Teaching in Winter 2025? Here's how to get started!

If you've *just* been hired (in the past couple of days), and you're not sure what to do first, please visit our Before you get started with Brightspace page to find out what needs to happen before you can start working with D2L Brightspace.

Once you can see your course sections listed in MyServiceHub, it's time to request your course shells. You will fill out the course shell request form once for each class you're teaching (ie. if you are teaching 3 classes, you will fill out the form 3 times). If you request a copy of another instructor's shell, keep in mind that some of the process is manual, and will take time (for the instructor to respond with their consent, and our team to copy materials into your shell).

Once you have your course shells, make sure to upload your course outline, create your grade items and assessments, preparing your shell for teaching. Consider posting an announcement to welcome your students, and set up expectations for the first class (ie. purchase the text, read a document, etc).

When your students are appearing in the Classlist, and you're ready for students to access your course shell, you need to make it "active".

On this website, you can find step-by-step instructions to perform most tasks in Brightspace. But if you get stuck, just email courses@torontomu.ca, including as much detail as possible, and our team will do our best to help. Keep in mind that we receive a lot of queries at the start of term, so it may take up to a day or so for us to respond.