Brightspace Help Documentation

• Help articles for Brightspace and other education technologies for educators
• Help articles for students

Brightspace Training

Instructors are welcome to sign-up for Brightspace training and workshops offered by CPI. Students are welcome to sign-up for Brightspace training and workshops offered by Learning Services.

• Brightspace training for educators
• Brightspace training for students

Explorer Sites

Brightspace Explorer Sites are automatically available for all faculty and staff and provide a simulated Brightspace experience for testing and exploration. Explorer sites are not intended for teaching and will not automatically receive student enrollment as with standard Brightspace course sites.

Access your Brightspace Explorer Site by logging into brightspace.brocku.ca.

Timeline

Availability of Integrated Services

Part of what distinguishes a modern LMS is its role as a hub for other integrated services. The link below provides an update on the status of integrations as they become available in Brightspace.

• Brightspace Integrations Status

Early Adopters (Spring 2022)

Instructors responded to the call for Early Adopter courses in Brightspace during the pilot academic term. The Early Adopters program was an opportunity for instructors and students to offer formative feedback about how Brightspace would be implemented at Brock University.

• List of Early Adopter Courses
• Early Adopters – Instructor Report

Requirements

The Resource Selection Team, created by Senate on March 3, 2021, consulted with the Brock University community and compiled a list of specific priority and feature requirements of a modern LMS that Brock University’s 2021 Sakai-based LMS did not meet:

A modern, straightforward, familiar interface

The most salient theme across all consultations is the need for an intuitive and user friendly LMS. After experiencing a variety of other systems, the Brock faculty, staff, and students reiterated that the most-liked features are ease of use or navigation (specific to creating and building a course), the aesthetics of the system (desirable layout), and intuitiveness.

Ease of content creation

The Brock community desires intuitive and effortless content creation and navigation through prioritizing processes such as: automating tasks, simplicity in completing tasks, and allowing for content and options of their choosing.

Integrated and interactive dashboard

The ability to see a snapshot of each course in one place, identify deadlines and outstanding assessments, and view an integrated calendar and checklist, allows students and instructors to stay organized and focus their attention on top priorities.

Seamless integration of multimedia

Video and audio content are a crucial aspect of online teaching and learning. The ease of upload of multimedia content (audio, videos, images) into the LMS is the most important feature when it comes to site and content creation for faculty, staff, and students. More specific features such as simple submission of video and audio content for assessments, and providing video and audio recorded feedback to students were mentioned as desirable aspects.

Robust grading and feedback tools

The high usage and the importance of these tools supports the notion that a robust grading and feedback feature is foundational to the LMS. This includes annotation, bulk editing, import/export of grades, event log in gradebook, grader notifications and specific file type submissions.

Complementary mobile experience

One of the most significant challenges with Brock University’s current Sakai-based LMS is its lack of a platform-specific mobile app. Members of Brock University community expressed an interest in the integration of LMS-based calendars and notifications with mobile phones.

Ease of content migration

When considering a change in the LMS one of the most important considerations that faculty, staff, and students have noted is the need for an easy import/export of content between sites, other LMSs, and related technologies. The short-term success of a new LMS will be primarily judged by the migration experience.

In January 2024, Brock University’s Sakai environment was fully decommissioned and is no longer available for normal access.

Sakai served Brock University from 2007 to 2023 and was a critical component to Brock University teaching and learning during that time. In 2021, the university undertook an LMS Review which examined the degree to which Sakai was continuing to meet the needs of Brock students and educators, established a list of requirements for Brock University’s next LMS. A formal competitive process followed through which Brightspace was selected as Brock’s next LMS.

Brock University’s Sakai environment was moved entirely offline in January 2024, remaining unavailable except for three limited one-week access periods annually until the close of 2026, signifying the completion of an extensive migration process.

Availability of Sakai Content

The best practice for building a course site in an LMS is to start fresh by building within the new space, meaning that the best courses will be those created in Brightspace for Brightspace. However, having some Sakai content available in Brightspace is a helpful reference.

Per the LMS/Online-Materials retention schedule, content from all 2018FW to SP/SU2023 courses delivered with Sakai has been automatically converted and imported into Brightspace. This content has been shared with instructors within Brightspace, and instructors can choose to transfer their converted content into Brightspace sites used to deliver future courses.

While Brock University’s Sakai environment is fully offline for the majority of the year, it can be made available for recovery purposes during three one-week periods each year until the end of the 2026 calendar year. These weeks are spread throughout the year:

• As early as the 4th week of January
• As early as the 4th week of April
• As early as the 1st week of September

If you wish to access Sakai during these times, please contact the Centre for Pedagogical Innovation.