Senior Blackboard Ultra consultants

Position Overview

Platform Assessment and Mobilization

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

Data, Access, and 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 and maintain a role-to-privilege matrix.
• Improve joiner, mover, leaver, and access-review processes and stabilize identity and integration feeds.
• Develop positive, negative, boundary, and volume test scenarios to prevent unintended data or enrollment changes.

Blackboard Administration and Security

• Maintain a register of licensed Blackboard capabilities and their readiness, ownership, and adoption status.
• Configure approved Blackboard Ultra capabilities and review course configuration, migrations, system roles, SSO/MFA, service accounts, REST/LTI privileges, and integrations.
• Apply least-privilege and supported-configuration principles and establish test or stage to production release and regression-testing processes.
• Support cybersecurity, privacy, accessibility, and WCAG or Ally-type requirements and provide operational reporting.

Course Templates and Assessments

• 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 or pools, grading and integrity controls, and Learning Outcomes or CLO hierarchies.
• Map assignments, tests, and rubric criteria to Course Learning Outcomes and support summative-assessment mapping.

Faculty Enablement and Support

• Provide Tier 2/3 onsite support for user access, course setup, content, gradebooks, assessments, integrations, data feeds, and reporting.
• Own technical and functional issues through resolution, including vendor escalation when required.
• Deliver faculty workshops, course-building clinics, consultations, showcases, office hours, term-start support, and assessment-period support.
• Develop guides, onboarding checklists, FAQs, in-platform guidance, a searchable knowledge base, and a known-error log.

Documentation and Knowledge Transfer

• Maintain architecture, configuration, data-flow, field-mapping, data dictionary, role matrix, test pack, change record, runbook, support article, course-template, and training documentation.
• Conduct structured shadowing and reverse-shadowing with client administrators and support teams.
• Perform an operational-readiness review, document residual risks and future improvements, and complete formal knowledge transfer and handover.

Required Qualifications

• Minimum 12 years of hands-on Blackboard Learn experience.
• At least 5 years of Blackboard Learn SaaS and Ultra Experience or Ultra Course View experience.
• At least two comparable higher-education engagements, including one in a complex research university environment.
• Ability to provide verifiable project scope, dates, outcomes, and references.
• Mandatory hands-on experience integrating Blackboard with Ellucian Banner or a Banner successor.
• Experience with SAP Student Lifecycle Management is strongly preferred.

Technical and Functional Skills

• Strong experience with Blackboard administration, data and user remediation, SIS integrations, identity and authentication feeds, SSO/MFA, roles and security, REST/LTI integrations, release management, analytics, troubleshooting, and platform support.
• Strong experience with Blackboard Ultra course design, course templates, gradebooks, assessments, rubrics, Goals or CLO mapping, accessibility remediation, faculty training, and academic stakeholder engagement.
• The ideal candidate combines deep technical expertise with functional and academic-facing capabilities and can take ownership of a live, mission-critical higher-education LMS environment.