The moment has arrived -> you've been given your Brightspace course shell, you've set up the content and quizzing in your Blended Teaching textbook, and you're ready to bring it into D2L / Brightspace.
D2L connects to Blended Teaching a little differently from Canvas and Blackboard. Before you install, this guide covers how the two work together and helps you choose how you'll run your quizzes and exams -> then walks you through the installation itself.
It covers:
How D2L Works with Blended Teaching
Choosing How to Run Your Quizzes and Exams
Installing Your Textbook into D2L / Brightspace
Adding or Updating Individual Content Later
Setting Your Assessment Dates
Getting Grades into Your D2L Gradebook
Other Setup Steps
1. How D2L Works with Blended Teaching
You install your textbook in D2L using a Common Cartridge file that you download from Blended Teaching. When you import it, your textbook installs as a set of items — one for each chapter, quiz, and assignment. Each item opens the full Blended Teaching experience in a new tab: the same videos, notes, and quizzes your students see anywhere else.
There's one thing to know up front. Canvas and Blackboard have a direct integration with Blended Teaching, which lets grades flow automatically into the LMS gradebook. D2L connects through these links instead, so grades don't sync automatically to the D2L gradebook. Your students' scores are recorded in your Blended Teaching gradebook, and you move them into D2L whenever you'd like.
📝 A note on proctoring: Blended Teaching's built-in proctoring (Honorlock and Respondus) connects through an integrated LMS, so it isn't available when quizzes run in Blended with D2L. You still have two routes to a supervised exam. For an in-person exam, use Blended Teaching's paper exams (Option 1 below). For an online proctored exam, export the questions and build the quiz in D2L's own quiz tool (Option 3 below), where you can apply D2L's proctoring.
2. Choosing How to Run Your Quizzes and Exams
You have three ways to run your quizzes and exams alongside D2L. Most instructors use the first — everyday quizzes in Blended Teaching, exams supervised — but all three work, and you can mix and match per assessment.
Option 1: Quizzes in Blended Teaching, Exams Supervised (recommended for most)
Your everyday quizzes run in Blended Teaching, launched from the links in your D2L course. Your exams are supervised — either on paper, printed from Blended Teaching and sat in class, or in D2L's quiz tool with D2L's proctoring applied (set up as in Option 3).
Paper exams are the highest-integrity option: sat in your room, with no screen to work from and no AI to ask — and every paper carries its own numbers, questions, and question order, so answers can't be shared.
Paper exams are built from multiple-choice questions, so automatic grading and full quiz analytics carry over — the only extra step is scanning the answer sheets back in.
No integration and no proctoring service needed — you print the papers from Blended Teaching and hand them out in class.
Best if your class meets in person, or you'd like your exams supervised.
New to paper exams? See A Guide to Creating Paper Exams.
Option 2: Keep Your Quizzes in Blended Teaching
Students take their quizzes and exams in Blended Teaching, launched from the links in your D2L course.
Full Blended Teaching quizzing: dynamic questions, automatic grading, analytics, and remediation.
Grades are recorded in your Blended Teaching gradebook. When you're ready, export them and bring them into your D2L gradebook.
Best if you'd like your students to have Blended Teaching's full quizzing experience and don't need proctoring.
Option 3: Host Your Quizzes in D2L's Quiz Tool
You export your questions from Blended Teaching and build the quizzes inside D2L's own quiz tool, so D2L grades them directly.
D2L grades the quizzes natively, so scores land straight in the D2L gradebook with no separate transfer step.
You can apply D2L's own proctoring (such as Respondus or Honorlock set up in D2L), since the quizzes run natively in D2L.
Blended Teaching's dynamic questions, automatic grading, and analytics don't carry over.
Best if you need proctored assessments, or you want everything in a single D2L gradebook. To get started, see Exporting Quiz Questions to Your LMS. If anything doesn't import cleanly into D2L, contact support and we'll get your questions into a format it accepts.
3. Installing Your Textbook into D2L / Brightspace
Installing your textbook is a case of downloading the Common Cartridge from Blended Teaching and importing it into your Brightspace course. Follow the two steps below.
3.1. Download Your Common Cartridge from Blended Teaching
The Common Cartridge file contains everything you've set up in your course — the chapters, quizzes, assignments, and links to content. To install your class, you download it from Blended Teaching and import it into Brightspace.
To download the Common Cartridge file, start in your Blended Teaching Control Center:
Go to the Settings tab of your Control Center.
Scroll down until you see the Export Course box.
Select the blue Export Common Cartridge button to download the file. Store it somewhere easy to reach, like your desktop.
