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MCC Daily Tribune

Playing in the Brightspace Sandbox

Are you looking to experiment with Brightspace during your winter break? Don’t forget that the Brightspace sandbox is available to everyone! You can register and create your own account: https://try.brightspace.com/suny/

The sandbox is a generic place to play and test out the basic functionality of our next LMS –Brightspace! We will spend the next year preparing for a migration with a goal to have all of our courses fully migrated by the beginning of the Fall 2022 semester.

In the sandbox, you’ll have access to two different courses – one course with student data and one empty course shell. With your empty course, you can decide how you want to use it. You may import an existing Blackboard course or practicing building a course from scratch. If you need help as you are working in the Brightspace, take advantage of the “Email D2L Sandbox Support” for assistance.

Keep in mind, these are generic course shells and built by D2L. There is no branding or permanent customization determined at this time, but when we get our real site, this may look slightly different. We do not have any admin access to these shells and we cannot test any third-party tool integrations at this time. Everything you create, is your own responsibility. If you want to reuse what you create at some point in the future, you can easily export your materials.  We would recommend approaching these course shells as a place to play with no consequences, rather than using it a space to fully develop your materials. SUNY will be creating a suite of various templates and will be sharing with our campus. It’s best you don’t get too far ahead, but it doesn’t hurt to start playing so you can be familiar in the space.  

Don’t worry—for those of you that need step by step instructions, we will offer plenty of training on Brightspace in the future. This is just a space to experiment for those that may be anxious to start. More training details will come available as we begin our planning in early 2022 and we will fully support you through this process. While we do not have a formal training course created just yet, Brightspace has plenty of resources to get you started. We have posted these on our MCC migration website under the “Get to Know Brightspace” page. There are some self-paced training courses and webinars to view. We recommend bookmarking this website because we will provide updates related to our campus:

https://sites.monroecc.edu/brightspace/  

Save the date for our next session on Brightspace during the Winter Teaching Institute on January 19th at 2pm!

Happy holidays from the Virtual Campus team and happy playing!

 

Andrea Gilbert
Instructional Technologies
12/22/2021