Downloading Brightspace courses

Catherine.P.340
Catherine.P.340 Posts: 5 🌱
edited April 15 in K-12

Hi everyone,

We’re looking to create backups of the courses we’ve built in Brightspace, in case we move to another platform in the future.

Could anyone advise on the best way to download/export courses so they can be stored and potentially reused elsewhere?

Thanks in advance for your help!

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Answers

  • Jamie.D.715
    Jamie.D.715 Posts: 14 ✨

    Our Instructor-level users are encouraged to keep offline backups for future use with the Course Admin > Import/Export/Copy Components tool if they'd like to export and download their Brightspace materials/activities:

    "You can export components from your course offering to a file. This allows you to reuse these components in another learning management system, including another Brightspace, or to store the components and then re-import them into another course offering or template at a later date."

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  • Ashwin.R.60
    Ashwin.R.60 Posts: 93 🤝🏼 image

    Hello @Catherine.P.340

    Thank you for reaching out to the Brightspace Community. To export courses, you can use the following methods:

    1. Individual Course Export (Manual Export Packages)

    Brightspace includes a built-in tool that lets you export each course into a standards-compliant package.

    What it is:
    A .zip export package (often IMS Content Package), containing your course content structure, files, activities, quizzes, etc. — useful for archiving, reuse in another Brightspace instance, or import into some other systems that support those standards.

    How to do it (typical instructor/admin steps):

    1. Open the course you want to back up.
    2. Go to Course Admin → Import/Export/Copy Components.
    3. Choose Export as Brightspace Package.
    4. Choose whether to export all components or selected ones.
    5. Optionally include course files in the package (e.g., PDFs, multimedia).
    6. Proceed and start the export — it runs in the background.
    7. When done, download the .zip file from the notifications/alerts area.

    Notes:

    • This export doesn’t include student data (submissions, grades, interactions).
    • The export format is IMS compliant, meaning many LMSs support importing it (with limitations).

    2. Bulk Course Export (BCE) for Many Courses

    If you have a whole set of courses to back up (say all courses for a term or year), Brightspace has a Bulk Course Export (BCE) tool that saves time.

    What BCE does

    • Exports multiple course offerings at once without manually going into each one.
    • Produces a ZIP export file per course, saved into an “Outbox” folder.

    How it works (overview)

    1. Enable BCE in your Brightspace environment via Admin Tools > Organization Tools > toggle Bulk Course Export.
    2. Set permissions (“Manage Settings”) for who can use it.
    3. Configure the inbox/outbox folders where CSV export requests go and result files appear.
    4. Prepare a CSV file where each line identifies a course to export (org unit ID, course code/name).
    5. Upload that CSV to the Inbox, and the scheduled task runs the export.
    6. After it completes, you’ll find the ZIP packages in the configured Outbox.

    This method is ideal for admins at an institutional scale — especially if you’re backing up many courses at once.

    Hope this helps.

    Regards

    Ashwin

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  • Catherine.P.340
    Catherine.P.340 Posts: 5 🌱

    Thanks that's so helpful. Especially the bulk export as that will save me a lot of time. We've not encouraged instructors to backup their courses offline but I think as good practice this is something we'll do going forward.

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  • Catherine.P.340
    Catherine.P.340 Posts: 5 🌱

    Hi @Ashwin.R.60, the information on bulk exporting was really helpful. I thought I'd done it correctly but in the outbox is the CSV file that I had uploaded into in the inbox. There's no zip files containing the courses. So something somewhere has gone wrong and I'm not quite sure where.

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  • Vivek.V.2277
    Vivek.V.2277 Posts: 25 🤝🏼 image

    Hi@Catherine.P.340,

    Thanks for reaching out.

    If you’re seeing the CSV files in the Outbox folder, I recommend checking the Logs folder, as this usually indicates that the process failed during execution. Common causes for this include file formatting issues, incorrect course offering codes, or invalid Org Unit IDs.

    For file‑formatting validation, please try the following steps:

    1. Open the CSV file in a plain text editor (for example, Notepad).
    2. Confirm that:
      • There is no header row.
      • There are no invisible or special characters.
      • There are no quotation marks (" ") surrounding values such as
        <OrgUnitId>, <Course Offering Code>, <Course Offering Name (optional)>, <Export Package Type (optional)>.
    3. If quotes or extra characters are present, remove them.
    4. Save the file again as a UTF‑8 encoded CSV.
    5. Re‑upload the corrected CSV file to the Inbox folder.

    I’m also sharing a relevant D2L Community article that outlines the correct CSV file formatting requirements for this process, which you may find helpful.

    If the issue persists after confirming the file format and re‑uploading the CSV, please open a support case with us so we can review the logs and investigate further.

    Let us know if you have any questions.

    Best regards,
    Vivek
    Product Support Analyst

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