Frequently Asked Questions
| When is the last semester faculty have the option to use both Blackboard Original and D2L Brightspace during the LMS implementation? |
The last semester faculty can use both Blackboard Learn Original and D2L's Brightspace is Fall Semester 2024. The three adoption windows for Brightspace are Summer 2024, Fall 2024, and Spring 2025. Hence, by Spring Semester 2025, all faculty will be utilizing D2L’s Brightspace for all of their courses.
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| When will faculty have access to D2L's Brightspace sandbox sites to begin learning the new platform? |
Faculty will be able to access Brightspace sandbox sites on Monday April 1st, 2024. A Brightspace sandbox site is an area that is not visible to students where you can both test Brightspace’s functions and work on designing your course. If you would like to request Brightspace sandbox(es), please complete the D2L's Brightspace Course Request form. Once they are ready, you will be notified. Currently, you may request a maximum of five (5) sandbox sites. You can register for Tri-C's required online asynchronous training in Compass. |
| I teach four different courses and three courses I would like to start the new LMS in the fall of 2024. Can I teach one of my courses in Blackboard and the others in D2L's Brightspace? | Yes, faculty can teach different courses in different LMS's during the same session/term (only one LMS for each course, though). You may also opt to migrate courses all at once over a single semester/session or split across both the Summer 2024 and Fall 2025 adoption periods. However, starting Spring 2025 ALL courses must be in D2L's Brightspace. |
| Can a placard be put on the page so we can easily get to the D2L webpage? (just like Email and Office 365, Attendance Tracking etc.) | Currently, there are two tiles within my Tri-C space one that is for faculty and one for students. They are currently branded with our current LMS system. During the pilot of the LMS systems links on the tiles to both LMS systems were present blackboard and the current pilot systems. The ITS team will work with the OLAT team to modify these for the LMS systems and have the links to both Blackboard and D2L’s Brightspace. Also, through the discovery feature in my Tri-C space users can enter in the LMS name as a keyword so that the card/tile is easily discoverable. Also, there is a link on our Public website on www.Tri-C.edu to log in directly to Blackboard and we could create a link to D2L’s Brightspace to be added underneath the Blackboard one as well. |
| For new hires that are starting this summer, will they be set up on D2L solely? | New hires, like other faculty, will still have the choice (unless program requirements already dictate something else). However, our recommendation is for all new hires to immediately complete the training for Brightspace and begin in that LMS, reducing the need to learn two different platforms. |
| For non-credit classes currently using Blackboard will those classes have to participate in the new Brightspace? | Yes, our contract with the Blackboard LMS will expire in May 2025. Therefore, all courses credit and non-credit that are using an LMS will need to use D2L's Brightspace by Spring 2025. |
| Can you share the timeline for when First Day classes need to use Brightspace? | First Day Books can only be used in one LMS at a time. In summer 2024, First Day Books will remain in Blackboard. In Fall 2024, ALL First Day Books will transition to D2L's Brightspace. |
| Would students have access to the D2L Brightspace site prior to the semester commencing or would the setting be the same as Blackboard? | What we did during the pilot/review was put students in an orientation site to allow them to get familiar with D2L's Brightspace before their courses were available, we will be working on setting up a similar workflow. The current plan is for students to receive access to their courses on the course start date. |
| Is there training, or a training site that I can visit to familiarize myself with D2L's Brightspace? |
Visit the Training Information Page for the latest descriptions and links to available training in Compass. D2L also has several Brightspace resources you can review: Brightspace Communications Higher Ed Instructor Documentation Welcome to Brightspace Guided Training for Instructors |
| Will training be offered that will show faculty how to do attendance reporting with the new system? | The Tri-C system for attendance reporting will not change when we move to D2L and will remain in Banner. As far as tracking student logins and participation in D2L's Brightspace, the Instructional Design and Learning Excellence team has created the D2L training to include this topic in one of the asynchronous modules. Additionally, D2L already has resources available to faculty to assist with the specifics of tracking student activity in Brightspace. |
