As we approach the end of the semester there are a few things you can do in Brightspace to wrap up for the semester.
Release final course grades
Unlike other grade items and categories in the Grade Book, final grades are not available to students by default. Final grades must be released. If you did not choose to enable the automatic release of final grades when setting up your Grade Book, you will have to manually release final grades in order for students to see their final grade.
Export your Grade Book
Student access to courses is removed two weeks after the end of a semester. This process of making the courses inactive allows student work and grades to be visible to instructors but students no longer have access to the course. Courses will remain on the Brightspace system for three semesters before they are removed. You should export (download) your Grade Book to your local computer after you submit your final grades.
NOTE: The export file that is created will NOT contain any student work or instructor feedback. Only the grades in your Grade Book will be exported.
Create a master copy of your course
Courses remain on the Brightspace system for three semesters before they are removed. You can request a Master Course Shell that you can use to develop and maintain your course materials. Master Course Shells will not be removed from the Brightspace system.
Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.
Brightspace calculates final grades for each student based on the grading system and the students' grades that are entered into the Grade Book. If the instructor wants more control over the final grades, perhaps to adjust the final grade for a student that is on the cusp of a higher grade, then adjusted final grades can be used and released to students instead of the calculated final grade.
If the instructor decides to use adjusted final grades for one student in the course, adjusted final grades must be used for all students in the course. This does not imply, however, that final grades must be manually adjusted for all students.
Adjusting final grades are implemented by the instructor for only the student or students that are deemed to need an adjusted grade. The remaining students final grades would be the final grade as calculated in the Grade Book.
Note: The Grade Book must be configured to use adjusted final grades. If you plan to use adjusted final grades, you should make the adjustments before you release final grades.
Follow these steps to do it.
To adjust final grades for all students:
Get into the course where you want to adjust final grades and click Grades in the NavBar.
Click on the Enter Grades link.
Scroll over to the Final Calculated Grade column and click on the arrow on the right of the column name and select Enter Grades.
In the Final Adjusted Grade section for each student, enter the adjusted grades and then click Save.
Once you have ensured that students' grades are accurate, you can release the final grades.
To adjust final grades for one or more specific students:
Get into the course where you want to adjust final grades and click Grades in the NavBar.
Click on the Enter Grades link.
Scroll over to the Final Calculated Grade column and click on the arrow on the right of the column name and select Enter Grades.
Click on the arrow on the right of the Final Grades and click Transfer All, then click Yes.
In the Final Adjusted Grade section, enter adjusted scores where necessary and click Save.
Once you have ensured that students' grades are accurate, you can release the final grades.
Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.
Unlike other grade items and categories in the Grade Book, final grades are not available to students by default. Final grades must be released. When setting up the Grade Book, the instructor can choose to automatically release final grades so that the students can see their final grade throughout the semester. If you did not choose to enable the automatic release of final grades when setting up your Grade Book, you will have to manually release final grades in order for students to see their final grade.
Additionally, you can selectively release final grades for some students now and release the final grades for other students later. For example, you can release the final grades for graduating seniors on one date and release the final grades for everyone else on a later date.
Follow these steps to do it.
To manually release final grades:
On the NavBar, click Grades.
On the Enter Grades page, from the Final Calculated Grade or Final Adjusted Grade context menu, click Enter Grades.
To release grades for all users, on the Final Grades page, from the Final Grades context menu, click Release All. To release final grades for a specific user, do one of the following:
Select the check box by the user name and click the Release/Unrelease link.
Select the check box in the Release Final Calculated Grade or Release Adjusted Final Grade column.
Click Save.
OR watch this video for instructions on how to release final grades:
NOTE: There is a slight change in the video instructions. The "Enter Grades" option should be used anywhere in the video where "Grade All" is referenced.
Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.
Image credit: "final grades" by jflorent is dedicated to public domain under CC0 and is a derivative of grade by OpenClipart-Vectors on Pixabay
In a Chronicle of Higher Education article, Kevin Gannon wrote about what he describes as grading jail. He found that he would enter his grading jail around the 13th week of the term. After a career of repeat offenses against efficient and timely grading of student work, he saw that he could only blame himself. He described himself as a hopeless recidivist.
