Competencies compared to 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 helps track information about the knowledge, skills, and abilities learners acquire as they participate in courses or other learning experiences. Competencies can be used with the Content tool, Assignments, Discussions, Quizzes, Grades, Rubrics, and for manual assessment.

Learning Outcomes is a newer tool created to provide learning outcome alignment with achievement tracking.  

• At the organization level, administrators have the ability to define scales for measuring achievement.
• At the course level, instructors can create new outcomes, and integrate with Quizzes, Discussions, Assignments, and Rubrics.

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 April 2025, there are still some features lacking in the Learning Outcomes tool, and no migration tool for converting existing Competencies to Learning Outcomes.

What’s the value of Competencies

Competencies may be valuable if the following describes your course, program, department, or institution:

• You have clearly defined outcome statements at the course, program level (across multiple courses), and institution level (across multiple courses, departments, programs).
• You are using competencies imported in from another institution using the Import/Export/Copy Components tool, shared to courses and departments, or manually entered in to the Competencies tool.
• You need aggregated data and reporting on student outcome achievement from courses, departments, programs, and the institution.

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 (compared to Competencies)

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 exploration

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 or discussion where that rubric is used.
• 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 April 2025 version 20.25.04 release).