Brightspace and Banner (Ellucian Company L.P.)
Student, instructor, and course information in Brightspace is passed from Banner (Ellucian Company L.P.) into Brightspace via a nightly batch process. The registrar maintains Banner information.
Handy points to remember:
Roll-over:
Information in Banner rolls over from Fall to Fall and Spring to Spring—not Fall to Spring. This is important in updating information in Banner.
Cancelled classes:
One kind of information that does not automatically transfer from Banner to Brightspace is course cancellations. Once a course is transmitted from Banner to Brightspace, there is no automatic way to delete a cancelled class from Brightspace—it becomes a manual process.
Course activation:
One of the most common user support calls received at the beginning of any semester is from students who don’t see a particular class on their list in Brightspace. The instructor must activate the course in Brightspace in order for anyone else to see it.
See a tutorial on how to make a course active in Brightspace: How to Activate Course
Instructor of Record:
Another common user support call is from instructors who do not see their course(s) appearing in Brightspace. Instructors should work with their department to make sure that they are listed in Banner as the "Instructor of Record" for the course. The "Instructor of Record" is the instructor that a department has identified in Banner as being an individual who is officially teaching a course offering.
"Instructor of Record" in all Banner sections is enrolled into a corresponding Brightspace course. Lab or clinical instructors enrolled in Banner will be enrolled as instructors in Brightspace as well. Instructors may ignore these courses in Brightspace by not activating them, may request that lab/clinical sections be merged with the lecture sections, or the instructor may choose to make the course(s) active (and therefore visible to students) in Brightspace.
Note that there can be multiple instructors assigned as "Instructor of Record" in Banner.
Read more info about Terms, Start and End Dates, and Instructor of Record: Terms, Start and End Dates
Merging:
Many faculty choose to merge separate sections of the same course in Brightspace. It is necessary for an instructor or a program to identify sections to merge each semester. This merge information should be communicated to MSU's Brightspace staff by sending an email to ecat@montana.edu with the Course Rubric, Number, Title and Sections to be merged.
When to merge:
The best time to request a merge is after all courses for an instructor are displayed in Brightspace and before actual work begins related to setting up a course. NOTE: Merging or unmerging sections after students have started working in a course (discussions, quizzes, assignments) will result in data related to student work being lost.
CD 201909