Summary
During a system-wide event disrupting D2L Brightspace, the System Office will publish time‑critical, system‑wide announcements directly in Brightspace, provided that the event affects all campuses. The announcement will:
- Use an organization announcement (vs. global or course‑level)
- Use a title starting with “SYSTEM‑WIDE:”
- Be updated in place rather than posting a separate “all clear.”
- Post after a delay of 5 minutes to allow campus admins preview and adjust, while ensuring the message still goes out if staff are unavailable.
Details
Purpose
Provide timely, authoritative communication inside Brightspace when a single disruptive event impacts all Minnesota State colleges and universities’ Brightspace environments.
Scope
In scope: Events that degrade Brightspace performance for all campuses (issues with specific Brightspace tools or third-party vendors)
Out of scope: Events impacting only some schools or ambiguous issues where the impact is unknown
Expected Occurrence
Occurrence: Rare. Historically this has been 1-2 events per year.
Delivery
An org-level announcement will be created by the system office, visible to all users (no release conditions). The announcement will have a ‘Start Date’ five minutes into the future to allow for campus review or adjustment. Brightspace administrators will be notified through Microsoft Teams of the issue and the posting of the announcement.
Content Standards
- Title prefix: SYSTEM‑WIDE: [Issue description]
Example: “SYSTEM‑WIDE: Brightspace load times are slow”
- Content: The announcement will include what is happening (in plain terms) and what users should do.
- Updates: Major updates will be appended to the same announcement.
Example Announcement
Title: SYSTEM‑WIDE: Brightspace pages are slow to load
Posted: 11:45 am
Body:
[Update 2:07pm]: The issue has been resolved.
[Update 1:14pm]: D2L has found the issue and is implementing a fix. Some pages are now loading faster.
D2L Brightspace may be slow to load, due to some performance issues. This impacts tools such as SCORM content, document viewer, and third-party integrations. If a page fails to load, wait 5–10 minutes and retry. D2L is aware of the issue and is taking steps to improve the performance.