Overview
Over the fall we piloted courses in Brightspace and began learning the workings of the system. We invited faculty to teach in Brightspace this spring and provided some guidance in migrating content. We worked with independent instructional design contractors to migrate part-time courses and received some valuable feedback. As we move off Blackboard entirely, given the short time remaining in our contract, we want to provide some guidance regarding the best path forward to finish migrating courses.
Recommended Course Migration Path
Working with Academic Affairs and Senate Academic Instruction, Learning Innovation Technology & Online has developed a content migration strategy that moves beyond a simple migration of content from Blackboard to Brightspace. Instead, we hope the faculty will embrace re-envisioning courses in the new environment. Our shared experience during the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted some shortcomings of our previous approach to LMS use. Most courses in Blackboard have been content repositories. Few courses fully used the breadth of teaching tools available. During the pandemic, this approach has fallen short of the academic excellence we aspire towards for our students. This past semester, a group of students from Wentworth Student Government, worked with representatives from the Senate Academic Instruction subcommittee to develop remote learning shared expectations to articulate the expectations of students and faculty in the digital learning environment. Academic Affairs has adopted these expectations as goals for all our courses.
It is our recommendation, shared with Academic Affairs and Academic Instruction, that all faculty follow a path of course rebuilding in Brightspace. We have previously provided resources to assist instructors in this process (these are reposted below). Our recommended process starts with downloading your content from Blackboard to your computer. Next, evaluate the value of the content and discard out dated or unnecessary content, find replacements for links to internet content that is no longer available, and organize content into folders/modules. It's also an opportunity to move video content to Panopto to make viewing video better for students. Consider which activities offered by Brightspace can enhance your students' learning journey. Map out how those activities fit into your course and in which folder/module. Finally, once you have your course mapped out, you are ready to rebuild your course in Brightspace. Learning Innovation Technology & Online recommends the rebuild option because it provides the cleanest transition with no lingering broken links, no outdated versions of handouts, and tool links that work in the new environment. To hear more about how to add files to Brightspace and download content from Blackboard view the following videos:
Resources for rebuilding courses in Brightspace:
LIT's recommended procedure for course rebuilding in Brightspace – Blog Post Nov. 13, 2020.
Guide for downloading content from Blackboard and rebuilding in Brightspace.
As a second option, you can export a package from Blackboard and import it to Brightspace. This option can leave you with significant clean-up. First, the course import package must be less than 1 GB in size, meaning that you may need to create multiple packages to import or select which content to migrate. Importing a course from Blackboard into Brightspace often results in broken links – tools that were configured in Blackboard are not the same in Brightspace and even the same tools do not have the same configuration in both systems resulting in broken links. So one clean-up task is finding all the broken content and or links in your course and rebuilding them. While initially appearing to be faster, importing content may end up costing more time during the semester as you field questions from students when links don't work and find or create new content to replace those broken links.
Resources for importing a Blackboard course package into Brightspace:
Importing a course package into Brightspace
And the third option, you can request "Bulk Conversion" of courses. Bulk course conversion is an automated version of importing a course package. Just like importing content yourself, using the bulk conversion process requires you to clean-up the migrated course and it is likely you will deal with lingering clean-up over the duration of the semester as students find broken links or content that did not migrate cleanly. You may spend more time dealing with content issues with exporting or bulk migrating content. And one final consideration, bulk migration provides little control over the process. With the first two options, instructors have more control over what content they bring over, how that content is structured.
Our contract with Blackboard ends on June 30, 2021. We are limiting access after June 1 to allow us to obtain final course archives and download our data prior to the contract end. Once our contract with Blackboard ends we will not have access to any courses or content on the system. This means all content download and course conversions must be complete by that date. Course rebuilding can continue past this date. Starting on March 2, 2021, faculty will have access to a Content Migration Selection form on the LeopardWeb Faculty and Advisors Tab where they can select which courses they want LIT to migrate. We will process requests on a rolling basis, however, the survey must be completed by March 22, 5 PM, 2021, so that we have sufficient time to complete the process before the end of our Blackboard contract. Starting the week of March 8, 2021, we will begin converting courses. We expect to complete all content migration requests by June 1, 2021. Faculty migrating their own courses should plan to have all content before this date. Course building in Brightspace can continue past June 1 only content download from Blackboard must be completed before that date.
All faculty must complete the Content Migration Selection form by March 22, 5 PM. We will only process requests from the Content Migration Selection form. We will not complete requests made via email, Tech Spot tickets, hallway conversations, snail mail, or other communication channels. We must use a single workflow to ensure that we identify the courses correctly. If you are requesting bulk conversion, we are asking that you select the best version of each course you teach for migration. Please do not select all courses – this will slow down the time for course conversion because we will reach out to you to select the best courses to convert. If for some reason you need a second version of a course, perhaps you teach a course as a face-to-face course but also as a fully online course, there will be a field to justify the migration of additional versions. We will use this information to label the resulting courses in Brightspace so you know which is which.
To complete the form:
- Go to the myWentworth homepage at https://my.wit.edu/
- Click on the Leopard Web tile
- Authenticate using single sign on.
- Once logged in click on the tab "Faculty Services"
- Click on the link "BlackBoard Content Migration Selections".
We queried the Blackboard database and selected all courses that were marked as active for the last four academic years. We then matched instructor enrollments to each course. If a course had two instructors, then the course will appear in both instructors' course lists. We removed from the list those courses that had no content items and or no files. We reviewed samples of courses and determined that courses with fewer than 5 content items and total file content of less than I MB, were likely not used or contained only a course syllabus. These unused or syllabus-only courses were eliminated from the list as candidates for migration. That left us with a selection of approximately 6000 entries. As you review the list, you will see multiple offerings of your courses, please select the one that is most complete for each of the courses that you teach. If you need a course migrated that is not on the list, please submit a Tech Spot ticket and we will explore the feasibility of migrating the course content. Due to the parameters we used to select courses, it is possible that we missed courses with significant content. If you prefer to migrate your content yourself, you still need to complete the form and acknowledge that you are migrating your courses. This acknowledgment will help us better plan our work and schedule the content migration. Remember, on July 1, 2021, we will no longer have access to our Blackboard instance.
Review the Options for Course Migration infographic summary.
Important dates to remember:
- Migration form open: March 2, 3 PM to March 22, 5 PM.
- Migration begins: March 8
- Blackboard Access ends for community: June 1, 2021
- Blackboard Access ends for DTS: July 1, 2021.
Bottom Line
There is no easy, clean process that will migrate content from one LMS to another and make the necessary updates to meet our shared expectations with students. All of the options will require the review and clean-up of content and rebuilding activities in Brightspace. We believe the option to fully rebuild courses will result in the best results both for students and for instructors.
Please send questions to lit@wit.edu.