Brightspace is the new Blackboard

Brightspace emerged victorious after a tender process with four participants, UU announces on its website. A tender was necessary because UU's contract with the current provider, Blackboard, expires in 2025. 

Blackboard has been the only course platform used by students and lecturers for over two decades. The Faculty of Social Science was the first to start working with the system, in 2001. 

Universities in Groningen, Leiden, Delft, Wageningen and Nijmegen, and several Dutch Universities of Applied Sciences, have been using Brightspace for some time.

Improvements
UU intends to start using the software, developed by supplier D2L, in all courses from the 2025-2026 academic year.  In the next academic year, several courses will test the system. Technology and support improvements will be made based on the experiences of students, lecturers and support staff. All UU lecturers will be trained to work with Brightspace next year. The training will focus on transferring learning materials from Blackboard to Brightspace.

Clear structure
The four systems which participated in the tender were assessed on various criteria, including price, sustainability, and technical capabilities. Students and lecturers also examined the user-friendliness of the system in several rounds of testing. Lecturers were very pleased with how easy it was to find everything on Brightspace and students indicated that the system has a clear structure.

Privacy
According to UU, the tender process also paid extra attention to public values such as privacy and data protection. Brightspace was the contestant that best met the requirements.

It is worth noting that the Groningen Data Protection Officer criticised how the system stores personal data. Archiving and deleting data can be problematic. In addition, lecturers can also see what students are doing online, without their knowledge. 

Commenting on these concerns, UU assures that Brightspace meets all the requirements set for data protection and privacy. The university has also defined the functionality to be used for archiving and deleting data and states that the supplier, D2L, will sign a processing agreement stipulating how different types of data should be managed.

Teams
Since the pandemic, many lecturers have been using Teams as a tool to communicate with students. According to UU, an in-house digital learning environment still offers great added value over such programmes. For example, the system supports lecturers by providing a standard course environment in which all students are automatically listed and they can prepare teaching materials. Brightspace also allows lecturers to make and grade assignments on the platform. There are numerous tools for students too. However, the university intends to integrate Teams into the new digital learning environment.