Best Of

January 2026/20.26.01 Preview Release Notes are now live and ready for review!

Please note, this is only a preview for the upcoming Brightspace version, which we will begin to roll out on January 1, 2026. All features described are subject to change before then.

Also, the December 2025/20.25.12 Release Notes have been republished to include the following changes:

• Added the Pulse – See due dates, start dates and end dates on Content | New release note.
• Updated New Content Experience – Visibility settings for Assignments and Discussions are accurately reflected in NCE | New to add a scope clarification note.

The December 2025/20.25.12 Release Notes are now live and ready for review in all languages!

Unfortunately, the embedded Release Highlights video is not functioning as expected. In the meantime, you can access the video directly here: December 2025 / 20.25.12 Release Highlights Video.

Thank you for your patience as we resolve this issue!

The New Content Experience – Control content visibility outside of availability dates release note was removed from the release.

Maryna,This feature applies to the New Content Experience. When D2L introduced the NCE, the ability to add due dates on discussions was lost. They are adding it back for the NCE, but only an initial post date. We're pushing the development team to add additional due dates for discussions, as well as functionality to specify how many replies are required, but it has not been made clear if and when that extra functionality will be rolled out. 
For now, as long as your institution doesn't switch to the New Content Experience, this update won't impact you. But it is something you need to consider before changing from Classic to New Content. 

As for Mandi’s comment, we think it’s better that it doesn’t specify whether the due date is for the initial or reply post. Since there’s only one due date available right now, we’re opting are going to put the date that replies are due, not the initial post. We also have been asking our faculty to create calendar events in lieu of these due dates. We’re probably not going to ask them to do that once we enable the due dates. They’ll just be asked to post an announcement each week reminding students of that initial post due date.

If you are reading this and your institution is like ours, where you rely on multiple due dates for discussions, please contact your Customer Success Rep and ask them to put pressure on the product development team finish phase 2 of this update, which is to allow for multiple due dates on discussions and to allow specification on how many replies are required. I know there’s a PIE item out there that you can upvote, too.

We’re grateful to the team for working on this and making due dates a reality for us.

Unfortunately, the new feature is not the addition of a second due date function; it's just that the existing due date setting will be linked to the initial post. This new feature won't provide the functionality we've been looking for. As a workaround over the years, we've been putting a checklist in every module. In the checklist, we add an entry for the "Module 7 Discussion Initial Post" and tag it with a due date, then a second entry for the "Module 7 Discussion - Two Peer Response Posts" and tag that with the later due date. This way, students have both due dates on their course calendar. Hope this helps!

@Maryna.Z.118 I'm confused about the December release notes. It says instructors will be able to add a discussion due date for the first post. However, from what I'm seeing we can still only add one due date for discussions. We could already do this in the classic content experience. We need to be able to add a first post due date and a follow-up reply due date. Is that not what this is?

The December 2025/20.25.12 Preview Release Notes are now live and ready for review!

Please note, this is only a preview for the upcoming Brightspace version, which we will begin to roll out on December 4, 2025.

All features described are subject to change before then.