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Starting a New Semester with Brightspace

Brightspace Content is Getting Upgraded

Beginning with the Fall 2027 semester, Brightspace courses will begin using the New Content Experience by default. Additionally, Instructors now have the ability to enable or disable the New Content Experience in their own courses ahead of the change in Fall 2027. For more information about this transition, see our New Content Experience Transition page.

When starting a new semester in Brightspace, there are a few things instructors and course builders always have to do. This page is designed to be a starting point of guides on common steps to start a new course in Brightspace. For a more detailed list of resources, check out our On-Demand Resources for Instructors and our Brightspace Frequently Asked Questions.

Accessing Your Course

  • Getting Instructor access to Brightspace courses

    All for-credit courses are automatically created in Brightspace. Instructors are automatically added once they are officially listed as an Instructor of Record (IOR) in YES. If you don't have access to your course, be sure to search for your course in to make sure you are listed as the IOR. If you are not, your department will need to coordinate with the University Registrar's Office for that to be updated. If you are listed as the IOR in YES and still do not have access to the Brightspace course, contact the Brightspace Support team for more help.听

  • How do I find my courses for this semester?

    Once you are logged into Brightspace, you will see courses displayed on your homepage. By default, courses under the All tab are listed in order of your most recent access. There are also tabs above your courses for each semester/category that your courses are listed under (eg 鈥� 2026 Fall, 2027 Spring, Sandbox Courses, etc). Lastly, anyone can use the Select a Course menu to search for any courses they have access to.听

    For more information on this, please refer to our online guide聽on this topic.听

  • Adding TAs to Brightspace

    Instructors and Brightspace Support personnel are not able to add TA鈥檚 to current or future courses. Per聽this policy, TAs聽must聽be added to courses by the Office of the University Registrar. To learn more about the TA roles the URO can allocate, visit聽聽to find and submit the聽Instructor Assistant Request Form.听

    For information about how other users can be added to your course, refer to our guide on adding users to a course.

Setting Up Your Course

  • Copying content from another course

    Brightspace offers two methods for copying content from previous courses. Instructors and other course builders can copy all components of the course, which is useful if the course requires all files, assessments, and configurations. They can also transfer pieces of the course from other Brightspace courses. As long as you are the instructor for both courses, this is a simple process you can do yourself.

    For a step-by-step guide on each process, refer to our guide here.听

  • Customizing a course homepage

    Instructors and other course builders can customize the homepage of a course to better suit the learning environment they want to facilitate. Adding widgets like a Visual Table of Contents or a Teacher Profile can help welcome students into the course and provide a more engaging course page.

    Here are some guides we have that are useful when customizing your course homepage.

  • Making a course available to Students

    When for-credit courses are automatically generated, they are set to inactive by default. This means that only those with Instructor or similar access can see it on their dashboard. When Instructors are ready for students to view their course, they will need to make their course active by going to the聽Course Offering Information聽page and selecting the聽Make course active聽option. For more information on this, along with screenshots, please refer to聽our detailed online guide聽on this topic.

Communicating with your class

  • Announcements

    Posting Announcements to your Brightspace course can be a good way to communicate with students with messages they see whenever they visit your course page. When you post an announcement, you can also select to email it to all of your students outside of Brightspace in case of an important update like a classroom change or an assignment reminder. For more information about how to post announcements, review our online guide on this topic.

  • Emailing your entire class or individual students

    There are times when Instructors may want to email their class without the need of posting an Announcement on the course homepage. In those cases, Instructors can use the Classlist page of their course to easily email everyone in the course. Instructors can also select individual students from the classlist to email. For detailed steps and screenshots of how to email students through the Brightspace Classlist, refer to our guide here.

Building and Uploading Course Content

Creating Activities and Assessments