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Known Issues

Brightspace Frequently Asked Questions

Check out our newly updated Brightspace FAQs! This list runs through the most common questions the Brightspace Support Team gets throughout the year. If you have any questions not listed here, be sure to contact our Support team for assistance.

Support Schedule

The Vanderbilt University Brightspace Instructional Technologists are available for support between 8 AM and 4 PM Monday through Friday. Any emails received after 4 PM will be addressed when our team returns to normal support at 8 AM the following business day. While we’re out, we encourage you to utilize our On-Demand Resources to answer any questions that arise.

When Brightspace experiences outages or ongoing issues, the problem and its resolution will be recorded to this page.

Experiencing an issue you don’t see here? Check out the Status Page for the tool you’re using below.

Ongoing Issues

  • Anonymous Marking in Assignments can break if Automatic Zeros is enabled in the gradebook

    If an Assignment is set up to have anonymous marking enabled, and the course gradebook is set to automatically score late assignments as a zero, then assignment submissions can become deanonymized if any student receives that automatic zero. The best workaround if this happens is to retrack feedback for any students who received a zero on an assignment with anonymous marking enabled or to disable the automatic zero gradebook setting completely before the assignment due date.

  • Unable to Add Questions to Surveys if Quizzes is Disabled in the Course

    If the Quizzes tool is turned off in a course, users are unable to add questions to Surveys. This is a rare issue because Quizzes is available in courses by default, but D2L is aware of this issue and is working on a fix. The current workaround is to always leave the Quizzes tool enabled in a course.

  • Export/Import Grades Tool

    Exporting and importing grades into Brightspace has proven to have some limitations. If you are experiencing problems with this tool or plan on using it, please contact us for help! One urgent issue to be aware of is the order of your students upon export. They are not always accurately alphabetized by last name. Please review the order of students before entering grades and importing back into Brightspace. Please view our guide on how to export and import grades here.

  • Formula Grade Items

    There are glitches with the Formula option in grade items. Symbols are appearing/not appearing where they should when the formula is saved, causing incorrect calculations. It is suggested to use the Calculated tool instead. Please contact Brightspace Support for more help with setting up your gradebook.

PAST EVENTS

  • December 2025

    On December 18, 2025, an error occurred that impacted how course data is sent into Brightspace. The following issues were caused by this error:

    1. All 2025 Fall and 2026 Spring courses that were set to active (meaning visible to students), were set to inactive, then later, all 2025 Fall courses were set to active. This at first prevented students from being able to access these courses, and then later provided access to courses that were not meant to be active. We were able to correct this issue for all Fall 2025 courses and most Spring 2026 courses.
    2. Additionally, all courses that were involved in a course merger by the Brightspace Support team had their original courses recreated. These existed in addition to the merged courses, and resulted in a pause on course mergers until the larger issue was resolved.
    3. As a result of this issue, all data feeds that come into Brightspace were down from Thursday, December 18 until Tuesday December 30. This meant that new student enrollments, instructor assignments, and course changes were not being processed in Brightspace during this time. Once the data feeds were restored, this information was automatically updated.

    As of January 2, 2026, data feeds into Brightspace were restored and this issue was resolved.

    On December 9, 2025, the Brightspace Support team discovered that the video editor for Kaltura videos was not loading in Brightspace. We contacted Kaltura Support and worked with their team to resolve the issue within a few hours.

  • October 2025

    On October 20, 2025, an ongoing issue with Brightspace’s cloud computing provider AWS caused some parts of Brightspace and third party tools to experience issues and be slow to load. D2L, the company that makes Brightspace, worked with AWS to resolve this issue. As of 5pm on Monday, October 20, this issue was resolved. 

  • September 2025

    On September 12, 2025, we were made aware of a bug where surveys that included a section were not working and resulted in an Internal Error page. After working with D2L, this error was corrected on September 15, 2025. 

  • June 2025

    On June 2, 2025, Namecoach stopped working in Brightspace. Users who tried to interact with the tool receive an error when trying to load the tool. We worked with engineers at Namecoach to identify and resolve the issue. As of June 5, 2025, this issue has been resolved.  

  • March 2025

    On March 17, 2025 there were reports that sorting students by Last Name does not work in the Brightspace grade book. This was identified as a defect by D2L (the company that makes Brightspace). As of March 24, 2025 this issue has been resolved.  

  • December 2024

    On Monday, December 2, our team started to receive reports of Brightspace loading extremely slowing and, in some cases, failing to load at all. As of 12:30pm (CT) on December 2, this issue appears to be resolved.

  • November 2024

    On November 19, 2024 we were made aware of an issue with exporting grades if the Section or Group Membership was selected as part of the Export Options. We were able to work with D2L to identify and resolve the issue, and as of November 21, this issue has been resolved. 

  • September 2024

    We had reports that Apple devices running iOS 18 were not working with some Kaltura videos. On October 3rd, iOS and iPadOS 18.0.1 was released and appeared to fix this issue. Users were encouraged to update their device to version 18.0.1 in order to reliably access Kaltura videos again.

  • August 2024

    Users experienced difficulty when attempting to sign out using SSO. We worked with VUIT and D2L to resolve this issue. This issue was resolved as of 8/20/24.  

  • July 2024

    Editing a discussion topic by clicking on the description either on the Content page or on the main Discussions page did not save changes. This was identified as a defect by D2L (the company that makes Brightspace), and they implemented a fix as part of the August Brightspace update.  

  • January 2024

    Some Kaltura videos housed in Brightspace courses were failing to load properly for playback. We worked with Kaltura and D2L to resolve this issue, and Kaltura videos appear to be displaying correctly again.