| Who will be responsible for training faculty in third party integration (i.e., publisher content). | The OLAT team will work to integrate all the publishers into D2L. Our process of working with publishers will be the same as how we currently work with Blackboard. Publishers should continue to support the use of their content and resources, while the OLAT and the ID Team will only have access to support and train within the Brightspace platform. Now is the time to reach out to the publishers that you have a relationship with and make sure that your representative is aware of our change to the new LMS. We will have an updated list in resources of publishers already integrated into D2L's Brightspace on our resource page. For applications other than publishers (WebEx, Mediasite, Remind), we expect to maintain a similar level of support and training. |
| Can the classes in Blackboard be imported into D2L? | Faculty will have three migration options from Blackboard Original Learn to D2L's Brightspace which include: 1) Build your course from scratch in D2L, 2) Move your own course content from Blackboard to D2L, and 3) Have your course content moved from Blackboard to D2L's Brightspace. |
| Will the OLAT team automatically transfer our Blackboard courses if we ask? | As shared in the LMS Town Hall presentation, there will be three methods for moving content from Blackboard to D2L's Brightspace. The options are: 1) Build your course from scratch in Brightspace, 2) Move your own course content from Blackboard to Brightspace, and 3) Have your course content moved from Blackboard to Brightspace. The OLAT and ID&LE teams will assist with the moving of content from Blackboard to Brightspace. Information about the request process will come under separate cover in mid-February. The College will not be moving everything in Blackboard automatically to Brightspace and it will be important to work with OLAT and ID&LE to make sure that the course faculty need to migrate to Brightspace is the correct course. Also, it should be noted that any courses being moved will be moved into a separate new Sandbox site in Brightspace for 12 faculty to review and finish any clean-up if they desire to do so. |
| Can faculty get courses transferred from Bb prior to having been assigned CRNs to ensure there is enough time to learn and get comfortable with the new LMS | Yes, faculty can transfer their content from Blackboard into a sandbox course site and they can make all their changes inside that sandbox. Once our systems are ready to transfer courses to Brightspace and the faculty member has their content ready in the sandbox, the OLAT team can assist with moving the sandbox course into the D2L course. |
| When copying a current Blackboard course to D2L's Brightspace, will there be a lot of modifications to do, or will the course be ready to use? | Course content will be able to be migrated seamlessly from Blackboard Original Learn; however, when the course is migrated it will not be ready to use right out of the box. Once the course is migrated, faculty will need to go into each of their courses to do some cleanup depending on how content heavy the course is and the type of features from Blackboard that exist in the course. For the most part, all content should migrate seamlessly with the caveat that faculty will need to cleanup based on features and functionality that they would like to use in D2L’s Brightspace. |
| Will you please address the transfer of exams and quizzes from Blackboard into D2L. | During the pilot, faculty tested this with mixed results. Sometimes, the TYPES of questions offered within each platform were different. A lot of the content will transfer seamlessly, but you will want to check all quizzes and exams to be sure they work and especially that images have transferred in. During the pilot, some of us added a colleague to our site to "test" the taking of a quiz or test to help in that testing process. This provided to be invaluable! Specifically, I added someone outside my discipline so it would be more like the student experience. |
| If we run both Blackboard and D2L in the summer, and the students select which one they want, how are the grades combined? | Faculty must elect to use one LMS per course/CRN; therefore, there will be no need to have grades combined. However, if faculty are teaching more than one course during the three implementation phases, they may elect to teach in two different systems (Blackboard and D2L Brightspace). For example, if a faculty member is teaching ENG 1010 and ENG 1020 in the Summer, they could opt to teach both sections in one LMS or teach one section in Blackboard and one section in D2L. Student grades are reported in Banner. Grades are "combined" there. Faculty should CHOOSE one LMS for each CRN and not offer their courses in both. |
| Does the new LMS have the ability for accredited programs to add their accreditation standards to the LMS and link them to the objectives for each of their program courses? The goal would be to be able to create a spreadsheet map of where in the curriculum the accreditation standards are being introduced, reinforced, and mastered. Such an ability will also provide an overview of what standards may not be sufficiently addressed in the curriculum. | The College conferred with our partners at D2L and they shared that, D2L's Brightspace absolutely has the ability the support Tri-C's program accreditation standards within the LMS and link them directly to the objectives for each of their program courses. In the College's agreement with D2L, they have included Learning Outcomes Consulting to help with this use case. In an exciting upcoming release within the first quarter of this year, D2L will be releasing the ability to import outcomes in bulk via CSV so this will help with this requirement. |