The hard time he served was enough to rehabilitate him, and turn him into a productive member of the grading society. He shared what he learned, hoping to save others from the same fate. He acknowledges that providing students with prompt feedback is a better practice. But too often this does not happen.
Kevin’s three strategies to better manage grading workflow are:
Pre-semester calendaring. Before classes start lay out a calendar for every month of the term. Then using different colors for each course, plot out the due dates for every assignment that you will give throughout the term. A cluster of different colors in a three-day span is a quick visual cue that you should reconsider some due dates.
Rubrics — done well — are your friend. A well-constructed rubric involves a significant investment of time on the front end, but once designed, using it to assess student work will cut grading time. The time saved allows you to concentrate on providing more meaningful individual feedback. Having specific criteria and clearly defined benchmarks provides consistency in grading.
Speech-to-text and voice comments. Using speech-to-text to transcribe comments in real time is one way to provide substantial feedback on a large amount of student work without getting writer's cramp. However, it is even more meaningful to record comments and then share them with individual students via an audio file they can listen to on any device.
Kevin says these three strategies are the academic equivalent of your “get out of jail free” card.
Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.
D2L (the company that owns Brightspace) uses Continuous Delivery to update our Brightspace system. The Continuous Delivery model gives us regular monthly updates allowing for incremental and easily integrated changes with no downtime required for our Brightspace system.
Our Continuous Delivery update occurs on the 4th Thursday of each month. D2L provides release notes to help users stay up-to-date with the changes.
Here are some of the updates in the November 2025/20.25.11 release that were added to our system this month:
1) Announcements – Email a copy of an announcement to your Classlist
In response to multiple Product Idea Exchange (PIE) submissions, when Instructors create a new announcement in a Course Offering, they can now choose to send a copy to all users in their Classlist as an email, sent as if from the instructor themselves.
In the user interface for creating or editing an announcement, a new Send Email Copy checkbox now appears when an instructor creates or edits an announcement.
The new Send email copy checkbox in Brightspace announcement
When an instructor selects the new checkbox, the system emails the content of the announcement to all users in the Classlist, including those who have opted out of announcement notifications, upon publishing. The email will originate from the email address of the person who publishes the announcement.
The checkbox will be automatically deselected when an announcement is copied or edited, and must be selected again before republishing.
Please be aware that if users are already receiving an automated notification email about announcements, this may result in duplicate or similar emails. Users who are not subscribed to receive a notification for announcements will also receive an email, ensuring that important information contained within the announcement is delivered to every learner.
For consistency with automated emails in Intelligent Agents and assignment submissions, the system sends the message to internal email addresses if users have them. If users do not have internal email addresses, the system sends it to their external email address.
Users without a valid email address will not receive an emailed copy of the announcement.
For announcements scheduled to publish at a later date, clicking the Send email copy checkbox emails the copy to users in the Classlist at the time that the announcement is published.
This feature implements the following Product Idea Exchange (PIE) items:
D1923 (Email Notification Option when Creating New News Items)
D3817 (Default email notification when publishing a news item)
2) Assignments – Advanced Assessment now shows when an evaluation has no designated evaluator
A new alert in the assignments user interface now notifies instructors when an evaluation currently has no evaluator assigned, so they can quickly identify the problem and take steps to assign a new evaluator.
This update helps prevent unexpected evaluation errors and improves clarity, especially for institutions with large enrollments and multiple sections.
Previously, if an instructor used Advanced Assessment features to delegate evaluation to a user who later became unenrolled from a course, there was no way to identify which submissions needed to be assigned a new evaluator. Learner submissions could remain unevaluated for extended periods of time, causing confusion and errors.
An example of a warning message when an assignment has no assigned evaluator
3) Brightspace – Progress bar for uploading files
With this release, Brightspace improves visual consistency and accessibility by updating progress bar indicators across several tools. These improvements enhance support for screen readers and assistive technologies.
Visual indicators have been updated in the following areas:
New Content Experience – Upload a file
Quizzes – Add Existing Question
Import Quiz Questions – Upload a file
Quiz Study Support – Check if the quiz meets the study support requirements
Generate Question – Choose a file to generate a question
Content Uploader – Upload a file
Manage Groups – Export progress bar
Upload File (Classic Content) – Upload a file
An example of the progress bar updating as a user adds a module to the Table of Contents in Brightspace, indicating the step-by-step progress
4) Brightspace Editor – Equation editor now uses the latest WIRIS version
The equation editor Instructors and Learners use to compose equations in the Brightspace Editor (WIRIS) has been updated to the latest version, 7.24.0.
