Make your homepage work for you on Brightspace

Posted by Stacey Johnson on Tuesday, January 9, 2018 in Uncategorized.

When you (or your students) first click on a course from the main landing page in Brightspace, the default first page is a homepage that has the announcements tool and the calendar tool pre-loaded. However, the default is not your only option. In fact, you have quite a bit of control over what your students see when they click on your course. Your options include the following.

Editing the homepage

The default homepage design is called a widget-based homepage, and the two widgets it contains are the announcements tool and the calendar tool. If you like the homepage more or less the way it is, but want to tweak it, there are two ways to do that.

First, you can go to Course Admin, then to Course Offering Information. This page will allow you to add your Course Image as a banner on the homepage.

Second, you can go to Homepages, also under Course Admin. There you will be able to add or remove widgets from your homepage to customize your widget-based homepage to maximize its usefulness. We have an on-demand resource here that can walk you through the steps in that process.

Making a tool (like Content or Checklists) the homepage

You can eliminate the homepage entirely, and instead have students’ first entry into the course be a tool within the course. For example, if the only tool you are using in Brightspace is the Content page, why not eliminate as many of the other pages as possible, and have students go straight to the Content page when they enter your course? If you have created a checklist to guide students through important tasks, why not make that the first thing they see?

Replacing your widget-based homepage with a Brightspace tool is a simple process, and we have a guide to walk you through the steps here.

Make another website your homepage

If your students will frequently need to access an external web resource like a digital textbook site or a class blog, you can have that site open up as your homepage to give students easy and frequent access to the site. (Note: some web resources, such as Google sites, have code in them that prevents this sort of linking, but most sites will work.

You can make another website open up inside of your Brightspace homepage by following the guide for creating a tool-based homepage, but choosing the option for a External URL page instead.

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If you have any questions or concerns about how to make your Brightspace homepage work for you, please reach out to us at brightspace@vanderbilt.edu. We’re happy to help!