| Along with the accreditation functionality, will the new LMS have the ability for programs to further align their course objectives with the Bloom’s domain and level of each course objective, the learning experiences used to teach the objective, and the method of assessment used to determine if the objective is met? | Yes, because the Outcomes tool allows text input for the details of the outcome and, yes, in theory via naming conventions, you could associate a taxonomy that matches Bloom’s however it’s not directly supported in the technology. Our D2L representative has reached out to their product team and there is a desire for D2L to do some experiments to include features like Bloom’s levels into their AI quiz question generation, but this isn’t currently supported. In addition, D2L's Learning Object Repository supports Blooms because institutions can define their own taxonomy schemas when uploading objects but that is outside of the Outcome functionality. You can read more about the taxonomy structure here. |
| Is there someone who can assist our program with getting this set up as we prepare for our next accreditation cycle? | Yes, this is exactly what the D2L Brightspace Outcomes Consulting service is intended to do. Here are the D2L deliverables within that service that can support this set up for the accreditation cycle: 1. Collaborate with Client’s project team to establish goals for the project, define and/or verify outcome structures to align with defined goals. 2. Provide recommendations and best practices to Client toward achieving their goals for the project. 3. Work with Client to analyze, recommend and configure the appropriate Brightspace tools, and design an outcome structure that will allow for assessment, evaluation, and data export of outcomes. |
| Does the new system have any capabilities to upload Course Outcomes/Program Outcomes from an excel file/comma delimited file, for faculty to then use to align assignments & rubrics for assessment? | D2L did share with us that this is on the roadmap for Q1 of this year to be able to support the import of outcomes from an excel file. Here’s the roadmap details: “Scale your workflows with the ability to bulk import outcome items at the course offering or the program levels via the CSV Import function in the Learning Outcomes tool. This function will use familiar import processes to allow instructors, course designers and program admins to import outcomes into the Learning Outcomes tool at the required level of the org unit structure to support quick and easy course/program creation of outcomes.” And here is the link to those details in our public facing roadmap. |
| If individual faculty use the Outcomes function to align assignments and assessment rubrics either to Program level outcomes or Course level Outcomes (or Essential Learning Outcomes), are there reports readily available to pull & compile the data results from these types of assessments? (i.e., a faculty member or a member of the assessment office could pull a report that will tell them 85% of students in X course achieved proficiency on specified course/program outcome?) | Yes, we have learned from D2L that their Data Hub provides aggregate reporting on rubric data, alignment data of rubrics to Outcomes, and additional Outcome based data sets. Administrators, or any other role permissioned to do so, can pull these reports (that are pre-compiled) at any time. In addition, faculty can see Outcome data within the course via these course-based dashboards available via Class Progress. In addition, D2L Brightspace also has recently released a Learning Outcomes: Outcome Achievement Dashboard Add-on, that allows institutions to: “Gain access to the new Outcome Achievement visualization with the new Outcome Achievement Dashboard add-on. This new reporting dashboard being added to the Insights Portal dashboard is for Program Administrators or L&D Managers/Department Managers who need visibility into aggregated achievement results across multiple courses. With this dashboard, these users can easily see that learners are meeting goals and outcomes across the learning interactions. |
| Who will be responsible for training faculty in third party integration (i.e., publisher content). | The OLAT team will work to integrate all the publishers into D2L. Our process of working with publishers will be the same as how we currently work with Blackboard. Publishers should continue to support the use of their content and resources, while the OLAT and the ID Team will only have access to support and train within the Brightspace platform. Now is the time to reach out to the publishers that you have a relationship with and make sure that your representative is aware of our change to the new LMS. We will have an updated list in resources of publishers already integrated into D2L's Brightspace on our resource page. For applications other than publishers (WebEx, Mediasite, Remind), we expect to maintain a similar level of support and training. |
