professionals gathered around celebratory cakeThe Brightspace Implementation Team gathered Friday to mark the retirement of the Blackboard learning management system.

Team celebrates transition to Brightspace

Members of the Brightspace implementation team took a few moments on Friday, April 28, to celebrate the completion of the work to provide a smooth transition to the new learning management system. They shared reflections on the challenges and acknowledged the collaboration within the team of the Centre for Teaching and Learning, Office of Open Learning, and Information Technology Services, and the vendor, D2L.

“We often do not stop and take a breath after a gruelling project has been completed or an impossible timeline met and simply continue on to the next thing,” said Erika Kustra, director of the Centre for Teaching and Learning. “We felt it was important to celebrate the contributions of the LMS team to the successful launch of Brightspace on the day the Blackboard contract ended.”

Almost 10,000 courses and more than 18,750 users have migrated to the new platform, with 1,598 course sites active in Brightspace during the Winter semester.

Brightspace is the University of Windsor’s learning management system (LMS). The University’s contract with Blackboard ended April 28 and Blackboard is now no longer available. The team is completing the final Brightspace implementation project tasks. To learn more about the transition to Brightspace or learn how to use Brightspace, visit uwindsor.ca/brightspace.