D2L Brightspace is the Learning Management System used for courses at Great Falls College MSU. A Learning Management System, or LMS, is a website that you log into with a username and password where course instruction is delivered to the learner and various types of learning activities are completed by the learner. If you are familiar with Google Classroom, this is a very simple LMS used primarily in the K-12 environments. Other LMSs that you may have come into contact with are Moodle, Blackboard, Canvas, Sakai, and even sites like Udemy.com, PluralSight, and LinkedIn Learning are forms of LMSs where you pay a subscription fee to use the service or you purchase individual courses.
In the case of Brightspace, you do not need to pay anything additional to use it as a student of Great Falls College MSU. In fact, all four MSU campuses use Brightspace to varying degrees. At GFCMSU, we require all of our credit bearing courses to provide a course instance within Brightspace for students enrolled in that course. What is contained in that Brightspace course depends on the type of course and the delivery mode of the course (face-to-face, online, hybrid, hyflex), however, all courses in Brightspace should include at least the following things: an instructor widget that provides some contact information and office hours for the instructor, the course syllabus, and an announcement welcoming students to the course and providing some direction to help students get started with the course.
Please do not be alarmed if you are in a face-to-face course and the course in Brightspace only contains those few things because either all of the course instruction and activities, such as quizzes, assignments, discussion will be handled in class or the instructor may be utilizing Brightspace but opening each week's or unit's module as that week or unit is reached.
If you have any questions regarding the information above, please do not hesitate to contact the Technology Assistance Center by email at elearning@gfcmsu.edu, virtual chat at https://elearning.gfcmsu.edu, phone at 406.771.4440, or stop in and see us on campus in suite G100.