Continuing Brightspace’s layout changes is the New Content Experience!
The new Content is now enabled as an opt-in option for your course. You may enable it any time to try it but remember that students will see the changes as well. To experiment with the new view without disrupting your students, we encourage you to test it first in your sandbox course.
Turning on/off the new Content
In the Content area, you will now see this notice. You can enable the new experience or leave it off. Toggle back and forth between the views any time. The change will be seamless and you will not lose any content.
You can pull down notification window anytime in the Content section to toggle between views. It is at the top left of the Content area with a down arrow button.
Changes in the New Content Experience
The new Content experience has significant change. Some of the main changes are:
- Change in terminology from Modules & Topics to Units & Lessons
- Colorful unit (module) markers in the sidebar
- Lessons (topics) show a resource type icon and due date information at a glance
- Topic descriptions do NOT transfer over. Please see the “Necessary and suggested updates…” section of this post for more details.
- Student view is very minimal and focused
- Student view guides them with prominent navigation to the next lesson
Screenshots
The instructor view.
Student main content menu view
Student individual content view – individual unit introduction or topic page.
Student individual content view – topic page but with the content sidebar open.
Necessary and suggested updates with the new Content experience
Most content will transfer over seamlessly to the new Content experience but here are some necessary and suggested updates to consider when switching to the new Content experience.
Topic/lesson descriptions
Topic descriptions do not transfer over to lessons. You will need to find a different way to convey this description or instructions.
In this example, I had a description along with a PDF topic.
To fit with the new Content experience, I’ve moved the description to its own file that comes immediately before the PDF.
Module/Unit introductions
In the new experience, Unit descriptions have their own individual pages as students navigate through the content and are much more prominently placed. You may consider adding Unit introductions or descriptions if you do not already have them.