If you are teaching a face-to-face class, you may be thinking about how can you put some of your course materials online in a hurry in case of an unplanned event. The Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University developed a resource with suggestions on how you can go about putting some of your course content online when you are in a hurry. The resource includes some Brightspace specific examples to give you ideas on how to move some of your course components online.
We have a series of Brightspace workshops planned over the next few weeks. Visit our events page to sign up for an upcoming Brightspace workshop.
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.
A common assignment given in an online class is for students to participate in a discussion forum. Most discussion forums are setup so that students are asked to respond to a prompt and reply to posts from their classmates. Do you want to setup your online discussion forums to encourage substantive discussions among your students?
In a recent Inside Higher Ed blog post, Dr. Steven Mintz (Senior Adviser to the President of Hunter College for Student Success and Strategic Initiatives) writes,
We don’t simply want our students to respond to a question, but, rather to engage with the course material and take part in a genuine dialogue.
In his blog post, he goes on to give strategies for better ways to embed dialogue and interaction into asynchronous online classes. The strategies he suggests are:
Provide Better Prompts – Prompts that involve higher-order thinking skills and require the students to apply, analyze, compare and contrast, critique, evaluate, explain, infer, predict, propose, solve, and synthesize.
Ask Students to Do Something – Ask students to solve a problem, analyze a case study, take part in a debate, adopt a role or relate the topic to a current event.
Raise the Stakes – Ask students to rate individual posts. Nothing focuses the online student’s mind better than a sense that their writing is being evaluated anonymously by their classmates. You can also raise the stakes by limiting the number of students who participate in each discussion and asking the rest of the class to provide feedback on the discussion as a whole (not on individual postings).
Reimagine How Online Conversations Are Displayed – Help students better visualize the discussion by displaying networks of comments or use word clouds to underscore the key issues that have arisen.
Adopt a Different Model – Perhaps it’s a mistake to transpose a mode of communication that works well in face-to-face, synchronous or one-on-one contexts into the asynchronous realm. There are other ways to create a sense of community, promote collaboration and elicit meaningful ideas and debate.
Instructors can provide feedback directly in submitted assignments using the Annotations tool. Previously the only option for annotating assignments was by using the Assignment Grader app on your mobile device.
Features available in the Annotations Toolbar are:
Text Highlighting
Freehand Drawing
Text Annotation
Note Annotation
The ability to annotate on assignment submissions will assist instructors in providing valuable feedback to students.
Instructors will see the Annotations toolbar within the Assignments Evaluation Submission screen.
Example of an assignment with annotationsAnnotations Toolbar
NOTE: The following file types are supported by the Annotations tool:
.doc
.docx
.rtf
.odt
.ppt
.pps
.pptx
.ppsx
.odp
.xls
.xlsx
.txt
.jpg
.jpeg
.png
.tif
.tiff
.gif (once converted to a PDF, only the first frame of the .gif displays)
.pdf
Students have to submit their assignments in one of the supported file types in order for the instructor to use the built-in Annotations tool.
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.
Use the Assignments tool to help you set and manage deadlines, unclutter your inbox, and save trees.
The Assignments tool is an efficient way to manage and collect your student's individual and group assignments digitally. Brightspace's Assignments Tool allows instructors to create a secure location for students to submit class assignments.
The Assignments tool allows instructors to set up a place for students to submit their assignments digitally, with the ability to:
Control the window for submission
Facilitate individual submissions or group submissions (provided the groups have been set up using the Groups tool first)
Collect and assess submissions (with a connection to the Grades tool, if needed)
Enable plagiarism detection through Turnitin
Follow these steps to do it.
To create an assignment submission folder using the old assignment creation experience:
On the NavBar (of the course you want to create a submission folder), click Activities and then choose Assignments from the drop-down menu.
Click New Submission Folder.
Enter a Name for your submission folder.
Select a Folder Type.
Do any of the following:
Select a Category or click New Category to organize your assignment submission folders.
Select a Grade Item, or click New Grade Item.
To assign a score, enter a value in the Out Of field.
To associate a rubric to the folder, click Add Rubric, or Create Rubric in New Window.
Enter instructions in the Instructions field.
Add attachments in the Attached Files area.
Expand Show Submission Options and select the appropriate settings.
Enter your email address in the Notification Email field to receive an email message when a new submission is uploaded to this folder.
Choose the option to hide student names during assessment, if appropriate.
Note: You can add the Turnitin plagiarism detection feature to the assignment submission folder using the options in the Turnitin tab. Follow these instructions to enable Turnitin for the assignment submission folder.
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 #1 Brightspace complaint we hear from students is that faculty don't post their grades online. When students don’t receive meaningful and timely feedback about their coursework, they are unable to make the necessary adjustments to improve their performance.
Last semester's "Grade Book and College Readiness" training session focused on 1) why using the Grade Book to provide students with their standing in the course is important and 2) how to setup and enter grades in the Grade Book.
In case you missed the training session or if you attended the training session and want to recap what was covered, you can review these resources:
Homework that was to be completed before the workshop
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 a few updates in the February 2020/20.20.2 release that were added to our system this month:
1) Assignments - Streamlined access to inline feedback
To streamline access to assignment feedback, learners can now immediately access inline feedback from User Progress, Grades, and Assignments. From these tools, the View Inline Feedback link takes the learner directly to the annotations view (or Turnitin viewer, if that is the tool used to provide feedback). The inline feedback also includes a link to the file for the assignment, so learners know which document contains the feedback. Previously, the View Inline Feedback link took the learner to the Assignment feedback summary page, where they had to click a second link to view the feedback.
