Cleaning up Your Copied Course in Brightspace

Now that the content and structure of your Blackboard courses has been copied to Brightspace, you may be wondering what to do next.

Please remember that the courses you are seeing do not represent the course shells for future offerings of the course. They are simply your courses that have been copied to the new environment. You will use these copied courses to edit, revise and store your assignments, content, rubrics and quizzes until the actual course shell is available. This will help you learn the new environment while ensuring that your course is organized and easily navigable, incorporates high-quality course design elements, and utilizes Brightspace features and tools efficiently

Once the course shell for the next offering of your course appears in your course list, you can copy your migrated (copied) course components into it.

The information presented here will help to guide your review of your new Brightspace course to make sure it is in good shape to be copied into the new course shell.

It is important that you review all content in your migrated course. Below are five recommendations that will help you clean up your copied course. Please consider using the course cleanup checklist to help you with the review process. It is highly recommended that, at the very least, you delete all unnecessary content and review and update all inaccessible content within your migrated course. The course cleanup checklist and recommendations below will help guide you through this initial and essential course review process.

1. Review, identify and delete content.
   • First review your course content to identify which items you want to keep, edit, or delete. Next, delete any content you have decided not to use in your course. This can include duplicate files or modules, outdated content, undeployed quizzes and inaccessible documents. This will help to minimize any clutter within the course and will allow you to identify essential course materials with ease. See below for detailed instructions on how to delete various content items.
2. Organize, update or create content.
   • Now that you have selected the items that you will keep in your course, consider organizing them into a logical order if they are not already. Create or revise any essential content and assessments that are missing or need some attention. Some content may not have migrated to Brightspace from Blackboard. If you used journals, blogs or wikis in Blackboard, for example, you will need to change these activities. Now is the opportunity to redesign and rebuild this content within Brightspace.
3. Check settings, rules, multimedia content and third-party applications.
   • You may have used settings for availability, plagiarism, submission attempts, group activities, grading methods and so forth in Blackboard. These settings will need to be reviewed and updated in Brightspace. If you used SafeAssign, for example, you will need to use TurnItIn as SafeAssign is only available in Blackboard. Taking time to review these settings is essential since the settings you used in Blackboard may not have converted in the migration process. There are many integrations and links that will need to be reviewed. Check the links to make sure that they are correct or make note of adjustments that you will need to address. For example, Panopto content will need to be reset to be used in your courses in the Brightspace environment.
4. Review and ensure content accessibility.
   • Make sure your content is accessible and inclusive for all your students’ learning preferences. Brightspace has several built-in tools to create an accessible learning environment. Plus, the third-party app, ALLY, will help assess the accessibility of your course content. For more on accessibility and inclusivity, please visit the Building Accessible Content and Equitable and Inclusive Teaching and Learning pages.
5. Review and clean up the gradebook.
   • Use the Grades tool to set up your grade book. Delete any unnecessary grade items and grade categories or create new grade categories to ensure optimal organization within your grade book. Another essential component is to review grading methods such as rubrics, grade book categories and settings. Grade settings  (e.g. grading schema) and rubrics may not have converted during the migration process and will need to be addressed.  Learn more about the Grades tool, grade settings, and rubrics on the Grading in Brightspace webpage. 

Once you have accessed your upcoming semester’s copied courses in Brightspace, you should begin to participate in available trainings so that you can learn how to use Brightspace. You will learn how to update your courses so that you can easily copy your newly organized and revised content into your live courses.

If you need extra guidance, please attend one of CATT’s Brightspace workshops or contact the CATT Office to set up a consultation at ubcatt@buffalo.edu.