Courses that are converted from Blackboard to Brightspace will have a number of issues that must be corrected, or “cleaned” in order for the course to function properly for students. Follow this guide to clean up your former-Blackboard course in Brightspace.
ATTENTION
If the techniques in this chapter seem like a lot of work, that's because it really is! Getting a former Blackboard course truly up to snuff in Brightspace takes hours even for someone experienced. Depending on the course, it may actually be LESS work to rebuild your course from scratch. If you are unsure what to do, contact us at ctelhelp@maine.edu and we'll help you come up with a strategy.
The tips in this section are meant to be used throughout the process and don’t belong to any particular phase of the cleaning process.
Right-click/Ctrl-click on a link and select “Open link in New Tab.”
To copy and paste clean, unformatted text (eg, from MS Word or other programs into Brightspace):
Select (highlight) the text you want to copy with your mouse, or with Ctrl-A (Windows) or Cmd-A (macOS).
Copy the text with Ctrl-C (Windows) or Cmd-C (macOS).
Paste the text without formatting using Ctrl-Shift-V (Windows) or Cmd-Shift-V (macOS).
Add headings or other formatting again directly using the Brightspace Editor.
Optional Tips:
Use Ctrl-A (Windows) or Cmd-A (macOS) to Select All text in the document.
Use Ctrl-X (Windows) or Cmd-X (macOS) to Cut text. This is handy for fixing oddly formatted text that came over from Blackboard in the same editor by cutting the text and pasting it right back in the same spot without the formatting.
Below is a handy Keyboard Shortcut Reference "cheat sheet."
Changing the Names, Instructions and Descriptions in the Content tool of an Assignment, Discussion or Quiz changes it in that respective tool and everywhere else that item is linked in the Content tool. Also, you can link to the same activity (assignment, discussion, etc) multiple times in the content tool.
You can quickly find some of these from the Search field on the Brightspace Content tool. However, this only searches the titles and descriptions of Modules and Topics, not inside the pages themselves.
To quickly scan for text that needs updating inside of Pages on Brightspace, use the “find” keyboard shortcut (Ctrl-F on Windows; Command-F on macOS).
Every Brightspace course has a behind-the-scenes place where it stores all of the files uploaded to the course. You can access this using the Manage Files tool. To get there, click Course Admin in the navbar and then select Manage Files. Files from Blackboard can be found in the “csfiles” and/or “homedir” folders.
This means that you do not have to re-upload files to your course. Instead, you can use the Upload/Create button in the Content tool and select Add from Manage Files to create new links to files that came over from Blackboard that use the in-browser preview instead of the download links created during the automated course import.
Run the Check Accessibility Tool on All Topics/Web Pages, Docs, Assignments, etc. in the Descriptions. The Check Accessibility tool will identify images missing alt-text, color contrast issues, and incorrect heading structure. This tool can be found at the bottom of the Brightspace Editor. If any edits are needed, note them in the checklist--preferably with the Module and/or Item name.
Click the following link to read the USM Disability Services Office’s Brightspace Accessibility Guide. You can also read more general Digital Accessibility advice on CTEL’s Accessible Content page on USMDL.
For videos in Kaltura, see the captioning instructions in our Kaltura Guide..
Give modules in the course corresponding dates for the upcoming semester (from syllabus). If some dates came over from blackboard, you can shift them en masse from the Date Management tool in Course Admin. Ensure assignments are in the correct module/week, and move them if not: Existing Activities > Assignments. If there are no dates for Assessments/Graded Items, don’t add them.
The Manage Dates tool will let you quickly change all the dates in a course.
Click Course Admin > Manage Dates > filter by Specific Tools (radio button), and choose the Tools you want to offset (usually Assessments: Assignments, Quizzes, Discussions).
Click Apply Filter > the Select All box > Bulk Offset Dates > Calculate range between two dates.
In "From," enter the Due Date of the first Assessment in the semester you copied from. (No need to edit the time here.)
