Prepare to teach in the Winter 2026 term
From the end-of-day on Friday, December 19th, until the morning of Monday, January 5th, our team will be taking a well-deserved break. We wanted to make sure you have plenty of resources, in case you need to work on your Brightspace course shells while we're away.
Getting Started
Is it your first time teaching at TMU, or you've *just* been hired to teach during the Winter 2026 term? Are you unsure how to find your bearings? Please visit our Before you get started with Brightspace page to find out what needs to happen before you can get started.
If you have taught at TMU in the past 2 years, please refer to our Getting Started guide, or our guide for reusing course materials.
Once you can see your course sections in MyServiceHub (this can take up to a week after you're officially hired), 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 must fill out the form 3 times).
After you successfully create your course shells
Once you have your course shells, make sure to:
- Check the Classlist, to ensure your students are appearing. If you didn't select the course section when you filled out the shell request form, you may need to add the course section now.
- If you have a TA, once their contract has started, make sure to add them.
- (Optional) Request/set up any other educational technology you plan to use.
- Upload your course outline to the Content section of your course shell. Make sure you have updated your course outline to include pertinent info about the technology you're using in your course.
- Create your grade items, then assignments, quizzes or discussion boards, if you'll be using those tools.
- 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 you're ready for students to access your course materials, you need to make each course shell "active".
If you need more support
On this website, you can find step-by-step instructions to do most tasks in Brightspace.
But if you get stuck, just email courses@torontomu.ca, including as much detail as possible about what you're trying to do, which course shell, etc. Our team will do our best to help. Keep in mind that we receive a lot of queries around the start of term, so it may take a day or two for us to respond.