Upload Files

To begin build­ing your course, start by upload­ing files and mate­ri­als such as PDFs, Word doc­u­ments, Pow­er­Points, or oth­er resources from your computer’s hard dri­ve or a shared dri­ve to the Man­age Files area. This orga­nizes and stores files in your Bright­space course. You can upload a sin­gle file or an entire zipped col­lec­tion of fold­ers all at once.

NOTE: Stu­dents can’t see any­thing in the Man­age Files area, this is sim­ply a col­lec­tion of mate­ri­als you can draw from in your course. To add files to the Con­tent area, where stu­dents can see them, use Course Builder or the Con­tent tool.

You can com­press mul­ti­ple fold­ers and files on your com­put­er into a sin­gle ZIP file, upload it to Man­age Files in Bright­space, and then unzip it to main­tain the same fold­er struc­ture with­in your course. See step-by-step instruc­tions below.

On your com­put­er

In Bright­space

Nav­i­gate to Tools > Man­age Files.

Click Upload.

The Upload win­dow appears.

Select Unzip from the zipped fold­er’s drop-down menu.

Upload Zipped File of Whole Course

In Bright­space

Nav­i­gate to Tools > Man­age Files.

Click Upload.

The Upload win­dow appears.

  • Tip: To improve load times, con­vert Microsoft Office files (Word, Pow­er­Point, Excel) to PDF before upload­ing to Bright­space. The sys­tem auto­mat­i­cal­ly ren­ders Office files to PDF, which can delay ini­tial access. Upload­ing a PDF ensures faster, more con­sis­tent view­ing — unless stu­dents need the orig­i­nal file to com­plete or edit it.

  • Tip: Keep your file struc­ture orga­nized with­in Bright­space. A clear, con­sis­tent fold­er sys­tem makes it eas­i­er to find and update mate­ri­als, sav­ing valu­able time both when build­ing your course and mak­ing future edits. Over time, cours­es that are copied from term to term can become clut­tered and dis­or­ga­nized, mak­ing it hard­er to locate files and increas­ing the risk of acci­den­tal­ly using out­dat­ed mate­ri­als.

Overview of Manage Files tool

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