Self Assessments tool End of Life (EOL) coming, in January 2027

D2L has recently announced their Intent to implement End of Life (EOL) of the Self Assessment tool, as of January 2027. Fall 2026 is the last term during which you’ll be able to use this tool to create assessments in D2L Brightspace. 

What is the Self Assessments tool?

Self Assessments is a tool that enables instructors to provide students with a type of self-test, with immediate feedback for responses, while having no impact on the student's grade.

Why is D2L making this decision?

The Self Assessment tool is a legacy tool with a very limited set of features and functionality. It has a very low usage rate - less than 1% of instructors use the Self Assessment tool. There is very similar functionality within the Quizzes tool, so there is redundancy in maintaining both tools.

Instead of using the Self Assessments tool, you can set up a Quiz without connecting it to the gradebook and/or to not show any point values while students take the Quiz. By using the Quizzes tool, you have access to information about student performance, which you can use to inform your efforts during the course, such as reviewing pain points in the content.

When will the changes happen?

The following schedule is what D2L has provided in early September 2026. We will update this page if any of this information changes. 

Late January 2027: 

You will no longer be able to create new Self Assessments within the Self Assessment tool. Instead, you will find a migration tool within the Quizzes tool to automatically migrate all the Self Assessments within your course into Quizzes.

Note: Once the migration utility has migrated all the Self Assessments to become Quizzes, it will delete the Self Assessments.

Late May 2027:

The Self Assessment tool will no longer be available to you. Also, Self Assessments will no longer be available in the Course Copy/Import/Export tool.

Note: If you neglected to do so prior to this time, you can still migrate existing Self Assessments into Quizzes using the Migration tool available in the Quizzes tool. Please make sure to do this in a timely manner, so you don't lose these assessments.

Late December 2027:

All existing Self Assessment data will be permanently deleted, with no option for recovery.

What does TMU's D2L support team recommend, to manage this change?

We very strongly recommend that if you intend to create any new self-assessments this term (Fall 2026), please use the Quizzes tool instead, or in very particular situations, the Surveys tool. If you have existing Self Assessments that you have not run yet this term, consider importing the questions from them into the Question Library, then creating a Quiz with those questions instead. If it is a genuine self-assessment, with no impact on the student's grade, you don't need to connect the quiz to the gradebook, and you can even hide the question points values, if you wish.

If you haven’t moved all new and existing Self Assessments into the Quizzes tool by the end of the Fall 2026 term, we very strongly recommend that you do this in a timely manner in the Winter 2027 term, once the migration tool is available (expected: late January), to ensure that you do not lose this content, as all content in the Self Assessments tool will be permanently destroyed before the end of 2027.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding this change, please reach out to our team, at courses@torontomu.ca. We can provide you with guidance.