About

URI Engage is a second LMS instance of Brightspace without third party plugins. Engage directly supports URI’s land grant mission to serve as a community resource. It gives URI continuing education and extension programs the ability to market themselves and their programs, offer new and unique learning opportunities to the public, and generate revenue for their programs and departments.

• External Learning Management – Supports training, certification, and non-credit courses.
• Public Access – Designed for learners outside of URI, including professionals and community members.
• Flexible Course Delivery – Offers self-paced and instructor-led training options.
• Credentialing & Certification – Enables digital badging and completion tracking.

Eligibility

• URI departments or programs may use Engage to offer non-accredited for-profit or non-profit classes, lectures, or seminars to external participants. Engage is used for non-credit continuing education or extension learning opportunities only. Alternatively, accredited degree-granting courses are offered via Brightspace, which is synced with eCampus.

How to Access URI Engage

Hosting & Development

• Faculty and departments interested in offering courses or certification programs can consult with the ITS Teaching and Learning team. The process will look like the following:
• After submitting an IT ticket the TLS department will begin the process with you:
  1) TLS chats with you about what program or continuing education (CE) course(s) you’ll run, and helps you determine which system you’re supposed to be in.
  2) If approved to use Engage then you choose a program admin who will be granted a sub-system-administrator account in Engage.
  3) Your program sys-admin will receive training on creating course shells and adding enrollments in Engage.
  4) You may work with ATL on the instructional design of your CE course.
  5) You may obtain support from TLS on the integration of educational technologies [submit an IT ticket].
  6) You proceed to offer the ready and finalized CE course to the public.

Engage in Action

URI Master Gardeners – Educating communities in environmentally-sound gardening practices.

Home Horticulture – From URI Cooperative Extension.

Food Recovery for RI – Exploring the intersection of the food system and the environment.

View All Courses on URI Engage

Updates

Latest:

• 12/11/25: (RESOLVED) TLS is aware of an issue related to Course Merchant/Engage enrollments. We have engaged the vendor and will provide updates as soon as they are available.

New Features:

• New Content Experience (NCE) is a redesigned interface that makes content delivery more intuitive and efficient while improving the student digital learning experience. Coming to Engage (and Brightspace), faculty may currently opt in to try NCE for your courses. The change becomes standard for all users at the end of August 2026. During the 25/26 Academic Year, you can toggle between NCE and Classic Content Experience without IT support. IT Teaching and Learning Services is here to support your transition.
• Course Leads.  This optional new role will give instructors enhanced access within their courses.  Specifically the ability to enroll/unenroll learners, and edit course navbars/homepages.

Documentation:

• Our team has been busy at work adding new, and enhancing existing online support (Knowledge Base) articles.  
• These can be easily searched for by keyword from the Service Now homepage.
• A few commonly used KB’s include:
  • Engage Access Request
  • Engage Course Setup and Activation
  • Engage/Course Merchant Discount Codes
  • Engage User Roles
  • Engage Setup for Outside Payment (ie. front end vs back end products)
  • Engage Sales Rec, Fund Requests, and Refund Requests

Clarifications:

• Should you become aware of someone with duplicate accounts, please submit a service desk ticket so our team can help figure out the best path forward.
• The best way to add a “URI” user to Engage…someone who will be running or supporting a course…is to submit a ticket to the Service Desk.  Our team is exploring alternatives to this process, but today, a Service Desk ticket is the best way.
• Course Merchant/Engage do perform limited duplicate checking.  They check two fields when a user is created username and email address.

Support

TLS offers guidance for setting up and managing courses on URI Engage.

TLS provides assistance with course design, digital credentials, and assessment tools.