D2L Brightspace

Please visit the Brightspace Transition Plan that was announced on April 29, 2026. 

A fall schedule of Brightspace training opportunities for instructors and students will be posted on this webpage by late August 2026. Registration will open at that time. 

Yes. A request form for private Brightspace training sessions will be posted on this webpage by late July 2026. To help with scheduling, groups will be asked to provide three preferred dates and times for the training session. 

Possibly. The School of Communication (SOC) and the School of Continuing & Professional Studies (SCPS) have been selected as Brightspace early adopters for Fall 2026. As a result, instructors and students who are enrolled in courses across multiple schools—including SOC or SCPS and schools that continue to use Sakai—may need to access both platforms during the transition period. 

A limited number of Spring 2027 courses will continue to be taught in Sakai. In addition, non-credit project sites may remain active in Sakai through May 2027. The system is scheduled to be decommissioned in June 2027, after which Sakai will no longer be accessible to users. 

No. Building your courses from scratch is optional. Completed courses from the past two years for SOC and SCPS early adopter instructors will be migrated from Sakai to Brightspace in July 2026. Completed courses for all other instructors will be migrated by mid-Fall 2026. 

As with Sakai, Brightspace allows you to copy content from a previous course into a new course site. However, you should plan to review your migrated content carefully, including formatting, organization, links, and activities, and make any necessary adjustments before teaching your course. 

Instructors can request a Brightspace sandbox course by submitting a ticket to the ITS Service Desk. Please allow 24-48 hours for the request to be processed. Once your sandbox course has been created, it will appear under My Courses when you login to Brightspace. The course title will be displayed as [Instructor's First Name] Sandbox. Content created in a sandbox course can then be copied over to an official course site. 

Yes. We are currently working to set up these integrations in the new system. Instructors using Brightspace in Fall 2026 can expect access to Zoom, Panopto, and VoiceThread. 

Note: Due to Loyola’s contract with Turnitin, it can only be enabled in one LMS at a time. Turnitin will tentatively move to Brightspace for Spring 2027.

Yes, Brightspace has a mobile app called Brightspace Pulse. Please note that this app is designed primarily to support the student experience.