Yes, you will be notified via email about any Observers who will be monitoring students in your classes, prior to the Observers accessing your class. Blackboard does not indicate that there are Observers associated with any of your students.
The Observer role allows faculty and staff to monitor progress for specific students across all of their Blackboard courses. The Observer role is designed for academic advisors, athletic academic coordinators, success specialists, and other support staff.
The Observer role is being piloted during the 2026-2027 academic year with support staff from Student Athlete Academic Support Services. The goal of this pilot is to increase real-time visibility that enables data-driven case management, early risk identification, and targeted academic interventions. Additionally, this access allows faculty to focus on strategic reporting milestones rather than responding to constant status updates, strengthening the collaborative partnership between classroom instructors and academic support services to drive student success.
Observer access is intended for advisers and academic success specialists. They are NIU faculty and staff who serve in roles to support student success.
Requirements for Observer access:
The Division of IT maintains the associations between Observers and the assigned students.
Observers are assigned specific students to observe; usually, these are the students the faculty or staff member advises or supports. The Observer can only access information related to these students; they cannot see any information related to students they are not assigned to observe.
Observers only have access to progress information for Blackboard courses that are currently open and visible to their assigned students. They cannot see any information about past or upcoming courses.
The Observer role provides view-only access to student activity data for their assigned students, including:
Yes, you will be notified via email about any Observers who will be monitoring students in your classes, prior to the Observers accessing your class. Blackboard does not indicate that there are Observers associated with any of your students.
No, Blackboard does not provide a mechanism for you to prevent an Observer from accessing your course or any content, including files and Documents, that are visible to the student they are observing. Observers cannot access any assessments or interactive tools, including Tests and test questions, Journals, and Discussions.
Yes, the Observer role was reviewed extensively prior to this pilot. NIU conducted an earlier pilot with the CHANCE program when the Observer role first became available, in 2015. At the time, there was not significant interest in the role, and it did not continue past the initial pilot.
Since that time, the use of the Observer role has become common place among student athlete academic support units, like NIU's SAASS. Based on reports from other institutions, the real-time data provided through the Observer role allows for more targeted interventions by support staff, which leads to improved student outcomes.
Before moving forward with the pilot at NIU, CITL sought faculty feedback on the Observer role from the Baccalaureate Council, the Computing Facilities Advisory Committee, and the Innovative Teaching and Learning Advisory Committee during the Spring 2026 semester. Feedback was positive and stressed the desire for transparency to faculty about the role.
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servicedesk@niu.edu