The migration of more than 34,000 Algonquin College courses from Blackboard and Canvas to Brightspace is proceeding apace.

The College migration team, working in tandem with Brightspace creator Desire2Learn, is in the process of exporting and converting two years of courses from Blackboard then importing them into the new Learning Management System (LMS).  Course content for Spring 2017 and Fall 2017 has now been copied into Brightspace.

The 2017 Winter courses are currently being processed. Subsequent rounds of course migrations will take place in the following order: 2016 Fall, 2016 Spring, 2016 Winter, 2018 Winter.

Canvas courses require a different manual export-and-conversion process that takes more time. Priority is being given to 2017 Fall courses, which are expected to be in Brightspace by the end of May.

Brightspace will be the only LMS in use at Algonquin College as of Sept. 1, 2018.

Once a semester has completed migration into Brightspace, it will be listed on this migration webpage. Prior to course migration, you can see your course content shells; however, you will only see content there once the migration for that term has been completed. The only exceptions will be courses with more than 100 question pools or courses that are more than 1 GB in size. These larger courses will be excluded from Brightspace.

Training in the new LMS is available to all faculty and registration can be found here.

Some issues may arise within migrated courses. Here is a table of known issues some Brightspace users may encounter and related solutions.

Student Survey

A recent survey of Algonquin College students about Brightspace had a remarkable 987 responses. More than half (55 per cent) of respondents said they were interested in becoming early adopters and Ambassadors for the new LMS. Here is the full list of Brightspace Student Engagement Survey questions and responses. 

Brightspace Ambassadors

Do you know any students who might be interested in becoming a Brightspace Ambassador? Here is how they can help fellow students navigate Algonquin College’s new LMS. A video introduction to the Ambassador program can be found here.