Brightspace is Leiden University's digital learning environment. With Brightspace you can share course materials, grades and updates with your students, create and evaluate assignments and tests, perform plagiarism checks, provide personalized feedback and peer feedback, create surveys and start discussions.
Brightspace includes many integrated tools and other options to enhance your teaching and increase your students' active participation. The Gradebook in Brightspace lets you record grades, calculate final grades and share them with students, among other things.
Experience Brightspace as a student
In the Student Experience for Teachers you can see and experience Brightspace from a student's perspective. Useful, if you want to see what parts of your course look like for your students. And inspiring, because in this course you will discover tools that you might not yet be using yourself.
In Brightspace we have to respect the rules of copyright. To help you with this, we have listed a number of useful links, all from the University Library website.
Here you can read exactly what you need know and which steps you need to take to prepare your Brightspace environment for the semester. Reserve about 60 minutes for these steps. When you've taken these steps you're ready to go!
The OSC will open student registrations for the courses in mid-July. The moment a student is registered in uSis, the student is registered in the course environment.
You always need to create new groups in every new course. After all, this changes every year. The standard availability of the workgroup layout in the course environment is new: the workgroups from uSis will be available as a 'section' in Brightspace by default. Sections are the same as groups, only the workgroup layouts (sections) synchronise between Brightspace and uSis. If a student changes workgroups in uSis, the student also switches 'sections' in Brightspace.
TIP: Use a filter to remove student groups from the total list. This option is available in several places (classlist, assignments, when using release conditions, etc.) both at VIEW BY "groups" and at "sections":
Your new course environment does not contain any content. With a course copy you can easily make a copy of your course environment from last year. Only the content is copied, students or student data are not included. You have two options when copying:
NOTE: Not all tools and functionalities are fully copied or may require an extra action after copying. For example, you must activate Turnitin Assignments once and republish Kaltura videos to the Kaltura Media Gallery. Read more: What information is / is not copied with a Course Copy?
In mid-August (Semester 1) or mid-January (Semester 2), students will automatically have access to the course environment. Students will not have access until then. Each course has a start date. This start date determines the moment that students can access the content of the course. You can adjust the start date yourself. Read more: How do I open and / or close a course for students?
PLEASE NOTE: Courses in Block 2 will ALSO open to students from mid-August, courses in Block 4 will open in mid-January!
Are you the only teacher (and therefore course coordinator)? The OSC will add you to to the course and you will automatically get access. Do you want to add colleagues to your course? Read: How do I add users to my course?
Do you want to add more than 10 colleagues? Please contact SOLO. SOLO can have a bulk enrollment carried out. We will need the ULCN usernames of your colleagues and the relevant Course ID.