In "To," enter both the Due Date & Time of the first Assessment in the semester you're working on.
Click Save.
Example: The first Assessment due in Spring might be a date in Jan, and the first Fall due date might be in Sept. Enter those From/To due dates, and Brightspace will calculate the number of days between them (~250) and move all chosen Tools/Assessments forward by that many days.
You may need to manually edit individual dates in holiday weeks because April break falls in a different week in the Spring semester than Nov break does in the Fall semester.
Be sure to look for references to Blackboard throughout your course – including, within your attached files. Below are some tips to help you do that.
Click on each page of your course and do a Ctrl-F (or Cmd F on Mac) and to search for instances of the word Blackboard.
Download each attached Word or PowerPoint document in your course and use Find and Replace to find instances of Blackboard and reupload them into Brightspace.
For PDF files, you’ll need to edit the ORIGINAL file used to create the PDF. Consider just uploading that file as an MS Word file or enter it directly in Brightspace using the Upload / Create button in the Content tool and selecting New File. This will create a web page within brightspace to paste the contents of the file.
If you see a missing image icon or message, chances are the file is still present somewhere in the course’s file storage area. Simply re-link it, re-upload it, or delete the missing image icon. To re-upload an image:
Edit the item that is missing the image.
In the Brightspace Editor, click on the frame where the missing image should be.
Several buttons will appear above the missing image’s frame. Click the Image Options button (the button furthest to the right), browse to where the picture is on your computer, and select it.
Click the Add button.
Add functional alternative text for accessibility if the image conveys information visually.
Click the OK button.
Cleaning up courses that came over from Blackboard isn’t for everybody. If you have made or are planning substantial changes to the way your course is graded, or it seems like a lot of work, starting from scratch is a valid strategy that may ultimately take less time than fixing up a converted course. However, if you do want to clean up your course, it is important to be systematic or you’ll get overwhelmed I recommend the following workflow:
Review your Syllabus.
Clean the Blackboard cruft out of the Grades tool.
Fix and Clean up Discussions.
Check and Clean up Assignments, Quizzes, and Exams.
Check and Clean up the Course Content.
Clean up Announcements.
Copy Cleaned, Converted course to the upcoming semester.
Review syllabus for any references, URLs or instructions pertaining to Blackboard or other LMS. You may use the following boilerplate text to describe Brightspace’s system requirements located below. In addition to updating technical information, confirming that your grading information, such as point/percentage values, are up to date will make cleaning up your course much simpler and ensure your course and syllabus reflect each other.
Use or modify the following in your syllabus regarding technical requirements for Brightspace:
D2L recommends having the latest version of whatever browser is being used on any computer or mobile device. Brightspace works very well on mobile Apple and Android devices via web browser. The Brightspace Pulse app in the Apple App Store and Google Play also allows you to receive notifications regarding your courses on your device.
The Brightspace Guide has specifics on how to add your Syllabus to Brightspace, or updating an existing one.
CTEL maintains a Syllabus Template that contains all of the latest policy boilerplate and required sections from the Provost's Office.
Your first stop in your converted course should be the Grades Tool, which is found in Assessments > Grades.
Blackboard had a bad habit of generating extra “total” and “weighted total” columns each time a course was copied. These would have all been converted to Grade Items in the converted version of the course. To delete these:
In the Grades Tool, click the Manage Grades tab.
Click the More Actions button and select Delete.
Click the checkboxes in the left column of the listing to select the Grade Items you wish to delete.
Brightspace has its own hard-coded “final grade” grade item that cannot be accidentally deleted. Therefore it is safe to delete ALL “Total”, “Weighted Total”, “Current Grade”, etc that appear in the Delete page.
Grade “Categories” appear with a light blue background. As long as there are no Grade Items beneath them (white background) these can also be safely deleted.
If you see duplicate Grade items for some of your course assignments, you can safely delete the duplicate that has nothing in its “Association” column.
