D2L Brightspace has an alternative content experience that provides an intuitive way to organize and navigate your course. The New Content Experience (NCE) focuses on clean visual presentation of content for educators and learners with a minimalist design. It is a simplified experience for organizing content and managing the availability of course materials. Modules and submodules have been redesigned as units, lessons, and folders to help conceptualize organization and prevent over-modularization. The user interface is streamlined to make it easier to create and edit material as well as to navigate to content and activities. This simplified organization allows instructors to focus on teaching rather than learning how to design a course website. Learn more about the New Content Experience.
Some features from the Classic Content Experience are not currently available with the New Content Experience:
- Restrict availability of content based on date: Content Modules (Units) can be set to hidden or visible manually but not released automatically according to dates available.
- Visual completion tracking: Students will no longer see visual tracking (checkmarks) for items visited in the content modules.
- View Reports: View Reports option is not available within Content. View Reports displays content statistics including the total number of users, the number of users who visited course content, and the average time users spent viewing content. This report provides overall course content statistics for the entire class. However, instructors using the New Content Experience can still view progress for each student individually using the Class Progress Tool. (Learner Management > Class Progress)
- Overview: The New Content Experience does not have an Overview page. If you have content in the Overview section of the original Content experience that you want displayed in the New Content Experience, you need to move the content to a module before converting to the New Content Experience.
- Bookmarking and Bulk editing are no longer available within Content.
Learn about the differences between the Classic Content Experience and the New Content Experience.
You might consider switching to the New Content Experience if you:
- want a more streamlined content area
- want better navigation from the Table of Contents sidebar
- want a simpler and more visual menu experience for creating new content or adding existing content
- find the updated naming conventions of organizational elements (Units, Lessons, Folders) more clear
The New Content Experience might not be the best choice if you:
- use release dates for content (versus manually hiding and unhiding them)
- find it cumbersome to have to open up activities in a new tab when accessing from the content area
- rely on the bulk editing feature to update multiple items quickly
Tutorials for the New Content Experience
The following tutorials specific to the New Content Experience are located on the D2L Brightspace Help Site.
- Overview: Create course content in a new Content Experience (Lessons)
- Organizing course content in Lessons
- Navigating in the Lessons interface
- Create a new unit
- Create topics by adding a link
- Create a new lesson
- What kinds of files can I use with Lessons?
- Create new material
- Arrange materials
- Edit materials
- Linking to materials in Lessons
- Post materials to a course homepage
- Set Release Conditions in Lessons
- Schedule Activity Feed posts
- Push assignments to Activity Feed
You can switch between content experiences yourself by following these steps. If you have any question about the New Content Experience or need help changing the content experience in you course page, please send an email to ltsisupport@uvic.ca.
You might also want to consider using our pre-loaded Course Template to help organize your content for your students.
This content is adapted from D2L Solutions by Eastern Illinois University and licensed under CC BY 4.0
