Brightspace Content is Getting Upgraded
Beginning with the Fall 2027 semester, Brightspace courses will default to the New Content Experience. Additionally, Instructors now have the ability to enable or disable the New Content Experience in their own courses ahead of the change in Fall 2027. For more information about this transition, see our New Content Experience Transition page.
With the 2017 transition from Blackboard to Brightspace, courses on Brightspace are now unavailable to students per the schedule below.
This schedule encourages students and instructors to take responsibility for maintaining personal copies of relevant course materials, instead of relying on Brightspace as indefinite storage.
One year after a course ends, the course will be made unavailable to students enrolled in the course.聽The course will remain available to instructors associated with the course.
Example: A Spring 2024 course will be available to students through the end of Spring 2025. It will be made unavailable at the start of Summer 2025.
In current state, all courses on the platform are retained indefinitely.聽This may change, so faculty are encouraged to utilize the export functionality to maintain their own records of course content.
Some caveats
- Once a course is no longer available to students, an instructor can elect to override this change by contacting brightspace@vanderbilt.edu. Note that an instructor cannot make a course available to a single student. The course is either available to all enrolled students or none.
- Exceptions to the standard availability schedule can be requested by instructors and school administrators. Exception requests should be submitted via聽brightspace@vanderbilt.edu, and must be approved by representatives of the University Registrar and the Institute for the Advancement of Higher Education (AdvancED).
- Multimedia content stored in 鈥淢y Media鈥� is retained indefinitely as long as the University maintains a contract with Kaltura, the hosting company for that media.
- Any course content published to a learning repository or student portfolio on Brightspace will continue to be available after the course becomes unavailable. Also, Brightspace allows students to download instructor-generated content from a course for later or offline use. For assistance with using these Brightspace tools, contact brightspace@vanderbilt.edu.
- The above policy does not apply to courses and organizations created manually on Brightspace, only courses automatically generated through integration with 自慰视频 student information systems. Manually created courses and organizations may be subject to periodic review to determine if they are still needed.
Policy updated June 15, 2026.聽