If you grade your course using percentages, see the following link to change your Grade System to use Weighted Percentages. Compare the point values or weight values in Manage Grades with your syllabus. If you find a discrepancy in Brightspace, correct the Grade Item by clicking the Action Button next to the Grade Item’s name and select Edit.
If there are things in your syllabus which are graded but not represented in Manage Grades, you will need to add Grade Items (and possibly categories) for those things. Click the following link to learn how to create Grade Items.
Grades for observed activities, such as class participation, can be entered manually. Simply create an aptly named Grade Item, such as “Participation.”
If your course uses weighted percentages and you have a large number of grade items, such as weekly quizzes, create a Category for them from the New button in Manage Grades and set the weight on the Category rather than the individual quizzes. When setting up the Category, select one of the “Distribute items in this category evenly” options to make things even easier.
To place Grade Items in a Category, Click the Grade Item’s Action Button , select Edit, and change the Category setting to the category this grade item should belong to.
Contact ctelhelp@maine.edu to consult with a Learning Designer on replacing the functionality of tools from Blackboard that have no equivalent in Brightspace. (Journals, Blogs, Wikis, and Glossary)
There are two significant problems regarding converted courses from Blackboard and Brightspace’s Discussions tool: Disconnected Grade Items and Superfluous Discussion Forums. The latter is mostly cosmetic, if annoying, but the former is critical to fix if you had graded discussions in Blackboard. Decide if you want to fix both the grade item association and the superfluous forums BEFORE you start working if you want to fix both the Grade Item associations and the superfluous forums to avoid a LOT of extra clicking. (Personally, since you have to edit each discussion topic to fix the Grade Item association anyway, it’s very little extra work to set the containing forum as well.)
The terminology Brightspace uses when referring to Discussions is a bit different than Blackboard's as well. Here is a primer on what the different components of Brightspace's Discussions tool are for.
During the conversion process, Grade Items and Discussions Topics were created from corresponding discussions in the Blackboard version of your course, but the Grade Items will not be connected (associated) with their partner Discussion Topic in the converted course. If you do not connect your Discussion Topics to corresponding grade items, the grades will not automatically transfer to the gradebook. To fix this:
Go to the Assessments menu and select Discussions.
Click the Action Button next to a Discussion Topic (topics have blue text) you intend to be gradable and select Edit Topic.
On the Edit Topic screen, click the Assessment tab.
Look for the Grade Item option and click its drop-down box to select a Grade Item to associate. It should have the same name as the topic. For example, if you are editing a discussion topic named “Week 2 Discussion,” there should be a Grade Item with a matching name in the drop-down.
Enter the points this discussion topic is worth.
Click the Save and Close button.
Forums in Brightspace are containers that hold Discussion Topics. In the Discussions tool, Forums have large black text and Discussion Topics are indented beneath them in smaller blue text. During the conversion of a Blackboard course, an individual Forum is created for each Discussion Topic. In some courses, this may make sense, however in most cases the result is a cluttered Discussions tool that requires a LOT of scrolling to navigate. To fix this, you need to consolidate all of your course’s Discussion Topics into a single Forum.
Go to the Assessments menu and select Discussions.
Create a new Forum named “Course Discussions” (or similar).
Work from the last Discussion Topic to the first. This will ensure that when you are done, all the course’s topics will be listed in the order they were in the Blackboard version of the course.
Click the Action Button next to a Discussion Topic (topics have blue text) and select Edit Topic.
On the Edit Topic page, select the Forum you created in Step 2.
While you are here, connect this topic to its partner Grade Item by following Steps 3 through 5 in the Fixing Discussion Grade Item Associations section.
Click the Save and Close button.
Repeat from Step 4 for each of the course’s Discussion topics.
Once all Discussion Topics have been consolidated into one Forum, you can delete the empty superfluous Forums by:
From the Discussions tool, click the More Actions button.
Select Delete.
On the Delete page, click the checkboxes next to all the empty Forums.
Click the blue Delete button at the bottom of your screen.
