Over the summer, the UTRGV Office of the Provost announced the university’s transition from Blackboard to a new learning manager system, Brightspace.
Jonikka Charlton, senior vice provost for Student Success and Academic Affairs and dean of the University College, told The Rider the change will go into effect Summer 2025.
“Students who are in accelerated online programs, they will transition in the summer,” Charlton said. “Module 2 and our medical school students will transition on July 1. That’s when their new year starts.
“Our contract was coming up with Blackboard and, just like lots of things at the institution, when those moments happen, we do request for proposals. The learning management systems out there in the marketplace have gotten much better, so we were looking to make sure that we had the best quality one for UTRGV.”
She said the new Brightspace platform price is significantly lower than what the university is currently paying for the Blackboard platform contract.
The Rider asked Charlton for the cost of the two platforms. As of press time, The Rider had not received the numbers.
“The Brightspace platform has a lot of really great features and functionality,” Charlton said. “Clearly, we wanted to make sure that we had an [learning manager system] that worked really well on mobile devices because we know that many of our students are using mobile devices to be able to access the platform.”
She said Brightspace allows “students to see … what progress they’re making in their courses, what their grades look like.”
Charlton said it will be easier for faculty to build courses on the Brightspace platform.
“There are a couple of pieces of functionality that will help them very easily create more engaging content for students, and to be able to see and manage grades and student progress a lot more easily as well,” she said.
Charlton said Brightspace allows users to “give audio and video feedback to students.”
“Human interaction, even if it’s not in real time, I think, is critical to learning for students,” Charlton said. “And students want to see their faculty, even if they’re in an asynchronous course.”
She said there are going to be modules to teach students how to navigate the new platform.
“We are taking this transition process very seriously and we’ve got a lot of resources at the institution dedicated to it,” Charlton said. “We did our due diligence to really look for the system that would help us to support the highest quality online experience possible, and we want it to be easy for students to navigate in the system.”
Biology junior Laura Guerrero said Blackboard is easier to navigate than other platforms, such as Canvas.
“Blackboard is a cleaner look, and there’s, like, a sidebar with the courses, calendar, and I feel like that makes it more modern,” Guerrero said.
She would prefer to have a new tab open when viewing a course on Blackboard.
Guerrero said there are no issues with the website, but the Blackboard app has “been really slow, especially here at the campus.”
Accounting freshman Kevin Flores said Blackboard is “out of date.”
“Personally, the Blackboard platform seems a little out of date compared to, for instance, Canvas,” Flores said. “There [are] much better alternatives out there, and I feel like definitely transitioning to a different one is going to be a lot better.”
He said the Blackboard user interface is “confusing” and there are issues when accessing assignments.
Flores said he would like it if the new platform “allows students to communicate with each other.”
“Let’s say you are taking a course, Intro to Communication,” he said. “Instead of just having access to that one class, you could have a group discussion with all the people taking Intro to Communication with that one professor. This would allow collaboration and networking among different classes on the same material, which I think would be very cool.”
