Migrating from Blackboard?

Shane.S.150

Hello,

This is mostly for SysAdmins - Have any of you moved from Blackboard to Brightspace?

What are some things that helped you through this process?

Is there anything In Blackboard you are missing in Brightspace?

What things do you feel Brightspace does better than Blackboard?

Thanks in advance,

Sam.B.358

Just finished Migrating from Blackboard to Brightspace, well, almost. I still have this term left to do and have to wait until May to do it and then we're officially live.

The most important thing that helped me through the process was patience and lots of it. Using the bulk migration tool and only being able 30 GB worth of Packages in a day was one of the most frustrating parts of it. Having a great team to test functionality and not having to do the course design piece was also a major in our success, so if they ever read this ;)

Alina on the D2L side has been amazing to work with for implementation and answering questions as we rebuilt the System. I think I migrated like 15000 courses or something and so far only 2 of those have been reported to me as having files that were missing. Just for whatever reason the package I uploaded broke the links to only a veryyyy small number of courses. D2L is investigating course #2/2.

Also missing from the Admin side, Direct Database access, will gravely miss that along with System logs. Had to open a ticket to figure out if an email went out from the system because we don't have access to those anymore. But other than that, I'm veryyyy happy with how flexible Brightspace is as far as customizations and a more user-friendly experience than Bb Original and how much fresher the courses look.

Privileges/Roles/Org Unit Editor have been some of the biggest struggles with the migration too mostly because we missed important permissions the first time and go back and fix it when someone says “I need this, why don't I have it?".

The creation of new processes related to Feed Files has been one of our biggest headaches too, mostly because we had the ICM tool from Bb doing most of the work for us, but that's mostly just internal issues.

Would be more than happy to answer any questions you have or to help in any way I can!

Regards,

Sam