As you fix the Grade Item connections and Forum for each of your Discussion Topics, you can also clean old Blackboard text formatting from the Description field of each topic by Cutting the offending text and Pasting it back without formatting.
See General Tips While Cleaning for details.
Generally, Brightspace does a pretty good job importing Assignments, Quizzes/Exams and their associated questions from Blackboard. Your main effort here should be checking due dates and testing your assignments, quizzes / exams as a student using the Learner Preview feature. Finally, look at both the Assignments and Quizzes & Exams tools under the Assessments menu of the Navbar and ensure that they are all connected to the Grades Tool. You can determine this easily by looking for a “ribbon” icon next to each one, which is depicted to the right.
If Assignments are not Associated (connected) with their Grade Item, grades will not automatically transfer to the gradebook. To fix this:
Go to the Assessments menu and select Assignments.
Click the Action Button next to an Assignment you intend to be gradable and select Edit.
On the Edit screen, scroll to the Grading section.
Look for the Grade Item option and click its drop-down box to select a Grade Item to associate. Ideally, you will have given the Grade Item the same name as the Assignment.
a. If your Edit screen looks slightly different, you're using the updated assignment tool and should click Ungraded, in the "Grade Out Of" section.
b. Enter the assignment's points and click In Gradebook, then click Edit or Link to Existing and choose Link to an existing grade item.
c. Choose the Grade Item and then set the due date and time.
d. Skip to Step 7.
Enter the points this Assignment is worth.
Set the due date/time in the Restrictions tab so the assignment will populate in Brightspace's built-in calendar for your students.
Click the Save and Close button.
If your assignments do not have the Instructions field filled in, copy and paste these in from wherever you have them. Some students will plunge into the assignment without reading them otherwise.
If your Quizzes or Exams from Blackboard used the following types of questions, there is a very good chance they did not import into Brightspace: Calculated Formula, Calculated Numeric, Either/Or, Fill in Multiple Blanks, Hot Spot, Jumbled Sentence, Opinion Scale/Likert, and Quiz Bowl. If this is the case for your course, please contact ctelhelp@maine.edu and we’ll help you find a solution.
The issues listing in this section may or may not apply to your course and to some extent are a matter of preference. Apply them at your discretion.
Follow the instructions in the CTEL Brightspace Guide to post your syllabus in the dedicated spot for it. Once posted, remove any “Syllabus” modules that were converted over from Blackboard (The conversion changes “folders” from Blackboard into modules). To delete modules, use the instructions in the next section.
To delete excess or outdated modules you no longer want or need in your course, click the target module in the left-hand column of the Content tool. Click the Action Button next to the title text of the module on the right column of the Content tool and select Delete Module.
Blackboard did not have a way for students to view a list of all the assignments, quizzes, exams, etc. in a course. This led many faculty to create folders in the Blackboard course menu containing all of these. However, Brightspace already provides this functionality from the Navbar’s Assessments menu.
One takeaway from our Spring 2020 pilot of Brightspace was that failing to remove these manually created Assignment modules after a course was converted from Blackboard regularly generated confusion for students. Therefore, we recommend moving Assignment, Quiz, Exam, etc. links in the Content tool into a weekly or other consecutive sequence of modules with other relevant course content they belong with.
For assignments which are assigned one week, but not due until several weeks later, it is perfectly safe to add the assignment to multiple modules through use of the Existing Activities button because the Content tool does not create copies; it creates links to the corresponding assignment, quiz, or exam in its respective tool.
Like Blackboard’s content folders, Brightspace allows you to place modules within other modules. However the way this works in Brightspace can be very confusing and has the potential to obscure important information from students. Having content nested three module-levels deep will become very onerous and confusing for you and your students very quickly. The following are some guidelines to help you use submodules conservatively:
To contain several things of the same kind. An example would be a group of several journal articles.
Please do not put links to activities, such as Assignments, Discussions, Quizzes and Exams inside submodules.
