Brightspace Adding Users

Adding users to a Brightspace course can help to enrich the learning and material within the course. Oftentimes, the users being added are other instructors, librarians, or student assistants. Find more information about the different user types in Brightspace.

Topics Covered

Video Instructions

Adding Individual Users

Adding Users in Bulk

Watch the instructions as a video

The video covers the same content as the written out instructions below.

Adding Users

Never add a student who is taking a course for credit directly to the class.

Go to the course
Click on Students & Grades in the course navigation
Select Classlist
Click on Add Participants and then choose to Add Existing Users
Type the last name or username of the person
Click the magnifying glass.
Scroll down and see search results
Click the box to the left of the person to add them
Go to the role box to the to set the desired role. Learn about role types here.
Click to Enroll Selected Users
Click Done on the next page

Screenshot of the top of the Add Existing Users page. At the top and to the left there is text that says Add Existing Users. Below that, there is a textbox with a username in it. To the right in the textbox, there is a magnifying glass with a pink box around it. There is a pink arrow pointing to the box with text that says eight (period) click the magnifying glass.

Screenshot of the add users page in Brightspace. There is a table with two rows and two columns. The first row is a header row. The first cell has text that says Org Defined Id. The second cell has text that says Role. The second row has a blue background. The first cell has a username. The second cell has a dropdown box with text in it that says Support Staff. There is a pink box around it with text that says eleven (period) click the dropdown box to set the role type.

Screenshot of the Brightspace Classlist page. There is a pink arrow pointing to a Search box with text to the right that says This is just a search box!. You need to click on Add Participants to add people to a course.

Adding Users in Bulk

This process is ONLY for non-credit-bearing courses AND existing Brightspace accounts as students in credit-bearing courses are automatically added when they register.
Questions? Please reach out to cite@sjf.edu.

Start by making a document using Excel, Sheets, or Numbers
1. In column A, add in a username (this is the part before the @sjf.edu) and In column B, change the role type
2. Repeat on a new line for each user to add
3. Save it as a .csv file.
Go to the Brightspace course
Go to Students and Grades and click on Classlist
Click Add Participants and click Import Users from a file on your computer
Click Import File. Don't select to send an email to existing users
Click Import and users should start to show up

Example of the file needed for adding users to a course in bulk

Note: Don't add header rows, just the data

Screenshot of an Excel document. There are two columns and three rows. The first row is a header row. The first cell is blank, the second cell says A, and the last cell says B. The next row down has the number one in the first cell, text that says jsmith in the second cell, and text that says learner in the third cell. The next row has the number two in the first cell, text that says bchavez in the second cell, and text that says instructor in the third cell. The last row has text in the first cell that says three, text in the second cell that says rliu, and text in the last cell that says support staff.

Next Steps

There are many user types in Brightspace. Learn more about how users work in Brightspace with these resources:

When using educational technology tools, be FERPA aware. To learn more, visit the Registrar's FERPA Guidelines site.