Wentworth’s pilot of D2L Brightspace is in full swing and we’ve been learning a lot as we go. One question we’ve been asked is can I just import my Blackboard course into Brightspace? The easy answer is yes, exporting a course from Blackboard is easy. Importing that package into Brightspace is easy. However, depending on what tools you use in Blackboard, you may have a lot of clean-up to do in Brightspace. Some content/links do not transfer cleanly.

We are recommending, based on the advice we received from three schools we contacted for reference checks on D2L, that you export your content, review it, and then build your course in Brightspace. We have resources to help you with this task and will be sharing a recommended process to transition your course to the new LMS with a structure to meet your students’ learning needs.

So what can go wrong when you import a Blackboard course into Brightspace?

Links to third-party tools break. Although we have added the various tools that we have in Blackboard into Brightspace, the connections are different and will not connect to the same content.

Now for publisher content, this might not be too significant a problem because you have to relink your course each semester to the new course you create for the text resources.

Some content like SCORM content (Rise module are in this category) will need to be reimported. Although Brightspace allows uploading SCORM content, it needs to come in on it’s own rather than as part of another package to display correctly.

Another area for concern is the grade center. If you have hidden columns, they will be copied over and added to the grade book along with any assignments or tests that might be associated. If you carefully clean up your course before exporting it, you should have no problems with extra columns.

Content – do you have a lot of files? Are they organized so your students can easily find what they need? Reorganize before building will allow you to quickly build a course where your students can easily find the resources you are providing to them. We recommend that you use a module structure or checklists to organize content by session, week, or topic, depending on what works best for your content. This is also a good time to check the value of the content. Do you need all the content items/files you have uploaded to your course or are some files no longer used?

Extra content that is not referred to in your course is a distractor to your students. (In the Bettering Learner Engagement Study we found that courses with lots of files were associated with poorer performance for students in the lower half of the grade scale). Do them a favor and cull the content to what you expect them to use and organize the remainder.

Are your quizzes and assignments in a single content area in Blackboard? Then it’s time to organize these activities with the appropriate content to create a course that students can navigate easily.

It is best practice to create modules containing links to all the activities students must complete. Modules can be time-based (think weekly modules) or topic-based. Which kind of module is less important than the organizing of your content into modules. If your Blackboard course is not organized in this way, take the time now to create the best structure to help your students navigate your course materials.

So, yes, you can export your course from Blackboard and import it into Brightspace, but we recommend that you do some clean up first so that the result does not require a lot of work to clean up on the back end. Very clean and well-organized courses can import well into Brightspace but if you have to spend time cleaning up your course first, you should download content and plan the new structure, then rebuild in Brightspace.

The LIT/WIT Online team is developing materials and tools to help guide you through the process of moving your courses from Blackboard to Brightspace. We’ll add new resources as we develop them.

Resources:

Guide to downloading content from Blackboard and rebuilding in Brightspace