Beginning of Term Brightspace Course Preparation

The following are resources Instructors can access to help setup their Brightspace courses before the start or term.

Included here are links to resources on the Studio website, Brightspace Community, and links to instructions in our Brightspace Beyond Basics course.

Finding your course in Brightspace

If you’ve been teaching for several years, it can become increasingly difficult to locate your new courses in Brightspace. Tips on managing years’ worth of courses:

Use the Select a course button (waffle button) on the top of any Brightspace page to locate your course.
Search for the course by using the CRN or term code. (ex. 202710 will find any Ffall 2026 courses)
Pin your courses! Click on the pin icon to pin the course to the top of the course list.
Unpin old courses! If the pinned list is growing too large, click on the pin icon to unpin that course!

Adding TAs to your course page

How to add a TA to your Brightspace Course: Brightspace Adding TAs — Studio for Teaching & Learning

Adding Demo Students to your course

You can now enroll your Demo Student accounts into your Brightspace courses!

Steps to do so:

Go to your course page.
Navigate to the Classlist, by clicking on Course Tools, and selecting Classlist from the list.
Click on Add Participants and select Add existing users
Under Add Existing Users, type the demo student name then click the magnifying glass to search.
From the list that appears bellow, select the user you want to add by clicking in the checkbox next to their name, then select the new Demo Student role.
Then click on Enroll Selected Users.
On the next page, click Done.

If you don't have a demo student account and would like one, please complete this form.

Copying course materials from previous courses

How to copy full courses and components of courses: Brightspace Import and Copy — Studio for Teaching & Learning

Merging Course Sections

To merge course sections together in Brightspace, please email Studio@smu.ca with the course information.

Crosslisted courses in Banner should already have a merged section created in Brightspace. In these cases, we suggest you edit the course start and end dates of each individual course shell to be the same, so those single courses don’t open to students.

Adding Content to your course

Use the Content page to organize your course materials. On this page you can post documents, links, create pages with engaging and accessible content, post quick links to your assessments like quizzes and assignments, organize content into modules, and post videos.

There are two different content views available to use:

Add and organize learning materials in the Classic Content experience - Brightspace

Add and organize learning materials in the New Content Experience - Brightspace