Terms are provisioned for Spring, Summer, and Fall semesters in Brightspace.

Brightspace (aka D2L) is updated multiple times daily with a feed from Banner.

Automatically provisioned Brightspace courses are made available to the "Instructor of Record" listed in Banner via dates that correspond to terms. When instructors make a course active, the course becomes visible and accessible to learners between the start and end dates of the course within a term.

 

Terms

In most cases, "terms" (typically aligned with semesters Fall, Spring, Summer) determine when courses appear on an individual's "My Home" page. Course offerings for automatically provisioned courses will be visible to instructors within a few weeks after registration begins for an upcoming term. Once the upcoming term courses are loaded into the Brightspace system, instructors can access their courses via the "My Courses" widget or via the "Select a course..." area on the mini-bar.

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Start and End Dates

Start and End dates are established for a course within a term. Registered learners can access a course between Start and End Dates. Instructors must make a course active before learners can gain entrance to the offering. Note that instructors can make their course active earlier than a start date but learners will be unable to access until the start date arrives.

To check the Start and End Dates of a course, instructors can access the "Course Offering Information" page from the "Course Admin" area. Course Start and End Date information appears on the "Course Offering Information" page.

After a course is made active, instructors may not wish to make their course inactive once the term begins unless learners are made aware that this is going to occur ahead of time - it can cause great confusion! There are many other ways to “hide” aspects of a course as opposed to making the entire course disappear.

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Instructor of Record

The "Instructor of Record" is the instructor that a department has identified in Banner as being an instructor that is officially teaching a course offering. The course and enrollment information in Brightspace comes from what is in Banner. When an automatically provisioned course offering is created in Brightspace, the instructor of record information is associated with the course offering. Instructors should work with their department and the Registrar's office to have instructor of record information correctly reflected in Banner.

Banner supports having multiple Instructor of Record affiliations for any course, so individuals can work with their department to make sure multiple Instructor of Record listings are in place should multiple instructors need access to a course. Individuals who are a co-instructor and not listed as an Instructor of Record for the course could also elect to have the Instructor of Record enroll the co-instructor into the course as an instructor role. 

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About term naming

In Brightspace the courses are provisioned and updated from the Banner system. Banner system course naming protocols use a specific code to identify what semester a course is associated with, and this code also appears in the course "Code" that is displayed in Brightspace.

In Banner, to describe a semester, a 2-digit code (as below) is appended to a year (rendered yyyy).

  • 30 = Spring semester
  • 50 = Summer semester
  • 70 = Fall semester

Example:

A history course offered in the Fall of 2012 looks like this:

Brightspace screenshot - course rubric described

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CD 202305