If you have a submodule which only contains one or two items, consider moving them up into the parent module and deleting the submodule.
You can also use the techniques described in Consolidating Numerous “Web Pages” to help you reduce the number of submodules in your course.
It was common practice in Blackboard to have a single link in the course menu which when clicked would reveal a sequential set of folders. In brightspace these courses result in a single top-level module containing many submodules which can obscure important information if a student does not know to specifically click on the submodule’s link in the left column of the Content tool. Brightspace refers to this top-level of modules the “root” of the course. To move submodules to the root of the course, please see the section, “Moving Things Around.”
Another issue is the way Brightspace imports the text from Blackboard’s “Items.” It turns them into “Web Pages” internal to the course. Instructors commonly used several “items” on a page in Blackboard to section out short chunks of text. The way this translates in Brightspace is a listing of the names of those items in the module view, but then students have to click each one to be taken to a separate page to view the text. See the illustrations below for an example. (Note: You are not losing your mind. I used filler text for the illustrations below.)
1. A Content Folder in Blackboard
2. After Importing into Brightspace
3. After moving content in Web Pages to the Module Description
In the illustrations above, the first depicts a Content Area with several items being used to section out a significant amount of text. The second illustrate how Brightspace translates it into one of its own modules. Notice how the text is no longer displayed? In order to be read, a student would have to click the headings to go to a separate page with a relatively small amount of content which, after reading, they would need to click again to reach next chunk.
The third illustration demonstrates a technique to restore the document-like cohesion of the original through the use of the Module’s Description field. Follow these steps to perform the same technique in your course if you have modules with a number of former Blackboard items converted to web pages:
Open one, some, or all web page links in a new tab in your web browser depending on how many you have to consolidate. Or, open your Brightspace course in two or more tabs. Use one tab for editing (step 2), and use the other/s for copying links and other content.
On the original tab, click the module description area. The Brightspace Editor will appear.
To give yourself more space to work, click the Fullscreen button in the upper-right corner of the Brightspace Editor.
Switch to the first browser tab you opened that contains the first chunk of text or other content.
Click the Action Button next to the title of the page and select Edit HTML.
You’ll want to use the keyboard shortcuts for Selecting All, Copying, and Pasting without Formatting to make this go faster.
Click once inside the B that appears and select everything in the editor.
Copy the selection to your device’s clipboard
Switch back to the first tab displaying the module description’s editor in fullscreen and click once in the editable area below the toolbar buttons.
Paste the text in the clipboard without formatting.
Re-format headings using the Format menu in the Brightspace Editor.
Repeat for the other tabs you opened in the order you want the text to appear.
Click the Update button on the module description’s Brightspace Editor.
Delete the original web pages from the module using the Action Button next to each one.
If you see links to Assignments, Discussions or Quizzes without description text in the Content tool, add them using the text for that assignment, etc in your syllabus.
If you have links to your Discussion topics that do not work in the Content Tool, simply delete and re-add them using the Existing Activities button.
If you used videos stored in Kaltura, in your course, chances are they will no longer work. Simply delete them and re-add them using the Existing Activities button and selecting Insert Kaltura. If you cannot find them in My Media, contact ctelhelp@maine.edu.
If you previously used ARES eReserves in your course, add a link to it using Existing Activities > External Learning Tools > Ares Course Reserves. Please contact Bill Sargent, william.sargent@maine.edu, to properly connect the course shell to Ares.
Go to the Announcements tool under the Course Resources menu., Select all old announcements except your initial “welcome” email, if you had one, and click the Delete button. Deleted announcements can still be accessed from More Actions > Restore.
If you have an initial “welcome” announcement, click the Action Button next to it and select Edit. the Welcome announcement and uncheck the “Always Show start date” checkbox. This will allow you to re-use this announcement each semester without confusing students by displaying an old date.
Once you have finished cleaning up the course from its trip from Blackboard, you are ready to copy it into its shell for the upcoming semester. See Copying One Course to Another in the CTEL Brightspace Guide.
