CUNY will migrate four years of historical courses from Blackboard and will continue the process until all Brooklyn College courses are only in Brightspace.

We have a short window of access to both Blackboard and Brightspace from Spring 2025 to Fall 2025. It is essential that you review all your transferred courses in Brightspace and compare them to your courses in Blackboard to make sure all of the content was migrated successfully. Additionally, if there are any other courses you would like to retain from Blackboard, make sure to copy them to your hard drive. After the Fall 2025 semester we will no longer have access to Blackboard.

LOG IN TO BRIGHTSPACE AND LOOK FOR THE CLASS CONTENT

Log in to Brightspace, and enter your CUNYFirst credentials, such as FIRST.LASTNAMEXX@login.cuny.edu, including your username and password.

Once logged in, navigate to the Brightspace course. Make sure that your last semester's courses in Blackboard are also available in Brightspace. If a course does not show in Brightspace; follow the steps below.

1- Export the course content from Blackboard to your computer desktop.

2- Navigate to the Brightspace homepage and create a new Practice Site.

3- Import the course content Import the course content saved in your computer to the Brightspace site.

Links with instructions are available for each of the steps above.

In the initial part of the transition, please ensure that for each of your courses, the content transferred from Blackboard is on your Brightspace course site. Below are four recommended steps. However, you will find more information in the Step-by-Step Description section below and the guidelines for this transition phase.

• Compare Course Layouts: Review the course structure in Brightspace against Blackboard to check for consistency in modules, sections, and overall organization.
• Inspect Content Items: Verify that elements such as lectures, readings, and multimedia files are present and correctly formatted in Brightspace.
• Test Functionality: Ensure that interactive components like quizzes, discussion boards, and assignments are fully operational and correctly migrated.
• Check for Missing Elements: Look for discrepancies or missing content that may not have transferred, such as custom formatting or embedded links.

Log in to Brightspace, and enter your CUNYFirst credentials, such as FIRST.LASTNAMEXX@login.cuny.edu, including your username and password. Once logged in, navigate to the My Courses widget and select the Brightspace class. Then, review each section below.

We have evaluated several fully online courses developed by the instructional designers from the AIT group. We picked them because they follow The SUNY Online Course Quality Review Rubric (OSCQR) standards for asynchronous courses and have complex structures. These are practical differences and similitudes we found when the courses were transferred, and we recommend you evaluate them.

• CLASSLIST : Only the course content and the course structure will migrate. Student rosters, activity data, and submissions will not show in Brightspace.

• ANNOUNCEMENTS : All announcements from Blackboard are showing on Brightspace. The last post is the first in the list. To reuse them, you must reorganize them and update the Start dates.

• CONTENT : Syllabus, Course Documents, Assignments, Content Folders, and Learning Modules will be displayed in Brightspace under the Content tab. Each container will retain the same title and organization within the Brightspace Table of Contents.

• Functionalities: Brightspace content and modules will include all tools linked to them in the original Blackboard site, such as Discussions, Assignments, Turnitin Assignments, Quizzes, and Surveys. You will find them within the Exiting Activities dropdown button. To modify the settings for these tools, you must access the specific Brightspace tabs assigned to each of these functions: Assignments, Discussions, and Quizzes.
• New Activities: You can also add new activities to each content area or module by pressing the Upload/Create dropdown list within the Content. These links will redirect you to the desired function.
• Third-party Content: Book Publishers such as Cengage, McGraw Hill, Pearson, and Wiley must be re-linked. It may include LTIs, such as Turnitin assignments and YuJa.
• Links to Media Servers: Links to media files posted on Dropbox and other cloud servers may not work on Brightspace. You must post them on a media server like YuJa and share the files with the course again.
• Activities Timeframes: It is crucial to check the Content and the Assessment timeframes to ensure that the information copied is activated and visible to students.

• BANNERS :Course banners are not transferrable. Brightspace provides automatic Banners. Banners are easy to customize in Brightspace.

• PROFESSOR PROFILE : Each Brightspace course site provides a Professor Profile on the course homepage. It would be very helpful to your students to have this basic information about you available to them on their course homepage. This feature substitutes the Contact tool available on Blackboard.

• DISCUSSIONS : Complex Discussion Board structures cannot be transferred to Brightspace. However, all Forums are retained. In most cases, topics and descriptions remain intact. Links between the content or modules and the Discussion will be functional. Any necessary adjusts will usually be very simple.

• GROUPS : Groups created on Blackboard are not transferrable to the Brightspace Group section. However, all previously created groups will show within the Discussion topics.

• BLOGS : Blogs content and some settings are transferable to Brightspace; however, in Brightspace, the blogging-style feature is referred to as “Discussions.” Instructors can set up discussion topics as blogging areas for students.

• ASSESSMENTS / QUIZZES : Most quizzes created on Blackboard will transfer to Brightspace without any problems. The only exception is the Random Block Questions, which will not transfer to Brightspace. However, you will be able to access all the questions in the Brightspace Quizzes Question Library. Instructors can recreate a new random quiz using the Question Pool function, which is equivalent to the Blackboard Random Block.

• RUBRICS : Rubrics transferred from Blackboard will show in Brightspace associated with the assessments. However, it might be prudent to review one of the assessment rubrics to ensure the rubric calculates the score correctly.

• GRADES : If you were using the Blackboard Weighted Total feature to calculate course grades in the Gradebook, you must recreate the weighted grade in Brightspace. Grade Categories are available; however, the final calculation requires some extra steps on your part.

• MORE / CUNY DEMO STUDENT : Become familiar with the "Viewing as Learner" and "CUNY Student Demo" functions. They will help you to test your course class from the student's perspective.

• SAFEASSIGN : SafeAssign will no longer be available on Brightspace. Assignments requiring plagiarism detection tools may need to be recreated using the Turnitin function.

• COLLABORATE : Blackboard Collaborate is no longer available on Brightspace. Please remember to save all recording sessions to YuJa and share them with students in Brightspace.

Our goal in this phase is for instructors to examine these and other potential changes and recognize and record them. Instructors will decide whether to create a practice site to maintain the original class integrity and be prepared for the Adjustment phase.

Here are the resources available for each of the faculty workshops and training sessions. For access please press the hyperlinks in each section.

RECOGNITION PHASE: BLACKBOARD WORKSHOP SERIES

• Exporting your Blackboard content to your computer desktop for future use in Brightspace.

• Creating a Brightspace Practice Site.
• Populating a Brightspace Practice Site.

The course content and assessments from the semesters listed below have been transferred from Blackboard to Brightspace. You can use these sites to recreate your courses within Brightspace and transfer the updated and reviewed versions to the official Brightspace course sites once they become available. You can also create a Practice Site to maintain the original class integrity when preparing for the adjustment phase. If one of your courses is not showing, visit the Introduction section of the Recognizing phase, where we describe the steps to Export a class from Blackboard, create a new Brightspace Practice Site, and Import the zip package exported from Blackboard to Brightspace

We will update the list when the new courses become available on Brightspace.

Summer I: 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024

Summer II: 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024

Spring: 2022, 2023, 2024

COURSE SHELLS CREATION SCHEDULE

Course shells for the upcoming semester are created based on the following schedule (subject to adjustment for maintenance):

Upcoming Summer semester: Starting 1st Wednesday of April

Upcoming Spring semester: Starting 1st Wednesday of November

Upcoming Fall semester: Starting 1st Wednesday of June