The Digital Learning Environment (DLE) transition team congratulates all the faculty and students who have made the transition from Blackboard to Brightspace. Approximately 1,200 course sections are currently active in Brightspace, which is a testament to faculty who have learned and continue to learn Brightspace, migrated and prepared their fall classes in it and to students who are learning it.
From the DLE transition team perspective, the transition has been pretty smooth. Any local campus issues that cropped up were dutifully addressed in short order to minimize impact. SUNY acknowledged a day of slow response times that may have resulted in login errors for some, but they quickly resolved those.
As the college enters the third week of classes, the DLE transition team wanted to provide an update on some items that are currently being worked on, how faculty can continue to seek support, and what lies ahead.
Brightspace third-party tool integrations
The DLE Transition team continues to work with SUNY and vendors to complete remaining third party tool integrations. These include: Starfish, Google Workspace, LinkedIn Learning and Qwickly Tools. The team is working to complete these as soon as possible.
The team is also currently working with faculty using Panopto who have links pointing back to Blackboard as students are unable to view them. Plans are under way to provide a solution.
Continued assistance for faculty
Zoom office hours for faculty continue to be offered through the fall semester. The schedule is posted on the Brightspace Training page.
Faculty who would like assistance with course design can request an appointment with the instructional designers through the CTS Help Desk.
Blackboard decommissioning
Blackboard logins became unavailable to students on Aug. 18. Blackboard logins will become unavailable to all near the end of the fall semester on a date to be determined. The SUNY contract will be expiring near that time. Faculty who have courses not migrated this 2022-23 academic year that they would like to keep should plan on exporting them (see written exporting instructions, video exporting instructions).
Note that SUNY Oswego will be archiving all Blackboard courses, including student content, to accommodate academic retention policy.
Looking ahead
The next round of migrations
The DLE transition team will be working on winter course migrations in the near future. A bulk submission will be made for SUNY to export them from Blackboard and import them into Brightspace automatically. When this work has been completed, the transition team will notify faculty teaching winter courses so they can review them in Brightspace.
Also in the near future, a call will be made to migrate spring courses. Similar to the fall migrations, faculty can migrate courses themselves or request that it be done. A request form will be posted on the DLE Help and Support page in the next few weeks.
Course navigation feedback
The existing course navigation in Brightspace was created by carefully reviewing research and evaluating it against the SUNY oswego campus culture. As faculty and students use the course navigation, the DLE transition team is interested in receiving feedback on any improvements that could be made. They will seek that feedback later in the fall semester.
Student evaluations
Many departments have used Blackboard to conduct their student evaluations of teaching (SET). In preparation for decommissioning Blackboard, a project started in the spring 2022 semester to transition to a product called AEFIS. A pilot using AEFIS for SETs was conducted in both the spring and summer 2022 semesters. A number of items were improved upon to prepare its use for all SETs moving forward. Planning is already under way to start training faculty and staff this semester on how to use AEFIS.
The DLE team will continue to post updates on these topics through Oswego Today and on the DLE website.
Questions?
If you have issues or questions not covered on the SUNY Oswego DLE website, please call or email the SUNY Oswego Help Desk and a ticket will be directed to the DLE team to answer.