UTRGV has made the decision to change the blackboard into Brightspace through a review process and reevaluation of the Learning Management System.
The review went on for a couple of years and the implementation process was evaluated by key stakeholders.
Instructional Support Specialist for the Center for Online Learning and Teaching Technology Nicholas Balderas said BrightSpace will have better functions and will be easy to use for the platform.
“The reason why they chose BrightSpace was because of the functionality and the ease of use for the platform,” Balderas said. “It was a little bit more modern. It can be used for a variety of devices and different types of technology. … It can actually be used through a variety of mobile devices, as well as laptops and regular computers. So, the scalability of that particular platform allows us to interact with different types of tools in the actual system.”
Balderas said the access to blackboard will be terminated August 30th. Depending on the summer course, that will determine whether students will take their courses on BrightSpace or Blackboard.
“So, students will have courses in Blackboard … but it only depends on which semester you’re attending,” he said. “So, if you’re part of the summer module one, you might be still taking those courses in Blackboard. But starting summer one, the regular semester for 2025, they’re all going to be on BrightSpace, so we should anticipate to start using that a little bit more frequently.”
Balderas said students and professors will have a form of interaction on the new platform.
“We can actually kind of tell or gauge how the student is doing in the class,” he said. “We just got out of a training about this data analytics, and it actually not just tracks their progress, but it also gives some key insights to their performance.”
Transitioning into BrightSpace will not require much work from students, but for faculty, it will be more difficult.
“There’s a little bit more work for faculty just because there’s some planning involved just to migrate their older courses into BrightSpace, especially if they’re gonna reuse that content,” Balderas said. “We have instructors who really use every single part of the Blackboard system, the original LMS system, and they use every moving part in their course. So, it really varies between instructors, so the migration process does take some time for us to move that content over and to structure their new classes.”
To learn more about BrightSpace, Balderas encourages students and faculty to do the training available in the training portal or visit UTRGV.edu/brightspace and UTRGV.edu/online.
This is Celeste Cruz for Vaquero Radio.