This update includes no functional changes to the equation editor, but does include WIRIS defect fixes.
5) Grades – Bulk edit now supports excluding items from final grade
Instructors can now use the Exclude from Final column when bulk editing grade items in the Grades tool. Selecting this option excludes the grade item from the final grade calculation.
Previously, this setting was only available when editing individual grade items. This enhancement helps instructors manage large grade books more efficiently by allowing them to update multiple items at once.
In the Bulk Edit Items and Categories page, select Exclude from Final for each item to omit from the final grade
Note: This option is only available in courses using the Points grading system. Courses using Weighted or Formula grading systems can exclude items by assigning a weight of 0 or excluding them from the formula, respectively.
This feature implements the following PIE items:
D1773 (Bulk Edit Grade Item)
D9984 (Course-level configuration to include/exclude grade from Final Grade)
Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.
Organizing your Grade Book using categories offers significant advantages beyond simply creating headings for your Grade Items. One key benefit is the ability to automatically drop the lowest grade within a category. This blog post will guide you through the process of setting up Grade Categories in Brightspace specifically for this purpose. To follow along, you'll first need to have your related Grade Items grouped within a Category in your Grade Book. If you haven't done this yet, please refer to "Creating Grade Items and Categories" for instructions.
NOTE:
You can only drop grades from Categories in which the items are weighted equally:
If you are using a weighted final grade, you’ll have to distribute weights evenly within the category to drop a grade.
If you are using a total points final grade, you will have to assign equal points to all the items in the category to drop a grade. For this reason, it is not recommended to have items with different maximum point values in the same category, for example, a quiz worth 25 points and another worth 10 points.
Follow these steps to do it.
Drop Grades From a Grade Category:
From the NavBar, click on Grades.
Click New to create a new category, OR click on the arrow to the right of your category name and click on Edit to modify an existing category.
In the Distribution section, choose the “Distribute weight evenly across all items” radio button and then enter the number of low (non-bonus) Grade Items that will be dropped from the category.
Click Save and Close.
Note: The instructions in this blog post work for Grade Items in categories that are equally weighted. If the Category contains Grade Items with unequal weights, you can use the "Bulk Edit Exemptions" option to manually review each student's grades and choose the grade that you want to exempt from the final grade calculations. Step-by-step instructions can be found in this article from the Brightspace Community that explains how to manually drop the lowest grade.
Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.
As the semester winds down, many faculty members find themselves knee-deep in grading. Entering grades into Brightspace may be a time-consuming task, especially when you need to assign the same grade to multiple students. Whether it's a pass/fail assignment, a standardized in-class activity, or a participation grade, manually entering the same score repeatedly can be cumbersome and time-consuming.
In my last blog post, I explained how instructors should input grades and feedback in the Grade Book. Today, I'll share a helpful tip: using the "Set Grades" feature to quickly assign the same grade to multiple students.
Follow these steps to do it.
Give Multiple Students the Same Grade at the Same Time:
From the NavBar, click on Grades.
Click on the arrow on the right of the Grade Item name.
Select Enter Grades.
Select the checkboxes next to the names of the students OR select all of the students at once by clicking on the checkbox above the list of students.
Select Set Grades.
Enter a value in the Grade textbox.
Select Save.
Select Save and Close.
Give Multiple Students the Same Feedback at the Same Time:
From the NavBar, click on Grades.
Click on the arrow on the right of the Grade Item name.
Select Enter Grades.
Select the checkboxes next to the names of the students OR select all of the students at once by clicking on the checkbox above the list of students.
Select Add Feedback.
Enter feedback in the textbox.
Select Save.
Select Save and Close.
NOTE: Giving multiple students the same feedback at the same time as described in this blog post is helpful for giving multiple students, like group members, the same feedback on an assignment/activity. I do not recommend using the Add Feedback functionality in this way if you want or need to provide more personalized details to each student. In that case, you should enter the personalized feedback for each student individually.
Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.
