Brightspace Course-Building Essentials for Instructors
Our comprehensive video series is designed to empower instructors with the essential
skills to navigate and utilize the Brightspace Learning Management System effectively.
Throughout these videos, you'll learn how to seamlessly navigate the platform, manage
course content, create assignments and quizzes, develop rubrics, facilitate discussions,
handle grading, and provide meaningful feedback to enhance student learning. Whether
you're new to Brightspace or looking to deepen your understanding, this series will
guide you through each component to help you maximize your teaching potential.
This guide will cover the process of exporting courses from both Blackboard Original
and Blackboard Ultra. It will then explain how to import those export files into Brightspace.
Instructors can change the name of their Brightspace course. This document will explain
how to change how your course appears to students in the UCM Brightspace instance.
This document contains instructions for using the built-in EVP checklist in Brightspace.
This process does require that you complete the EVP step in MyCentral.
In this guide we will cover how to change the Banner Image for your Brightspace Course.
This will cover how to add an image from the Brightspace Image Library, not a custom
made banner.
In this walkthrough for how to move uploaded files from one course to another in Panopto
here at the Å·ÃÀÊÓÆµ. Before you start this process, you will
want to identify a few things. First, it’s recommended that you determine the CRN
where the video currently resides and the CRN for the course you wish to move the
video to. You only need the last 5 digits of the CRN (Ex: 23456). Have these numbers handy as you will need to enter these during the next phase
of this process. Second, make sure that the course you are moving the video files
to has been provisioned. If there is not a Panopto Video section of the course you
are moving the files to contact DLII to have that course provisioned.
The Brightspace Editor is a rich text editor for creating and editing content. This
guide will indicate and describe the various tools available for formatting text,
and inserting multimedia, equations, and other special items.
Brightspace Media Player is a display window that enables you to watch any videos
uploaded to Brightspace. It allows you to play video, adjust playback speed, and download
videos.
Note: Embedded videos such as YouTube do not use Brightspace Media Player.
Record videos up to 25 minutes long and add them anywhere where Brightspace Editor
is available. To help ensure all users can learn without barriers, closed captions
can be automatically created.
This guide teaches you how to use announcements to put clear communication front and
center in your course. Announcements are used to share course information, updates,
and upcoming activities, introduce yourself and the course, and can be customized
to inform students when they have completed (or not completed) an activity or milestone.
Learn how the Activity Feed can act like a social media feed for your course. When
added to your course homepage as a widget, it can serve as a front and center communication
hub for you and your students.
This guide will show you how to manage discussions in your course. Discussions allow
you to give your students the ability to share knowledge and experiences with one
another and to apply what they have learned in your course. They also serve as a valuable
assessment tool for you as an instructor.
This guide will show you how to harness the capabilities of Brightspace Intelligent
Agents (IAs). IAs can monitor course activity, automatically act upon learner-based
criteria in your course, and send targeted alerts to you and your learners. This document
will describe what IAs are and how you can manage them in your courses.
The Manage Dates tool helps you adjust dates for course content efficiently. This
guide will demonstrate the basics for filtering by tool, adjusting the start, end,
and due dates, and offsetting dates.
In Brightspace, when a student unenrolls from your course, they are removed from your
classlist. However, you can still find any content the student has completed through
the withdrawal date and identify when they last accessed your course.
As an Instructor, you can find and enroll Librarians, Peer Mentors, or Teaching Assistants
in your course. If you are manually adding a user, please make sure you understand
the UCM Brightspace User Roles. For example, you do not want to add a learner to your course in one of these roles.
A learner can only be added via the Banner feed. Adding a learner as a Peer Mentor,
Teaching Assistant, or Librarian will not allow a learner to submit coursework or
be included in the Gradebook.
Provide more efficient, timely, and meaningful grading and feedback. Create and edit
assignments, see submission details, view submissions, associate assignments to rubrics
and competencies, and return submissions with grades and feedback. On paper and observed
in person assignment formats are also available.
Rubrics Basics 101 This document will provide all the basics to how to create a Rubric for your Brightspace
Course.
Create an Assignment This guide will show the learner how to create and fill in information for an Assignment
in Brightspace.
Customize Submission Type & Completion Settings You can also customize what type of assignment you are creating, and what file types
you will accept from learners submitting their assignments.
Make Your Assignment Only Available to a Select Group (Accommodations) You can Manage Special Access for your assignment. This enables you to make your assignments
available only to a select group of users or to add individualized due dates for certain
users that may need accommodations.
Build quizzes using varying question types. Create quizzes that randomly select questions
from a question pool or that shuffle the order of questions.
The Create a quiz page has a fully immersive page layout. This layout is consistent
with other areas of Brightspace including Quizzes, Content, and Lessons, where you
can create and configure a quiz.
Creating a New Quiz The learner will be guided through how to create a Quiz in Brightspace.
How to Edit Quiz Questions This will guide the learner in how to edit Quiz Questions of created Quizzes in Brightspace.
