Case Study: University of Ottawa achieves a successful bilingual LMS migration with D2L Brightspace

Successfully migrating from Blackboard to Brightspace

The University of Ottawa, the world’s largest bilingual university, needed a new LMS because its long-time Blackboard system was no longer meeting strict bilingual charter requirements for French and English users. Working with D2L Brightspace, the university also had to plan for a major platform change as its Blackboard contract neared expiration and the existing system risked disenfranchising faculty and students.

D2L Brightspace was selected for its strong bilingual support and fit with uOttawa’s needs, and D2L helped execute a rapid 109-day migration from Blackboard to Brightspace. The team batch-migrated and converted content from 54,959 courses, trained hundreds of professors, and completed the cutover on time; Blackboard was shut down on May 30, 2017. By the fall of 2017, 695 more professors were trained and another 6,000 courses had been migrated, with Brightspace adoption already matching Blackboard’s previous 80% usage and still rising.

University of Ottawa

Michel Marcheterre

Former Manager of Learning Technology Systems and Network