Learn Bruin Learn!

By Thomas Garbelotti on November 24, 2021

Since the early Fall Quarter of 2021, UCLA has been transitioning online teaching and learning content from CCLE to its new home on Bruin Learn (built on Canvas). Canvas has become one of most popular Learning Management System (LMS) platforms in the United States, and is used widely by our colleagues the California community colleges, the California State Universities, and by the majority of UC campuses.

Some of the big improvements the Canvas software provides are a fully functional mobile app, an improved calendar interface for students, and a grading interface for instructors. Having had some time to get to know the new platform, we’ve cataloged some of the key changes for you. As instructors preparing to transition to using Bruin Learn for your courses, we recommend you take a few minutes to review Core differences between Bruin Learn and CCLE.

Your courses

Course content from fall 2019-fall 2021 has been migrated by an outside company from CCLE to Bruin Learn. To get started, simply go to https://bruinlearn.ucla.edu/ and log in using your UCLA Logon ID credentials. This will lead you to your Dashboard, where you will find your past and future courses listed as “tiles”. Simply click on a tile to open the course site.

Your content was migrated and placed into a UCLA-designed Canvas template designed to help showcase how your course could look. If you click on the “module” menu option, you will note that any content that was not in Week 1 through 10 format will appear towards the bottom of the list. Note that the use of this default template for your course site is not mandatory, and we can help you determine if there is a more suitable template or approach for your needs. After you’ve taken a look at your migrated sites, we are happy to assist you in arranging your Winter 2022 course sites in any way you would like.

If you are familiar with Canvas from another institution, Bruin Learn should look familiar to you. Still, you may want to review the Bruin Learn orientation, and/or reach out for assistance. Our instructional team can help provide guidance, training, and support for the suite of tools available within Canvas to make your class the best possible.

Getting help

There is a veritable feast of support available to help you get up and running with this new software. In addition to our normal, zoom based support (Monday – Friday, 9-4 pm, https://ucla.zoom.us/j/865893942), we will be hosting two dedicated days in December (Tuesday, Dec 8 and Wednesday, Dec 14) with both in-person and remote drop-in help available. See our Learn Bruin Learn event days for more information.

While we will be unavailable during the campus winter closure, Canvas 24-hour support and the Bruin Learn team (limited) will be reachable via the help option in the Canvas menu. There is also a wealth of self-help training and resources on UCLA’s own Bruin Learn Resources site. Please note that the Canvas 24-hour support is great to get help with Canvas specifics (such as how to upload a file, or set a due date), but they have limited knowledge of UCLA-specific tools and pedagogical approaches. For a consult or UCLA-specific support, email us at ritc@humnet.ucla.edu and we’ll get to you just as soon as we can.

Additional Bruin Learn resources:

About the Author

Thomas Garbelotti is the Instructional Technology Coordinator for the Humanities at HumTech. He received his BA in German Literature from the University of Arizona and a MS in Technology Management from University of Maryland University College. He has had the pleasure to have worked with faculty, staff, and students at Middlebury, Dartmouth, and New York University Abu Dhabi.