3.2. Upload Your Common Cartridge in Brightspace
Brightspace is highly customizable, so your version may not look exactly the same as ours. Even so, these steps should map closely.
To install your Common Cartridge:
In Brightspace, navigate to the Import/Export/Copy Components page.
Select Import Components, choose from a course package, and press Start.
Drop your Common Cartridge file from Blended Teaching into the upload box and select Import All Components.
⏰ Now wait ⏰. This step can take up to 5 minutes while Brightspace converts the Common Cartridge into the Brightspace format.
Once it's finished, click View Content.
Hey presto — your textbook is installed, with your chapters, quizzes, and assignments in place. Each one opens straight into Blended Teaching. 🙌
ℹ️ Good to know: each chapter, quiz, and assignment installs as an item that opens Blended Teaching in a new tab. That's how D2L connects to Blended — your students click through from D2L and complete their work in Blended Teaching.
4. Adding or Updating Individual Content Later
You don't need to re-import the whole Common Cartridge just to add one new item. Because every item in your D2L course is a link to Blended Teaching, you can add a single chapter, quiz, or assignment by copying its link and dropping it into your course.
ℹ️ You only need this for brand-new items. Your installed links always point to the latest version of your textbook, so if you only edited content inside an existing chapter, there's nothing to do here — your students already see the update.
First, copy the link from Blended Teaching:
In your Control Center, go to the Course Structure page.
Find the chapter, quiz, or assignment you want to add, and click the eye icon to the right to open it in the Blended Teaching player.
Copy the URL from the player.
Then add it to D2L:
In your D2L course, go to Content and open the unit where you'd like the item to appear.
Select Create New, then choose WebLink. (On the older Classic Content experience, this is Create a Link instead.)
Enter the chapter's name in the Name field, and paste the copied URL into the Link field.
Select Open in a new tab (rather than Embed on the page), so it behaves like the rest of your Blended Teaching content.
Click Save.
The new item now opens straight into Blended Teaching, exactly like the ones from your original install. 🙌
5. Setting Your Assessment Dates
Where you set your dates depends on where your quizzes run (the three options above).
If your quizzes run in Blended Teaching (Options 1 and 2), set each assessment's start, due, and end dates in Blended Teaching -> in your Control Center, on each quiz's Details page. Blended Teaching is what actually opens the quiz, applies any late penalty, and closes it at the end date. See How to set Dates & Points for Assessments.
Because D2L isn't integrated, those dates won't appear in D2L on their own -> the installed items are links, so they don't drive the D2L calendar or reminders. So that your students still see their schedule, add the key dates where they'll notice them in D2L — for example a calendar entry, or the due date in the item title. Treat anything you add in D2L as a reminder only: the dates in Blended Teaching are the official ones, and if the two ever disagree, Blended Teaching wins.
If you run a paper exam (Option 1), the date that matters is your in-class exam date. See A Guide to Creating Paper Exams for how to set one up.
If you host quizzes in D2L's quiz tool (Option 3, or a D2L-proctored exam in Option 1), set those dates in the D2L quiz settings instead. There, D2L handles the schedule, reminders, and cutoff natively.
6. Getting Grades into Your D2L Gradebook
Blended Teaching records every graded quiz and exam in its own gradebook, in your Control Center. Because D2L isn't integrated, those scores don't flow into D2L automatically -> you bring them across whenever you're ready. Many instructors do this after each major assessment, or all at once at the end of the term.
Here's the process:
Export your grades from Blended Teaching. In your Control Center, open the Gradebook, then choose Export → Download CSV (or Download Excel). You'll get a spreadsheet with a row for each student and a column for each quiz and assignment.
Create a matching grade item in D2L. In your D2L Grades tool, add a grade item for each Blended Teaching assessment you want to record (if you don't already have one).
Add the scores. Enter each student's score from the exported spreadsheet into the matching D2L grade item. If you'd rather not enter them by hand, you can reshape the spreadsheet to D2L's import layout and use D2L's Grades → Import.
ℹ️ The exported scores are final -> they already reflect the attempt you chose to keep (highest, latest, or average), any late penalties, and any manual score adjustments. Each score is a percentage, so set your D2L grade items out of 100 (or convert as needed).
7. Other Setup Steps
A few more things you may want to do:
Finish building your quizzes and exams -> A Guide to Creating Quizzes.
Help your students get access -> students enroll with an access code from the bookstore. Share Getting Started with Your Blended Teaching Textbook so they know what to do.
See the full setup flow -> New Class Launch Guide for Instructors.