How to Set Conditions in a Quiz This guide will walk the learner through how to set up the Conditions of Availability,
Time Limit, Quiz Display, Attempts, and Results in a Quiz in Brightspace
Manage Quiz Visibility In this guide the learner will see how to change Quiz Visibility per quiz or in bulk.
How to Preview a Quiz In this guide the learner will see how to preview a Quiz they have just finished creating.
The Setup Wizard is where you configure the structure and grading system before entering
any grades. This ensures consistency and clarity for both instructors and students.
Forms for requesting temporary LMS accounts for new faculty, merging course sections,
adding users to courses, and retrieving archived course content for instructors or
administrators.
A course merge combines two (or more) course sections into one course section. For
example, an undergraduate and graduate course may be merged together, or multiple
sections of the same course may be merged into one section.
Manual course merge is NOT available in Brightspace. Instructors do not have the ability to enroll users that
are not enrolled in a particular section into a different section.
All course merge requests need to be made prior to any student work being done in
a section.
Allow 2-3 business days for this request to be completed.
Once merged, sections cannot be separated without loss of student data.
You must provide Course titles and entire CRN(s) to process this merge request.
List the section you want to work out of first (the Parent course), followed by the
sections to be merged into it.
Faculty cannot add new users or modify enrollment in their courses in the Brightspace
instance . The enrollment in each course is owned by the Banner feed. However, you
can request a user be added to your course by completing this form. Please note that
we will not manually merge an entire course into another course section. If you wish
to move all students to another section, you should complete a Merge Request form.
We can add another faculty member or graduate/teaching assistant. Please identify
why you wish to grant access to this user in the form below. Contact DLII at dlii@ucmo.edu if you have any questions.
If you have provided a "U" grade to a student, you will need to submit this form to
change their role in your Brightspace course from Learner to Learner-Incomplete.
By changing their role in Brightspace, the student will be able to access the course
even if it is made "inactive" to other learners. As the instructor, you will also
need to modify any end dates on assignments that the Learner-Incomplete user needs
to access. If you have any questions or need guidance on adjusting dates, please
contact DLII at dlii@ucmo.edu.
Panopto is a video platform that integrates with Brightspace to support educational
content creation, sharing, and management. It allows instructors to record lectures,
capture screen presentations, and add video content directly into their courses. Panopto
also offers tools for editing, closed captioning, and analytics to track student engagement
with video materials, providing a flexible solution for enhancing online and hybrid
learning environments.
This guide will walk you through activating Respondus Lockdown Browser for your quizzes,
and exams in Brightspace
A software solution for online test proctoring. UCM has a site license for Honorlockâ„¢
which makes it available for all faculty to use within their course.
This guide will walk you through enabling Honorlock for your quizzes, and exams in
Brightspace
The Honorlock Knowledge Base provides essential resources for instructors, including
getting started guides, best practices for remote proctoring, and detailed instructions
for integrating Honorlock with platforms like Blackboard and Brightspace. It also
offers troubleshooting tips, and privacy information to ensure smooth and effective
use of Honorlock in your courses.
Zoom is a virtual meeting application that students and instructors can use for synchronous
meetings. Zoom offers a free account and UCM Zoom Pro licenses are available, on
a limited basis, from the Office of Technology. UCM faculty can request a UCM Pro
license by contacting the Office of Technology at 660-543-4357. A free Zoom account can be created by visiting Zoom.com
Copyleaks is an AI-powered plagiarism detection tool that helps educators ensure academic
integrity by scanning student submissions for copied or AI-generated content. It seamlessly
integrates with Brightspace to provide detailed reports and insights. Watch this video to learn more about Copyleaks in Brightspace at UCM. Follow this document on How to use Copyleaks for your assignments in Brightspace.As of December 2025, instructors can now add to a native Brightspace assignment. For
more information, visit the How do I add Copyleaks support page.
This page explains how to set up Copyleaks via a Brightspace Assignment. This is embedded within a Brightspace Assignment, and results will be visible when grading.
This link explains how students can submit work for processing through the Copyleaks
application. NOTE:Since UCM has purchased Copyleaks through our D2L contract, students will not be required
to accept Copyleaks EULA. Instead, their submissions will be processed according
to the Copyleaks settings you set for the assignment.
Infobase Learning is an educational content provider offering digital reference materials,
streaming videos, e-learning resources, and databases for schools, libraries, and
institutions. It provides tools for research, career readiness, and academic support
across various subjects. Here is a document that will walk you through on how to add Infobase Learning content into your Brightspace
Course.
YuJa Panorama is an accessibility tool integrated into Brightspace that automatically
converts course content into multiple accessible formats, such as audio, ePub, and
tagged PDFs. It also provides real-time accessibility scores and guidance to help
instructors improve their materials for all learners. View the YuJa Panorama in Brightspace recording or visit the YuJa Panorama Help Center to learn more.
This guide will walk you through using Yuja Panorama, Brightspace’s integrated accessibility
checker, to identify and remediate common accessibility issues in your course.