Getting familiar with the Brightspace site layout
Channel: Kevin Dunn
Date: 2017-03-12

Just after logging into Brightspace, you are presented with the main page for yourself.

This is your home page. It will appear different to what is shown here, but you will have essentially the same elements. At the top is a navigation bar, and  one important area to note there is your name. 

Here you can change your profile, and account settings. We suggest you go and upload a photo of yourself. This tiny photo is visible across the site, and helps personalize it a bit for students. We suggest that you do not fill in your contact information or other personal information, as that is also shared across the site.

The other important area to note is the list of courses you are enrolled in. You can pin courses so that they are always visible. 

These icons up here are related to the instant messaging features, built-in email and notifications. You are likely to use the notification feature the most. These notifications, which appear the same for you, as well as for your students, are used to let you know that there is a new piece of content available, a new announcement, new grades, and so on. 

There is an email feature, but this is not a replacement for your TU Delft email. There are some limitations to this email system, which we describe in our other videos, related to communication.

So that's the home page. Now let's go look at a typical course page. 
Click on the icon to select a course, and pick one of them.

Courses might be configured slightly differently to mine, shown here. There are some elements that are in common though.

This here the course banner, and it can be customized. We have a video on that. The name of the course is shown prominently.

This "Course Home" link, will always bring you to this current page, the homepage of the course.It might look different of course to mine, shown here, but, you will see some announcements from the course, and some other useful information.


Click on "Content" to access the main part of your course site. It is here that all your course content is placed, and that students will interact with the learning materials, they will interact with each other, with activities and assignments, quizzes, and so forth. Most of the training material in this website focuses on the "Content" area.

Lastly, there is a "Course Admin" link. The course admin area contains a list of all the functionality available to you in Brightspace. Everything that you can add, change, or remove in a course is available here. If you ever are stuck looking for a feature that you know exists in Brightspace, this is place to come to, to find it. 

The "Course Admin" area looks intimidating. A quick tip: use the Find function in your browser to search for the word you are looking for. The "Course Admin" area is also grouped into categories and has icons to help you locate what you need.

So those are the major elements in the Brightspace site, and common to all Brightspace courses.

Our coming videos recommend you start to adding some content to your course site. Now that you know where to click to access that content area, you can already get started.