About
We use Brightspace to provide online courses, supplemental course materials, work spaces for research, professional development courses and much more.
Brightspace became the university's official LMS* on September 1, 2015. It includes a collection of tools that facilitate the online delivery of learning materials, quizzes and assignments, communications and grading.
* Learning Management System
Each Brightspace shell has a lifecycle, balancing Toronto Metropolitan University's retention requirements and our need to access our materials and/or student data.
As such, a new course shell must be requested each time a new cohort of students is taking the course -- but the contents of a recent course may be copied as a starting point for that new shell.
Organization shells have a different lifespan, determined by the shell owner identifying the shell's ongoing use.
Retention of student data in a course is governed by the university's course retention policy, which says that student course work is to be retained for 1 year, at which time it is to be destroyed.
Our retention procedure for D2L Brightspace shells aims to strike a balance between this, and instructors' need to reference and reuse their own work (the course materials, assessments and activities) for future course delivery.
While we provide access to your course shell for 2 years after the end of the term, this does not guarantee that the students and their work will also be retained for that long.
Student accounts in the system are not kept indefinitely - 1 year after a student has left the university, their account will be deleted from D2L Brightspace, and the record of their work in the course is removed with it.
Users with an Instructor or Instructor (RO) role are considered the "owners" of their course shell. A course shell may be made up of the instructor's own intellectual property, as well as the intellectual property of others (provided it meets the requirements of all copyright and intellectual property laws).
As such, only the shell owner may provide consent for their shell contents to be copied. Even a department's chair or dean is not authorized to take or reassign course materials to others.
There are a few scenarios whereby new user access is granted after the end of a term, including programs that require reviews for accreditation, and for investigations such as grade appeals.
We also provide an emergency approval process for the continuation of teaching and learning should an instructor not be able to complete the semester. Note that this is only to ensure the continuity of learning for an existing cohort of students in the middle of a term. The materials, activities and assessments in the course may not be used for any other purpose and may not be shared, copied or reused.
In the case of distance courses delivered by the Chang School, the policies may differ.
Copyright Notice:
It is your responsibility to make sure that all material uploaded to Toronto Metropolitan University's LMS/Brightspace by D2L and other systems complies with Canadian copyright laws. Please consult the "Do-it-Yourself Copyright Checking workflow (opens in new window) " before you upload content.
Use the university's already existing licences for content from the library and the Toronto Metropolitan University "Fair Dealing Guideline (opens in new window) ".
If you have copyright questions contact copyrt@torontomu.ca.