Assessments measure student achievement. They may take the form of traditional assessments such as exams, or quizzes, but may also be part of learning activities such as group projects, discussions, or presentations.
Brightspace has a number of tools instructors can use to assess learners and the Grades tool is useful for assigning and keeping track of learner grades. If you are not familiar with setting up your Grade Book, review Brightspace Tip #542: Grade Book for information.
There are multiple ways to enter grades for learner submissions in Brightspace. Three ways instructors can enter grades in their Brightspace courses are:
Using Quick Eval
Within Individual Tools
In the Grade Book
Quick Eval
Quick Eval is a tool that allows evaluators to see a list of unevaluated learner submissions from all their courses. Submissions from Assignments, Discussions, and Quizzes are displayed in one location to improve efficiency when locating work that requires evaluation and providing feedback to learners. Instructors can use Quick Eval to assess learner submissions.
Within Individual Tools
For assessments that are created using a Brightspace tool, such as Quizzes, Assignments, and Discussions, instructors will associate the assessment with a Grade Item in the Grade Book. The association is made within the tool itself. When you are ready to grade the student’s work, you will grade it within the tool and the grade will automatically transfer over to the Grade Item in the Grade Book.
In the Grade Book
For assessments that occur outside of Brightspace, instructors have to create a Grade Item in the Grade Book, and then manually enter student grades into the Grade Book. Examples of in-class assessments where you may need to manually enter grades in the Grade Book include participation grades, tests administered on-paper, presentations, and demonstrations.
Instructors can manually enter grades for assessments in the Grade Book’s Standard View or Spreadsheet View.
Standard View
The Standard View allows instructors to enter grades by grade item for all students in the course or for an individual student.
The standard view allows instructors to evaluate individual learner submissions. Each submission type has a unique icon and new learner submissions are identified with a dot on the corner of the icon.
Learner submission icons with a new submission indicator dot on the discussion icon
Click the associated icon next to the learner submission to evaluate the submission.
Spreadsheet View
The Spreadsheet View allows instructors to enter grades for all students and all grade items in a single spreadsheet view. For quick edits, click “Switch to Spreadsheet View” (the button toggles back and forth between “Standard View” and “Spreadsheet View.”)
The Spreadsheet View allows instructors to manually enter or modify grades in cells. Instructors can also override previously-entered grades using the Spreadsheet View.
Entering the new or updated grade in the field for the learner and the submission
Spreadsheet View is ideal for entering grades for assessments that occurred outside of Brightspace. Once you’ve entered the grades, save the changes before leaving the page.
Entering Feedback
You can enter feedback by clicking on the arrow to the right of the grade item (column) you want to add feedback to, then select Enter Grades.
Locate the name of the student you want to provide feedback for, then select the pencil icon under the Feedback column and enter the feedback.
The pencil icon opens the feedback dialog box
Once you’ve entered the grades and feedback, save the changes before leaving the page.
NOTE: When entering feedback you have the option to enter private comments that will only be visible to you and users with grading privileges. Learners cannot see private comments.
Important
Remember tool-based assessments should be graded using the respective assessment tool.
Use the Enter Grades tab to easily view all learner grades, grade categories and grade items. From the Enter Grades tab, instructors can assess and evaluate grades for activities conducted outside of Brightspace.
Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.
The instructor’s view of grades is not the same as the learner's view of grades. Did you know you can get a preview of what a learner sees when they view their grades in your course?
To verify what a learner sees when they view their grades, an instructor can Preview the learner's grades.
Follow these steps to do it.
To Preview a learner's grades you should:
On the NavBar, click Grades.
On the Enter Grades page, select "Preview" from the contextual menu associated with a learner name from the table. The Grades will appear in a new pop-up window.
NOTE: If you are meeting with a student and want to hide the grades of the other students, you should use the Grade Book Search to do so.
Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.
November 3 – 7, 2025 is National Distance Learning Week (NDLW). This is the 19th Anniversary of NDLW.
In association with NDLW, the United States Distance Learning Association (USDLA) is offering free webinars focused on how rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI) are reshaping various aspects of education, including teaching, learning, access, and equity in online and hybrid environments. A few other organizations are offering free webinars during NDLW as well.
For more information on the activities and to register for the webinars visit NDLW 2025.
