Understanding Competencies and Learning Outcomes in D2L Brightspace

Overview

Within D2L Brightspace, two separate tools provide overlapping features: Competencies and Learning Outcomes.

Competencies is a legacy tool that helped track information about the knowledge, skills, and abilities learners acquire as they participate in courses or other learning experiences. Competencies was used with the Content tool, Assignments, Discussions, Quizzes overall, Grades, Rubrics, and for manual assessment.

Learning Outcomes is a newer tool created to provide learning outcome alignment with achievement tracking. Learning Outcomes can be used with the Assignments, Discussions, Questions in Quizzes, Rubrics, and for manual assessment (from the Mastery View in Grades).

How are Competencies and Learning Outcomes related to each other?

Can I use Competencies and Learning Outcomes at the same time in my Brightspace site?

The tools – Competencies and Learning Outcomes – may be used in separate courses. However, both tools cannot be used at the same time within the same course! Remember do not turn off the Competencies tool, since it prevents instructors from attaching rubrics to assignments and could cause other issues with course assessment.

How to determine whether Competencies or Learning Outcomes are used in a course

In an empty course, both the Competencies and Learning Outcomes tools appear on the Course Admin page. But, as soon as the Learning Outcomes tool or the Competency tool is set up for use within the course, then the link to the other tool is automatically hidden on the Course Admin page and no longer available from the Class Progress screens. 

• The Competency tool is considered to be in use when at least one learning objective is aligned to an activity in the course.
• The Learning Outcomes tool is considered to be in use when an outcomes list is generated by importing or creating at least one learning outcome in the course from the Learning Outcomes tool page.

Learn more about what to do when the Learning Outcomes tool is not available in a D2L Brightspace course.

Will Learning Outcomes replace Competencies?

Yes, eventually, but we don’t have a definite timeline for when the Competencies tool will be deprecated. D2L has been releasing additional functionality related to Learning Outcomes and continuing to build this tool.  However, D2L has some remaining functional gaps that they are working to address in their roadmap (review the feature comparison section). As of November 2026, there is migration tool for converting existing Competencies to Learning Outcomes.

What’s the value of Learning Outcomes

Learning Outcomes may be valuable if the following describes your course:

• You have clearly defined outcome statements, which align to purposes of course curriculum mapping and faculty course review, to discreet student learning activities.
• You are using outcomes that can be manually entered or imported via CSV in to the Learning Outcomes tool.
• You need data and reporting on student outcome achievement from a course.

Learning Outcomes limitations

The Learning Outcomes tool is missing key requirements for tracking outcomes/competencies for Higher Education.  Key items include:

• Learning outcomes is strictly course based. There is no aggregation of achievement data outside of the course – such as across multiple courses in the program or at the institution level. This means that outcomes higher than the course (such as program or institution outcomes) cannot be tracked using Learning Outcomes.
• There is no reporting tool for Learning Outcomes in the LE. There are a few data sets for the tool but any reporting that is needed would have to either be created in an external reporting tool based on the data sets. Notable, Learning Outcomes connected to rubric criteria is not yet available in the Brightspace data sets.
• There is no definition of “achieved” vs “not-achieved” in the learning outcomes tool, which would define a threshold of achievement. This means that the instructor cannot set a threshold to determine whether a student has met or didn’t meet an outcome.

Learning Outcomes tool benefits

If institutions or faculty members can work within these current limitations, then there are benefits to using the Learning Outcomes tool.

• It has a much more appealing and user friendly interface.
• Outcomes can be aligned to rubrics and automatically are included for evaluation in any assignment, discussion, or quiz question where that rubric is attached.
• Outcomes can also be aligned directly to assignments, discussions, and quiz questions.
• Rubric evaluation levels can be mapped to achievement scale levels for suggested levels of achievement on assessment activities.
• The Mastery View provides a single, combined view of all outcome achievement activities across the course in one consolidated, color coded view with drill-down capability to see each individual learner’s assessment evaluations.
• The Mastery View provides the ability for an instructor to apply his or her professional judgement to manually override the calculated, suggested overall level of achievement.

Feature Comparison: Competencies versus Learning Outcomes

The following table documents the differences between the Competencies tool and the current state of the Learning Outcomes tool (as of the September 2025 version 20.25.09 release).