Requests for merging courses are approved and managed by the Registrar’s Office. To request merging sections in Brightspace, please complete this form:
https://go.uvm.edu/brightspace-merge
3/5000-level or 4/5000-level co-located courses sections cannot be merged in Brightspace.
Merging courses in Brightspace creates a new, empty “parent” course that contains all students in the “child” courses that were approved to merge. In other words, there is no way to merge one course into another— the merge process is only able to create a new space.
Instructors can copy content from a previous “child” course into a newly merged parent course— however student data cannot be copied between courses, so any merges should be requested and completed before the child courses are made available to students.
Instructors may still access the merged child course spaces in Brightspace. These child courses will have “DO NOT USE ” added to the title, and have been inactivated by default, so students will not see them.
Communicating to Students about Course Titles and Exam Times
When courses are merged, there isn’t a way to specify a “custom” title for the merged course. For example, when requesting the following sections be merged, specifying 90666 as the primary section will result in the course space having the “A” section title in Brightspace:
- CALS 1850 Computer Applications Section A (90666)
- CALS 1850 Computer Applications Section B (90667)
As such, students logging into Brightspace will see “CALS1850A: Computer Applications”, even if they are registered for section B. With this in mind, instructors will need to communicate to their students that:
- When logging into Brightspace, this merged course is the one they need to be looking for (and it may have a different title than the one they are registered for). As the example shows, the section letter of the teaching space in Brightspace may not match the section they are enrolled in.
- When looking up the time and location of their final exam, students should use the section they registered for, and not rely on the title of the course. While this information should also be listed in their syllabus, if they are looking at the final exam schedule posted on the Registrar’s website they need to make sure to look at the course section and CRN they are enrolled in.