| Can Pearson and Cengage be addressed at the town hall? I was hoping to get them going this summer. | Ultimately all existing publishers in Blackboard now are on track to be integrated in to Brightspace before Summer. As it relates to Pearson and Cengage those two are already in Brightspace since we had some of the review faculty request them. Important to note that courses utilizing First Day need to be taught in Blackboard for summer and in Brightspace in the Fall since the bookstore integration needed for First Day can only operate within one LMS at a time. |
| How well do most publishers have test and quiz banks that are compatible with D2L? | Most publishers are already compatible with all the LMSs. As D2L's Brightspace and the publishers' test and quiz banks there have not been any reports of issues, and everything should be compatible in D2L’s Brightspace. |
| Is there someone who can assist our program with getting this set up as we prepare for our next accreditation cycle? | Yes, this is exactly what the D2L Brightspace Outcomes Consulting service is intended to do. Here are the D2L deliverables within that service that can support this set up for the accreditation cycle: 1. Collaborate with Client’s project team to establish goals for the project, define and/or verify outcome structures to align with defined goals. 2. Provide recommendations and best practices to Client toward achieving their goals for the project. 3. Work with Client to analyze, recommend and configure the appropriate Brightspace tools, and design an outcome structure that will allow for assessment, evaluation, and data export of outcomes. |
| As an LMS reviewer, I really enjoyed working in D2L on the content build side. Where I struggled significantly with the platform was on the grading side. I recall that there was talk about updated or improving the grade book/grading system in D2L. Can you explain what updates or changes we might see with the grade book and if the process of grading student assignments process has been improved or will be improved? | D2L's Brightspace implementation team has been notified of our concerns and OLAT will continue to work with Brightspace to make sure we are notified of any planned updates. D2L's Brightspace has also informed their training services that this is a concern for faculty so they will be emphasizing the best way to optimize the grading features in Brightspace. |
| Does the new system have any capabilities to upload Course Outcomes/Program Outcomes from an excel file/comma delimited file, for faculty to then use to align assignments & rubrics for assessment? | D2L did share with us that this is on the roadmap for Q1 of this year to be able to support the import of outcomes from an excel file. Here’s the roadmap details: “Scale your workflows with the ability to bulk import outcome items at the course offering or the program levels via the CSV Import function in the Learning Outcomes tool. This function will use familiar import processes to allow instructors, course designers and program admins to import outcomes into the Learning Outcomes tool at the required level of the org unit structure to support quick and easy course/program creation of outcomes.” And here is the link to those details in our public facing roadmap. |
| Out of curiosity, what was the general consensus, or overall, first choice, from the faculty review members specifically? | As shared in the LMS town hall presentation, many stakeholders were involved in sharing feedback as part of the LMS review process, one group being the LMS Faculty Reviewers. Overall, the scores and weighted totals from all stakeholder groups favored D2L. However, the faculty reviewer-specific totals slightly favored Canvas, however, the qualitative feedback was mixed between D2L and Canvas. When the DLSC co-chairs gave their recommendation to Executive Leadership, they shared that Ultra received zero votes and that voting for D2L & Canvas were mixed and did not share the actual numbers. The DLSC stated as a committee that we were comfortable with the selection of either Canvas or D2L. Ultimately, D2L’s Brightspace was recommended and approved. We are very proud of the shared governance executed in this LMS review process to include faculty, staff, and administrator voices in the recommendation process. |
| Do you know if many universities or community colleges use this D2L's Brightspace platform? | Schools in Ohio with D2L's Brightspace University of Akron Wright State University Central State University Lourdes University Ohio Department of Education Sinclair Community College Union University Cedarville University Ohio Christian University Ohio Dominican University University of Mount Union Ursuline College ATS Institute of Technology Good Samaritan College of Nursing & Health Science Other Community Colleges/ Systems with D2L's Brightspace SUNY CUNY Harrisburg Area Community College City Colleges of Chicago Tennessee Community College System Colorado Community College System Maine Community College System |