn Ultra environment.

The successful candidate will act as the single point of delivery accountability, working closely with IT, academic affairs, registrar teams, faculty, and other stakeholders.

The engagement will focus on four key areas:

Stabilize → Optimize → Enable → Transfer

The consultant will be responsible for platform stabilization, data and access remediation, identity/SIS integrations, Ultra configuration, course and assessment standardization, faculty enablement, operational support, documentation, and knowledge transfer.

Key Responsibilities:

1. Platform Assessment & Mobilization

• Conduct stakeholder interviews and establish project scope and priorities.
• Assess Production, Test/Stage and approved Blackboard environments.
• Inventory configurations, licenses, users, courses, integrations, authentication, reports, support processes, and security/accessibility controls.
• Establish a prioritized remediation backlog with risks, dependencies, owners, timelines, and acceptance criteria.
• Establish appropriate testing, backup, rollback, approval, and change-management procedures.

2. Data, Access & Integration Remediation

• Profile and cleanse Blackboard users, courses, enrollments, terms, roles, organizations, hierarchy nodes, files, archives, and related data.
• Identify and resolve duplicate, orphaned, invalid, stale, or incorrectly configured records.
• Review privileged, manual, guest, service, inactive, and direct-access accounts.
• Develop and maintain a role-to-privilege matrix.
• Review and improve joiner/mover/leaver and access-review processes.
• Stabilize identity and integration feeds, including reconciliation, monitoring, alerting, recovery, and backfill.
• Develop positive, negative, boundary, and volume test scenarios to prevent unintended data or enrollment changes.

3. Blackboard Ultra Administration & Security

• Maintain a complete register of licensed Blackboard capabilities and their readiness, ownership, and adoption status.
• Configure and enable approved Blackboard Ultra capabilities.
• Review Ultra course configuration, Original Course View migration, system roles, SSO/MFA, service accounts, REST/LTI privileges, and integrations.
• Apply least-privilege and supported-configuration principles.
• Establish Test/Stage-to-Production release and regression-testing processes.
• Provide recurring platform readiness and operational reporting.
• Support cybersecurity, privacy, accessibility, and WCAG/Ally-type requirements.

4. Course Templates, Assessments & CLO Mapping

• Design and implement institutional Blackboard Ultra course templates and approved variants.
• Standardize course navigation, learning modules, assessment structures, gradebook practices, and accessibility.
• Develop reusable assessment rubrics, question banks/pools, and grading/integrity controls.
• Configure Learning Outcomes/CLO hierarchies.
• Map assignments, tests, and rubric criteria to Course Learning Outcomes.
• Support summative-assessment mapping across pilot courses.

5. Faculty Enablement & Operational Support

• Provide Tier 2/3 onsite support for:
• User access
• Course setup
• Content
• Gradebook
• Assessments
• Integrations
• Data feeds
• Reporting
• Own technical and functional issues through resolution, including vendor escalation when required.
• Deliver faculty workshops, hands-on course-building clinics, one-to-one consultations, showcases, and office hours.
• Provide targeted support during term starts and major assessment periods.
• Develop faculty/student guides, onboarding checklists, FAQs, and in-platform guidance.
• Maintain a searchable knowledge base and known-error log.
• Produce weekly operational and monthly service reports.

6. Documentation & Knowledge Transfer

• Maintain complete and editable:
• Architecture documentation
• Configuration documentation
• Data-flow and field-mapping documentation
• Data dictionary
• Role matrix
• Test packs
• Change records
• Runbooks
• Support articles
• Course-template standards
• Training materials
• Conduct structured shadowing and reverse-shadowing with the client's administrators and support teams.
• Perform a final operational-readiness review.
• Document residual risks and future improvement opportunities.
• Complete a formal knowledge-transfer and handover process so the client team can independently operate the platform.

Required Qualifications:

Blackboard Experience:

• Minimum 12 years of hands-on Blackboard Learn experience.
• At least 5 years of experience with Blackboard Learn SaaS and Ultra Experience/Ultra Course View.

Higher Education Experience

• Minimum two comparable higher-education engagements.
• At least one engagement must have been delivered within a complex research university environment.
• Ability to provide verifiable project scope, dates, outcomes, and references.

SIS & Integration Experience

• Mandatory hands-on experience integrating Blackboard with Ellucian Banner or a Banner successor.
• Experience with SAP Student Lifecycle Management (SLcM) is strongly preferred.

Technical Skills:

Strong hands-on experience with:

• Blackboard Learn administration
• Data and user remediation
• SIS integrations
• Identity and authentication feeds
• SSO/MFA
• Roles and security
• REST/LTI integrations
• Release and change management
• Analytics and reporting
• Troubleshooting
• Platform support

Functional Skills

Strong experience with:

• Blackboard Ultra course design
• Course template development
• Gradebook configuration
• Assessment and rubric design
• Blackboard Goals / CLO mapping
• Accessibility remediation
• Faculty training and adoption
• Academic stakeholder engagement

Ideal Candidate:

The ideal candidate is a hands-on Blackboard Learn Ultra specialist who combines deep technical expertise with strong functional and academic-facing capabilities.

They should be comfortable working across platform administration, data remediation, SIS/identity integrations, security, course design, assessments, and faculty training.

The candidate should demonstrate strong stakeholder-management and communication skills and have experience taking ownership of a live, mission-critical LMS environment within higher education.

The ultimate objective is to leave the client with a stable, optimized, well-documented, and self-sufficient Blackboard Ultra operation.