This meeting primarily served as a technical orientation for Blackboard Illuminate, led by Jeff Kelley and Scott Hurrey, focusing on how the platform warehouses and transforms raw Blackboard data into simplified Canonical Data Models (CDMs) for institutional reporting. A key highlight was the distinction between the Core and Premium tiers, where Premium offers over 180 raw tables refreshed every four hours and custom dashboarding capabilities. The session also covered the powerful Ultra Events view for granular clickstream analysis, the ongoing development of an Ally accessibility model, and the role of Institutional Hierarchy in streamlining data organization. While users expressed interest in the AI-powered Data Q&A tool, they also noted performance challenges and the need for specific "golden queries" to achieve useful results.

Dr. Katie Grennell, Product Engagement Manager with Ally presented on how we can use data to inform our decisions as institutional leaders and admins and shared strategies and resources with us.