Teaching with D2L Brightspace

What is D2L Brightspace?

D2L Brightspace, is the official learning management system at Minnesota State University, Mankato. You can use your courses to:

email your classlist,
keep track of grades,
publish due dates,
organize your course materials, and more!

How do I Find my Courses?

All courses are automatically added to D2L Brightspace! Log in with your StarID credentials to find your course(s):

getting started with D2L Brightspace

This playlist of captioned videos will help you get started. Learn to:

navigate D2L Brightspace (1:49 minutes),
manage courses (2:02 minutes),
manage account settings (1:45 minutes),
set notification preferences (1:50 minutes),
update the instructor profile widget (2:15 minutes), and
email your classlist (1:16 minutes).

Direct link to the Getting Started playlist

D2L Brightspace Essentials

The campus Technology Roundtable recommends using D2L Brightspace at minimum to:

Post the syllabus to Content
Post Grades
Add course due dates to Content Topics, Assignments, Discussions, Quizzes, and events to the Calendar

Watch this playlist of tech tip videos (most of them are 90 seconds or less!) to learn how to manage your courses, add files to Content, set-up Grades, and add due dates:

Course Design in D2L Brightspace: Teaching from Content

Teaching from Content is a strategy that applies instructional design and education research for quality course design. Teaching from Content uses the D2L Brightspace Content tool to create a "hub" for all of your course activities.

Watch this playlist of tech tip videos (most of them are 4 minutes or less!) to learn how to Teach from Content:

Get the most out of grades

In this playlist of tech tip videos, learn key strategies to maximize effective and efficient use of Grades in D2L Brightspace.

creating Assessments

Learn how to set-up a variety of assessments in your courses with these video playlist from D2L Brightspace.

Course admin

Teach multiple sections of the same course? You might Request Merged/Grouped Courses
- It takes 1-2 days for grouped courses to update in your account.
- Note: Please request your grouped/merged courses before any content or student submissions have been added.
Need to add a Teacher's Assistant or Co-Teacher who is NOT listed in our official record? Use these instructions to add a Co-Teacher, Teacher's Assistant to your course.
Learn essential admin tasks, such as how to:

When are courses deleted? How will I learn about updates? Learn more about Course Request, Deletion, and Updates for D2L Brightspace here.
How can I practice? Request a "Practice Course" in D2L Brightspace by submitting a ticket to IT Solutions:

Request a Practice Course