SUNY Empire State University faculty, professionals, and administrators will discuss their campus’s implementation of Desire2Learn’s Brightspace. Participants will address the challenges and potential solutions found when completing a Learning Management System (LMS) transition. They will also look at the impact of SUNY’s initiative to bring 51 campuses together under one Digital Learning Environment (DLE).
Members of the SUNY Empire State University LMS Steering Committee will discuss their campus’s implementation of Desire2Learn’s Brightspace. Our presenters will address the challenges and potential solutions found when completing an LMS transition with a short turnaround time (we gained access to the production environment in April 2022 and began instruction in September 2022). We will also look at the impact of SUNY’s initiative to bring 51 campuses together under one Digital Learning Environment (DLE). As a Cohort 1 campus, SUNY Empire led the way in their approach to implementing the new LMS, addressing how best to convert courses under a master model from Moodle to Brightspace, and resolving use cases that were unique to the DLE experience (e.g., how roles and permissions work for a user who is a student on one campus and a faculty member at another).
We made strategic choices in how we assembled each committee and selected co-chairs across divisions and departments of the college. We will deep-dive into how we organized our overarching steering committee and sub-committees to balance the technical and pedagogical challenges of an LMS implementation, ensure a transparent communication strategy, and provide training and support for an all users with short turnaround. This allowed for meaningful collaboration and coordination of activities across the college’s Office of Academic Affairs and Information Technology Services.
We will address how we branded the transition around the theme of moving between residential homes and developed a plan that allows for upward and downward communication across stakeholder groups (e.g., maintaining Frequently Asked Question pages; hosting a wide range of synchronous and asynchronous training options, monthly briefing sessions, and drop-in office hours).
Attendees will be asked to question what strategies they would adopt in future implementations and consider how they would address their stakeholder groups. When the OLC conference commences, SUNY will have two cohorts in live courses and two cohorts preparing for their first terms on Brightspace. This transition is not over and there will be additional queries presented to the attendees that can impact and influence how we work with our colleagues who have not quite yet joined the DLE.