Now that the spring semester has officially ended there are a few housekeeping things you may still need to do in Blackboard before access ends on May 31, 2024.

You may need to download your gradebooks. Depending on your department’s specific accreditation requirements, you should download at least the past academic year (Summer 23, Fall 23, and Spring 23). Check with your department if you need to keep more than one academic year.

Migrating content from Blackboard

While the past academic year will be migrated by Computer Services, courses older than Summer 2023 and master courses will not be migrated by default. You will need to migrate those manually. Here are a couple of things to keep in mind when migrating content:

You need to request a source course before you migrate content into Brightspace. DO NOT migrate content into a live course. Here are three reasons why:

1. The settings from Blackboard are retained when you import content so you could inadvertently make your course available once you have uploaded the course zip file to Brightspace.
   • If announcements were included in your export file and your course is switched to “active” your students will start receiving notifications of those announcements as soon as the import process has finished. This could cause quite a bit of confusion.
2. Students would be able to access to your course before you have had a chance to make changes and do any necessary clean-up post migration.
3. There will be clean-up post migration.
   • It is completely normal to have some clean-up to do after migrating content from one platform to another. Using the Transitioning to Brightspace Checklist can help.

Need to make your course active (or inactive)? Learn how from the Knowledge Base article: Activating your Brightspace Course

Incomplete Grades

If you were using Blackboard during the Spring 2024 semester and have assigned an incomplete grade for a student and they will need longer than May 31st to complete work, you will need to submit a request to Computer Services to have them added to the next semester offering of your course in Brightspace.

Requesting Brightspace Access for students with Incomplete Grades

If you have questions or need to contact the MSU Help Desk, please do so by submitting your question/request directly to the Help Portal.