Desire2Learn Brightspace Roll-Out

That’s the news for this week. We rolled out our new learning management system, Brightspace. We had an in-service in which Doug Black of our Port orange campus spoke to teaching faculty, while Craig Mencl, also of the Port Orange campus, spoke to clinicians. The idea was to demonstrate how easy to use the system is. After the in-service, a number of us were available for one-on-one sessions with individual faculty, and I am happy to say a good number of people took advantage of that.

Users will quickly find out that is rather easy to upload content. Using the “Module” section, you can organize your course however you like. For me, right now, I am organizing it by modules simply title “Week One,” “Week Two,” etc. Thus, if all you wanted to do was recreate what you have on the portal- and you should provide everything on Brightspace that you did on the portal- that is a matter of a few minutes work (outside of uploading large video files, for example, which have to process over time).

But Brightspace is not a content-delivery system alone. If that is all it did, we could have stayed with the portal. Brightspace offers you the ability to do so much more. You can create discussion boards, develop self-assessments, send out mass or individual communications, have a blog for an individual class, etc. Over the course of this current term, you can get comfortable with the LMS, and be ready to expand what you do the next.

Your sandbox is a good place to experiment with what the system offers. What you do there will affect nothing anywhere else. Feel free to experiment and take advantage of this.

Note: next week I will be away riding RAGBRAI. No post until I return.