Many people think that universities went digital when the COVID-19 pandemic began, but in truth, most universities were heavily digital long before that. The average university student arrives to class with a laptop, phone, and perhaps a tablet, all of which can aid them in their studies. Course descriptions and assignments are often delivered online, and so is much of the interaction between students and their teaching assistants and professors. None of this would be possible without a digital intermediary called a learning management system (LMS.)
LMSs are applications for the administration, documentation, tracking, reporting, automation, and delivery of educational courses, training programs, or learning and development programs.
For many years, Carleton University relied on an LMS called cuLearn, which was based on the Moodle open-source platform.
Following extensive consultations and evaluations with its teaching and learning community, Carleton decided that a new LMS was needed to enhance performance, responsiveness and reliability while delivering a more simplified and consistent experience for students. The Brightspace LMS, developed by D2L in Waterloo, Ont., was selected and the project launched in August 2020, with the goal of offering a limited pilot to some users during the summer 2021 term.
The Brightspace Migration Begins
That’s when ITS’s Bei Chapman and Edwina Yin came in. Working collaboratively with Teaching and Learning Services, they would be responsible for much of the project’s success.
Chapman, who was the system and application administrator as a subject matter expert for cuLearn, got to work migrating the courses held in cuLearn to Brightspace. Courses going back to fall 2015 were migrated, amounting to more than 27,000 courses in total. It was a monumental task, and it was complicated by the fact that data couldn’t simply be copied from cuLearn and into Brightspace.
“Moving a learning platform from one system to another is never an easy job,” says Chapman. “It requires a lot of integration, changes, additions, and consideration of business requirements. Thankfully, through hard work and dedication, we made it happen.”
Meanwhile, Yin worked to extract data out of Banner, an enterprise resource planning system used by the university to manage course codes, instructor names, student enrolment data and more, for import into Brightspace. Both worked closely with a technical team at D2L to rework this data in a way the new system would understand.
Yin also worked on custom scripts to enable Carleton’s distinct method of sorting students into sections, labs, and tutorial groups within their larger classes. Part of Yin’s work involved customizing Carleton’s method of merging courses for instructors teaching several sections in the same course. This enables students in different sections of the same course to collaborate using Brightspace.
Yin also worked on LTI integrations, which are plugins that can be added to Brightspace to enhance its functionality. Some popular LTI plugins are Zoom and Teams, which enable Carleton students and faculty members to attend their classes remotely after logging in through Brightspace.
“There were also a lot of user management workflows that needed to be decided, so we worked closely with Carleton’s Teaching and Learning Services to make decisions that would impact students and their instructors,” says Yin.
“To me, understanding and working with the technology is the easy part,” says Chapman. “But making hard decisions like these takes time. How many elements should we take on as part of the project? To what extent will we make changes and customizations to the platform? Those are the hard questions.”
Lift Off: New LMS Launches
All told, the development of Brightspace continued until September 2021 when the system was fully launched.
“Launching during the COVID-19 pandemic certainly made this project more difficult to navigate, and we were all a little nervous about how things would go,” says Chapman. “But thankfully, everyone worked together to help the project run smoothly despite working remotely.”
“I am glad we made this happen, and that we received so much positive feedback,” says Yin. “I am honoured to have been a part of this team.”
One of the major benefits of Brightspace is the additional stability it affords, particularly during high-traffic periods like exam season. Students and faculty members can now log into Brightspace and be confident that their course materials and assignments will be ready and available to them.
“Before we adopted Brightspace, we spent a lot of time and resources keeping cuLearn up and running during periods of heavy usage,” said Marc Dabros, Associate Vice-President (Information Technology Services) and Chief Information Officer. “As an enterprise application, Brightspace is stable and reliable. I think that’s a major success story, and I’m proud of our team members for the collaborative work they did to bring Brightspace to Carleton.”
This story is a part of ITS’s Year in Review for 2021/22. Read more at our Year in Review homepage, or follow along on Twitter using the hashtag #ITSYearinReview. Thanks for reading!