MCC Daily Tribune

Brightspace Updates: April 2022

We have had a busy month with Brightspace! SUNY has launched faculty training this month to our pilot faculty group and all faculty. Our big accomplishment was finally getting access to our Brightspace instance and getting our pilot accounts set up. A big thank you to Jamie Hoover for all of her work on this! We still have a lot of work ahead, but we are making good progress towards our summer launch. We are excited to hear all of the positive feedback about Brightspace from our piloteers.

Many questions have come up over the last few weeks, and here are just few questions answered:

When will all faculty have access to our MCC Brightspace instance?

Our upcoming priorities include getting all of our faculty access to the system and getting the live summer and fall shells created as soon as we can. Currently, only our summer pilot faculty have access to Brightspace and they only have access to a few practice shells. Everyone else will have access very soon. We can't give an exact date, but we are working closely with Amy Ariola's team and SUNY SICAS to get the SIS integration working so that all accounts can be created in Brightspace. A big shout out to Amy's team (Susan, Jeff, Pete, Dan, and Bob to name a few) for their hard work helping us on the back end to get things up and running. A lot of this integration hinges on the use of Global IDs and there are always unexpected hiccups with SUNY. Thanks for your patience and we will let you know once accounts are created.

What does our Brightspace system look like?

I have created a 7- minute video walk through so you can get a sense of what you will see when you login into Brightspace. Brightspace Tour: April 2022

How can I sign up for Brightspace training?

Training is available to all faculty through SUNY CPD in a sychronous mode and as well as scaled webinars. You can go to the registration page to sign up for trainings at your convenience. Register now

More training dates will be added throughout the end of the semester and through the summer. If you don't see times that work for you, you may want to choose the scaled webinars and then get the recordings emailed to you after the session. Once our Brightspace user accounts are created, you will also have access to SUNY's asychronous training modules so you can learn at your own pace (you will just get automatically enrolled, you don't need to register). You can refer to SUNY's training website for more details: SUNY DLE Training

How can I practice with Brightspace?

Anyone can sign up for a sandbox account to test out the functionality and you can do this now if you haven't already done so. You will first need to set up an account and then you can login. You can also import your materials to see what they look like from Blackboard.

Explore the SUNY Brightspace sandbox
Watch our videos to get to know the sandbox and learn how to export/import your course into Brightspace

What tools will be integrated into Brightspace?

Jamie is also coordinating the integrations of third-party tools with the vendors and SUNY. We have gotten four tools set up to date (Pearson, McGraw, Wiley, and VoiceThread) and more are on the way. It takes a significant amount of time to gather the information from the vendors, so if there are any uncommon tools that you typically integrate in your course beyond the normal Cengage, Lumen, Zoom, Ensemble, Packback, Respondus, Exam Soft, Norton, HOL, Electude, etc. please reach out to our office. Blackboard Ally will be integrated as an add-on for Brightspace, but we don't have a clear date for this yet. SUNY as a whole is exploring a contract with TurnItIn for integration with Brightspace.

Note: You can still embed YouTube, Ted Talks, Google Slides, etc. and all of the normal things into your course without having an "integration".

Is there any information I can share with students about the transition?

We will be working to put together a communication plan for summer pilot students and for our returning and incoming fall students. We have just completed an asynchronous training course for students and we plan to have synchronous options available. Students will have the support of the SUNY Online Help Desk. For the time being, you can refer to the "Student" tab on our website: Brightspace for Students

How can I get my questions answered about Brightspace?

First, refer to our migration website. Many of your questions may be answered here: LMS Migration to Brightspace

Faculty and staff can also use our regular drop-in hours on zoom/FIC or email us at virtualcampus@monroecc.edu. Please see our May support calendar for dates and times.

-Virtual Campus Team

Andrea Gilbert
Instructional Technologies
04/29/2022