During this past summer, Queens College’s Information Technology Services (ITS) announced that Brightspace has officially replaced Blackboard. This makes QC one of the first eight senior colleges in the City University of New York (CUNY) system to fully transition to the new virtual learning management system.
After CUNY signed the contract with the developers of Brightspace, D2L, in summer 2023, colleges have been gradually migrating courses to the new platform, as outlined in CUNY’s Transition Process Timeline. Beginning in Spring 2024, faculty members were offered Brightspace training sessions, which ended in June. Online training sessions were also held for students, running from April to May, and additional Q&A sessions were held by ITS in late August now that the platform has fully rolled out.
The goal of this transition, according to CUNY’s Brightspace informational page, is to support growth in online learning using a more modern, user-accessible system.
“It’s built for student’s expectations of how technology works today,” CUNY Online Executive Director Evan Silberman said during the first look at Brightspace in November 2023.
Now that students have started using Brightspace full-time, we can observe their reaction to this transition. “I think Brightspace aesthetically looks more pleasing, but it’s more of the fact we have to get used to an entirely different platform that bothers me,” junior Computer Science major Nisa Ahmed said. “I feel like we finally got the hang of using Blackboard.”
While this transition may be hard for some students, others have already gotten used to this transition. Senior Sociology major Lina Jaramillo weighed in: “After working with Brightspace, I have become accustomed to the change. In all honesty, it’s very easy to navigate your way through it. Everything is right there.”
Despite having to adjust to the new system, Dr. Alia Lesnek — assistant professor in QC’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences — expressed a positive outlook about Brightspace. “I’m happy with the transition to Brightspace, and I actually prefer it over Blackboard so far,” she said. “There was a bit of a learning curve for me, especially when I was setting up online homework assignments, but since then it’s been going quite well. I also like how my course shell looks now — it’s a lot more modern and sleek.”
Faculty and staff encourage students to ask for technical help when having trouble with the usage of Brightspace as it is essential that everyone learns how to use the new platform. D2L is continuously upgrading their products to better students’ learning.
By these opinions on Brightspace, it’s safe to say that there are a mix of people who do like working with it and people who don’t. Sooner or later, QC students will hopefully get the gist of Brightspace and look forward to using it for classwork or homework.
