By Natalia Dias, Transition Services Consultant
The New Content Experience (NCE) is one of the three current content experiences in Brightspace. As NCE continually improves, it offers a fresh approach to creating, organizing, and delivering course content that is intuitive, accessible, and engaging. It helps instructors and learners focus on teaching and learning. NCE simplifies workflows, helps learners navigate more easily, and reduces time spent managing course materials. It enables educators to create content more quickly and provides learners with a clean, focused experience supported by ongoing improvements and long-term support.
If you want to compare NCE with our other content experiences, this article has everything that you need: New Content Experience vs Classic Content in Brightspace: Understanding our Content Experiences - Brightspace
However, if your biggest question is how to prepare your organization for the transition from the Classic Content experience to the New Content experience, we are here to help you.
Let’s talk about transition!
All content available in Classic Content is also visible in the New Content Experience, so changing how your content is displayed is as simple as flipping a switch. No migration is necessary. There's no messy conversion, no broken links, and no need to reorganize your content.
However, moving from the Classic Content experience in Brightspace to the New Content Experience (NCE) is more than just a feature switch; it touches teaching practices, course design workflows, learner navigation, and institutional support models. With thoughtful planning, collaboration, and a clear roadmap, this transition can strengthen both instructor confidence and the learner experience.
Why a Transition Plan Matters
Transitions affect people, processes, and outcomes. Without a plan, change can feel chaotic and lead to resistance. A structured transition ensures alignment with academic goals, minimizes risk, supports faculty readiness, and delivers a consistent, positive experience for learners.
Key Considerations for a Successful Transition
When building the transition plan, keep these best practices in mind:
- Academic Cycles
Align the rollout with academic cycles to avoid unnecessary disruption. Avoid first-week adoption surprises for students: communicate early, provide orientation sessions and ensure consistency across the platform. - Change Champions
Identify faculty leaders, instructional designers, and support partners who can advocate for the NCE, demonstrate its benefits, and address concerns early. - Resources and Training
Provide centralized, accessible training grounded in real teaching workflows: hands-on guides, quick videos, and side-by-side Classic vs NCE comparisons. Focus on answering the concerns raised by instructors to make them feel supported. Some inspiring examples from our customers are below! - Sandboxes or Testing Courses
Offer safe environments for experimentation, pilot courses, or preview environments, allowing faculty to explore the New Content Experience before full rollout. - Feedback Loops
Set up channels to stay in touch with instructors and students, refine support materials, and adjust rollout plans. - Success Metrics
Define outcomes such as adoption rate, reduced navigation issues, faculty satisfaction, support ticket trends, and student experience indicators. - Learner Experience
Keep students at the center: ensure clarity, consistency, accessibility, and predictable navigation across courses.
How to organize the transition process in your organization?
The transition process usually unfolds in four phases. It will help you decide not only whether your organization can make the switch, but also when and how to do so.
1. Discover
Understand the current reality. Engage instructors, students, instructional support teams, and administrators. Use interviews, data analysis, and workflow reviews to evaluate how Classic Content is currently used, what challenges exist, and where NCE offers improvement. Analyze usability barriers and equity/accessibility considerations.
2. Explore
Collaboratively with instructors, students, instructional support teams, and administrators, assess what the New Content Experience enables and changes in their daily interactions. Consider:
- Feature differences and workflow changes: focus on what is functionally different between Classic Content and NCE and how those differences change how people work.
- Impact on instructional design practices: assess how NCE impacts how courses are built and experienced pedagogically. This ensures the transition isn’t just technically successful but also educationally meaningful.
- Identify risks and mitigation strategies: where possible, run early demos and internal evaluations to build familiarity and trust.
3. Plan
Create a structured transition plan with clear objectives, governance, ownership, and readiness timelines aligned with academic cycles. If you ever feel lost in the process, reach out to your CSM. There are so many ways that D2L can help you!
In a well-structured transition plan, you should:
- Define a roll-out model to introduce NCE, and decide how detailed you'd like to make it:
- Specify a communication roadmap: Effective communication is a key factor in determining adoption success.
- Outline the instructors' and instructional designers' training strategy
- Determine support desk preparation and strategy
- Identify accessibility and quality assurance expectations: ensure visible leadership sponsorship and transparent decision-making.
Suggested transition timelines and checklist:
We've prepared the timelines and checklists below to highlight key milestones, the recommended task order, and responsibilities. This way, you can plan effectively, communicate clearly, and easily monitor your progress.
4. Validate
Before launch, confirm readiness. Test in real teaching contexts through pilots or limited program rollouts. Gather feedback, make refinements, and ensure documentation, help resources, and champion networks are in place. Validate that all players (instructors, students, instructional support teams, and administrators) feel supported.
Would you like to engage more with us? Join the Optimization Service Community Group to share ideas and learn tips from D2L’s Optimization Services team members (TAMs/LAMs/Learning Analytics/Transition Services).