Brightspace Updates-Course Merges and LTIs – John Jay Brightspace Transition Announcements

Dear Faculty,

I write with two updates regarding our transition to Brightspace. As a reminder, summer courses will be taught in Brightspace, not Blackboard (although you will continue to have access to both).

Course Merges

One important difference has to do with merging courses. In Blackboard, faculty were able to merge classes themselves. Faculty cannot merge their courses in Brightspace. Merges must be done by the LMS Team. CUNY made the decision to limit faculty access because of the possibility of student work being lost when merges are done in Brightspace (this was not an issue in Blackboard).

For summer, the LMS Team will start merging cross-listed courses soon. These are courses listed under different prefixes, but are actually the same course and section. For example, LAW/POL 313. The LMS Team will be merging the courses under the prefix that is first alphabetically. LAW/POL 313 will become LAW 313. Students who register for POL 313 will be automatically added to the merged LAW 313 in Brightspace. As was the case in Blackboard, you can change the title of your course in Brightspace to reflect the cross-listing.

If there are other course merges you would like, for example merging multiple sections of the same course, you can request them using this form: https://forms.office.com/r/S7ExSEGTg2. You do not need to request merging of cross-listed courses.

Third-Party Tools (LTIs)

As part of CUNY’s transition from Blackboard to Brightspace, it is necessary to also transition the third-party LMS tool integrations licensed by John Jay, known as LTIs, from the one platform to the other. The table below lists the LTIs in currently use at John Jay and their status.

Spring 2024 grade rosters will be open from Thursday, May 16, to Tuesday, May 28. The PlayPosit LTI cannot be run in both Blackboard and Brightspace simultaneously and requires downtime as part of the transition to Brightspace. PlayPosit will be disabled in Blackboard at 8 AM on Thursday, May 28. Grading of PlayPosit content must be completed by that time as the tool will be unavailable in Blackboard. Once disabled in Blackboard, LTIs cannot be re-enabled.

Please note:

While it may be possible to reuse content created using LTIs in Blackboard, links to that content must be recreated in Brightspace.
Brightspace replaces campus email addresses with CUNY Login account information, with email being delivered to a user’s email address as listed in CUNYfirst. You may receive an alert from an LTI that your email address has changed or that you must log in with your CUNY Login account. If you receive a message asking you to confirm the email address change or log in again, this is expected behavior and you must accept the change.

LTI tool	Blackboard Status	Brightspace Status

Perusall	Live	Live – moving between platforms requires confirmation of email address change
PlayPosit	Disabled effective 5/28	Anticipated effective 5/29
Turnitin	Live	Live
VoiceThread	Must login in using CUNY Login credential	Live
Yuja	Live	Discontinued