Below, you’ll find written instructions and short videos about how to accomplish a variety of things in Brightspace. If you have questions that you would like to discuss with our staff, stop by our drop-in hours for faculty or email us at DEFacSupport@bmcc.cuny.edu.
Getting Started
Access Brightspace and Find Your Courses
Learn how to log into Brightspace and find out how your courses are organized.
Edit Your Notification Settings
Learn how to change how and how often you receive notifications about course activity.
Edit Your Profile
Learn how to add a profile picture and other information about yourself.
Troubleshoot Brightspace Email Notifications
Why does Brightspace send email to my @login.cuny.edu address? Why haven’t I been receiving email notifications? Read this for answers and troubleshooting steps.
Announcements & Messages
Creating Announcements
Learn how to create and manage announcements, which appear on your course homepage.
Sending Emails Through Brightspace
Learn how you and your students can use the Brightspace email tool to contact class members.
Assignments
Creating Brightspace Assignments
Learn how to create individual and group student assignments.
Creating Turnitin Assignments
Learn how to create assignments in Brightspace that generate Turnitin similarity scores (plagiarism detection)
Course Content
Content FAQs
Answers to commonly asked questions about content and modules in Brightspace.
Creating Content
Learn about the different options for adding content to your Brightspace course.
Editing Content
Learn about the tools available in the Brightspace editor, which enables you to add a variety of content including images, video, and hyperlinks.
Organizing Content
Learn how you can use modules, sub-modules, and topics to organize your content.
Adding Descriptions to Your Modules and Content
Learn how to create descriptions – short summaries of the contents of modules, sub-modules, and other types of content in Brightspace.
Course Management
Make Your Course Active (Available to Students)
Students will not be able to see your course until you make it “active.”
Copying from one Brightspace Course to Another
This one-minute video shows how to import all or selected content from one Brightspace course to another.
Changing Your Course Language
Change the default language for tools and menu items in your course.
Cleaning up Courses That Were Migrated from Blackboard
You will likely need to clean up and reorganize content in courses that were migrated from Blackboard to Brightspace.
Discussion Board
Creating and Configuring Discussions
Learn how to create and configure discussions in Brightspace.
External Tools
Padlet Activities
Learn how to create Padlet activities within Brightspace. Padlet is a web-based bulletin board that makes it easy for you and your students to share text, video, and images.
Turnitin Assignments
Learn how to create Turnitin assignments and use tools like Peermark within the Brightspace environment.
VoiceThread Assignments
This 1 1/2 minute video walks you through how to create a VoiceThread assignment in Brightspace.
Grades
Making Final Grades Visible to Students
Depending on how you initially set up your gradebook, you may need to take additional steps to enable students to view their final class grades.
Groups
Content forthcoming.
Navbar, Homepage, Widgets
About the Course Homepage
Learn about BMCC’s custom course homepage, which includes four widgets: Announcements, Table of Contents, Instructor, and Course Calendar.
Customize the Course Homepage
Learn how to change the content and layout of your course homepage.
About the Course Navbar
Learn about BMCC’s custom “navbar” – the navigation menu at the top of every Brightspace course.
Customizing the Course Navbar
You can customize the course navbar by adding, removing, and grouping navigation items.
Customizing Your Course Banner
Learn how to change the image that appears at the top of your Brightspace courses.
Quizzes and Tests
Content forthcoming.
View Course as Learner
View as Learner vs. Demo Student
Brightspace has two tools that enable instructors to see the course from the perspective of a student: View as Learner and Demo Student. This post describes how these tools differ.
View as Learner
“View as Learner” is a quick way for instructors to see how course content is displayed to students, but has limited functionality.
Creating a Demo Student
Using a demo student, you can fully interact with the course as a student would, including completing quizzes, submitting assignments, and checking grades and feedback.
