I am writing with some information to share regarding the transition to Brightspace.  Going forward I will post these transition-related updates on our Academic Commons page. This way, they will be easily accessible and allow you to post questions or comments that we can all view and benefit from.  

As you already know, the official launch of Brightspace on our campus will take place in Fall 2024, not Summer 2024, which gives us extra time to get acquainted with our new learning management system (LMS).  

Course Migration/Exportation:

Your courses from the past two years have already migrated to your Brightspace page.  When you have a free moment, it would be great if a few of you would review at least one of them and, if you have an additional free moment, post your impressions in the comments section, especially if you spot any problems.  To access Brightspace, go to brightspace.cuny.edu and use your CUNY (not KCC) login.

I have reviewed my courses and am happy to report that they look great.  All of my material arrived intact and organized in the exact way I had envisioned.  So far, so good. 

However, I will suggest that when you review your own courses, have a close look at your grading area, as this is where I encountered problems.  If your grades are weighted by percentage (20% for essays, 10% for in-class assignments, for example), you might need to do some minor recalibrating. 

Even though only two years of courses migrated, you can still download any Blackboard course and import it into a future Brightspace course shell.  Let’s say that in Fall 2024 you will be teaching a class that you have not taught since Fall 2018. You can download the entire course from Blackboard and import it into that Brightspace course shell.  This Youtube video shows you how: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_utG6Amj-A 

NOTE: Importing a previous course into your “Sandbox” just to see how it looks will not work (or at least it did not work when I tried).  A Blackboard course can only be imported into a migrated course shell (this I was able to do) or a future Brightspace course shell.

Here is how to copy an already-migrated course on Brightspace to another Brightspace course shell: https://www.vanderbilt.edu/brightspace/how-do-i-copy-content-from-1-brightspace-course-to-another/ 

For legal reasons, information pertaining to students – names, ID #s, submissions, discussion posts, grades, etc. – who took the class that has migrated did not and will not migrate.  Essentially, your migrated course is a course with no enrolled students.  

Training: 

As you know, there will be a series of CUNY-wide and KCC Brightspace tutorials held throughout the semester.  The other day I attended the first in the CUNY-wide series, called “Getting Started With Brightspace.”  Click HERE to view a recording of that session.

There are plans to hold workshops just for our department, which will help us learn how to use Brightspace and iron out any migration issues.  Stay tuned for more on that.  

Annie already sent the schedule of CUNY-wide workshops, but I will include it again here.  Note the monthly “Ask Me Anything/Office Hour” offering, which will allow you to ask questions specific to your own needs.  If you have been to any of the CUNY workshops and found yourself frustrated by the bomb cyclone of chat questions that go unanswered, this might be a good alternative:

Spring 2024 CUNY Workshop Schedule: https://www.cuny.edu/academics/brightspace-transition/spring-2024-workshops/

I look forward to hearing about how your course migration went.  It is still early in the transition and learning Brightspace may not be on your radar just yet, but please know that the earlier we know about issues that faculty are having, the quicker the transition team (ours and CUNY’s) can address them in time for the Fall 2024 launch on our campus.

Neil