D2L Brightspace
What is D2L Brightspace?
D2L Brightspace is PCC’s online course and learning management system. D2L Brightspace provides students with an interface for accessing the content of their courses, including the syllabus, course calendars, lessons, assignments, quizzes, and discussion forums.
Who manages D2L Brightspace?
The Online Learning department at PCC manages the D2L Brightspace learning environment.
New to online courses at PCC?
PCC’s online learning preview goes into more detail about being an online learner at PCC. These guides
- Check out our D2L Brightspace Quick Start Videos
- These very brief videos go over each of the major areas of D2L Brightspace and their general function.
- Sure that you want to take online courses at PCC? Then Complete the Start Guide for Online Learning to enroll in fully online courses
- The Start Guide for Online Learning provides students who intend on taking fully online courses an overview of online courses at PCC. Complete it before registering for online classes at PCC.
Individual D2L Brightspace guides
Access and navigation
Profile, Pronouns notifications, and calendars
- Change Your Pronoun in D2L Brightspace
- Setting up Notifications in D2L Brightspace
- Subscribing to a D2L Brightspace Class Calendar
Assignments
Content
- Access Restrictions
- Downloading Content to your Computer
- Enabling 3rd party cookies for Media
- Ally – Generate Alternative Formats for Web Pages in your Course
- Printing a Page to PDF
Discussions
Email? and classlist
Grades
Mobile
Online rooms (Zoom)
Quizzes
Problems?
If you are having problems logging in to D2L Brightspace, try these steps to log in.
If you are getting a “This account is deactivated” message when attempting to access D2L Brightspace then contact the Student Help Desk for assistance.
If you are having trouble finding or accessing a course, consider the following:
- You must be officially registered at PCC and be on the official class roster before you can access your online class
- If you are on the class wait-list, you will not have access to the class
- Once you are moved from the wait-list to the official class roster, you may need to wait 24 hours before you can access your class.
- If you do not see your courses within the My Courses box then try the course selector (waffle icon at the top of your D2L Brightspace account). This area will show any courses you currently have access to, and clicking on the course will bring you to the course homepage.
- On campus instructors may use D2L Brightspace for their course, but are NOT required to do so
- Contact your instructor if you do not see your on campus course listed within D2L Brightspace to confirm whether they are going to use the system
- Online courses through the Community Education department use the Ed2Go system: www.ed2go.com/portlandcc
- See the Community Education department site for further information about their Remote and Online offerings.
Missing course or missing content?
If you looked over the information above and still can’t find your course, you can notify us. You can also use this form in the event your D2L Brightspace course is empty or otherwise missing content.
Be sure to also keep in contact with your instructor if you are running into any issues with your course.
Support for D2L Brightspace
Student support for D2L Brightspace is provided by the Student Help Desk and Faculty support for D2L Brightspace is provided by the Online Learning Faculty Help Desk.
Device support
PCC supports full desktop or laptop computers using Windows or Mac OSX operating systems. Computers running Linux based operating systems have limited-to-no support.
Mobile devices (smart phones, tablets, etc.) using the current version of OSX or Android may work with D2L Brightspace, but it is recommended you use a full desktop or laptop computer for the best compatibility with the system. The Desire2Learn company has also released the Brightspace Pulse app that can be used to easily keep up to date on course information and upcoming tasks.
Note: The Pulse app is not a replacement for a desktop or laptop computer.
Browser support
The most up-to-date versions of Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome are currently recommended for use with D2L Brightspace.
It is highly recommended that you have multiple browsers installed on any device you may access D2L Brightspace for troubleshooting purposes.
Can’t see videos in your online course?
If you can’t see videos that are supposed to be in your course, try adding some sites to your browser’s whitelist.
Free access to Aira for no and low vision users
Students and staff can use Aira, a smartphone app, to access visual content for free.