Class Progress view for instructors and learners displaying the View Inline Feedback link, which now opens directly in the annotation viewGrades view for learners displaying the View Inline Feedback link, which now opens directly in the annotation view
Assignments view for learners displaying the View Inline Feedback link, which now opens directly in the annotation view
2) EXIF data warning appears when uploading images
In some instances, when users upload .jpg files in any file upload area across Brightspace Learning Environment, an EXIF (exchangeable image file) data warning appears informing the user that the file may contain geolocation data.
3) Course Administration - Course Reset
Course Reset is a new tool that enables a course administrator to reset a course back to an empty shell. Course Reset permanently deletes course content, activities, associated files, user grades, user progress records, and interaction data from the course in a single bulk process. Users can optionally choose to include course groups, and/or course widgets, navbars, and homepages as part of the course reset process, or leave them in the course.
The Course Reset process does not affect user enrollments, sections and section enrollment, course associations, course paths associated to the course, user progress in linked SCORM objects, LOR objectsin Brightspace Learning Repository, portfolio objects saved to a users' Portfolio or ePortfolio, ePortfolio sharing groups or forms, email/instant messages sent to or from users in the course, LTI tool provider information, and Activity Feed posts.
Course Reset permanently deletes the course data and it will not appear in any reporting or data sets after the course reset process is complete. After performing a course reset, an Audit Log maintains a record of the course reset action, including the date and time of the course reset, the data that was selected for deletion, the user who performed the course reset, and any errors that occur during the course reset process.
4) Grades – Tab delimited import into Gradebook
Users can now import tab separated value (.tsv) files into Gradebook. Previously, users could only import comma delimited files into Gradebook, which created a usability issue in some international regions.
5) Quick Eval - Course level filtering
When opening Quick Eval within a course, only the list of activities and submissions related to that course display. This helps instructors easily view and evaluate submissions on a course-by-course basis. If an instructor wants to view all submissions across all their courses, they can still use the More Options menu to see the Multi-Course Quick Eval, or open Quick Eval from outside of a course.
6) Quick Eval - Dismiss activities until next submission
Instructors can now remove items from their Quick Eval list until a new submission is received for the activity. The removed activity appears on the Dismissed Activities list and can be restored at any time. Once a new submission arrives to the Quick Eval list, the previously dismissed activity reappears there.
Previously, instructors could only select a specific date or forever when dismissing an activity. This new option provides instructors with an additional option to manage the submissions on their Quick Eval list.
7) Video Note – Automatic Closed Captioning
To improve accessibility, video notes now provide automatic closed captioning for newly created videos and the ability to manually add or update closed captioning for all previously recorded videos. After video processing, users can view closed captions using video player controls.
In addition, users can now download a transcript and the closed caption file associated with a video independent of Video Notes.
Localized closed captioning is available for the following languages:
US English (en-US)
British English (en-GB)
Canadian French (fr-CA)
German (de-DE)
Brazilian Portuguese (pt-BR)
Korean (ko-KR)
Italian (it-IT)
Spanish (es-US)
Modern Standard Arabic (ar-SA)
Russian (ru-RU)
Japanese (ja-JP)
Turkish (tr-TR)
Dutch (nl-NL)
Chinese Mandarin (zh-CN)
Notes:
Canadian English is not available for closed captioning and defaults to en-US.
Chinese Traditional (zh-TW) closed captions are not currently available and defaults to zh-CN.
Mexican Spanish (es-MX) closed captions may not be available and defaults to US Spanish (es-US)
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.
I have written a few blog posts about the importance of using appropriately licensed materials in your courses and for your digital projects. Finding quality images, audio, video, etc. can be daunting. When you find something that you want to use, you must make sure the license allows you to do so.
I recently completed the Creative Commons (CC) Certificate course. The Certificate is an in-depth course about CC licenses, open practices and the ethos of the Commons. I was excited when the opportunity to take this 10-week Certificate course came about. I felt knowing more about Creative Commons would help me to better understand and use CC licensed works appropriately. Also, I wanted to be able to apply CC licenses to my own work. While I knew some things about Creative Commons before starting the course, I realized as I got into the course that there was a lot I didn’t know about CC licenses.
I’m writing this blog post to share information and resources that may help you understand more about CC licenses.
What is a Creative Commons (CC) license? A CC license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that they (the author) have created.
All rights are reserved with copyright. Re-use requires permission from the copyright owner. Whereas, some rights are reserved with CC licenses. Re-use is permitted under the specification shared in the Creative Commons license. The image above describes how CC licenses relate to traditional copyright and the public domain.
If this has this piqued your interest, check out our Creative Commons (CC) Wiki Resource for additional information about CC licenses and CC licensed works.
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 a few updates in the January 2020/20.20.1 release that were added to our system this month:
1) Support for Internet Explorer | Removed
As of January 1st, Brightspace has ended support for Internet Explorer. All versions of Internet Explorer will no longer be able to access Brightspace.
2) Brightspace Pulse – Additional languages supported
To provide consistent language support with the Brightspace platform, Brightspace Pulse is now available in the following additional languages:
Arabic (Saudi Arabia)
Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
Danish
French (France)
German (Germany)
Japanese
Korean
Swedish
Turkish
Previously, Brightspace Pulse was only available in: English (U.S.), Spanish (Latin America), French (Canada), Portuguese (Brazil), and Dutch.
3) Classlist – Total number of users field and floating buttons
To improve ease of use, the total number of users for their selection (whole class, section, group) now appears in a field at the bottom of the Classlist page for at-a-glance viewing to help instructors keep track of the total number of learners, which may extend beyond the users visible on the page. On the Print Classlist and Email Classlist pages, the clickable Print and Email buttons now float consistently on screen, to ensure easy access to these actions without excessive scrolling.
4) Copy Course Components - Add validation logic to the copy process
Copy Course Components now contains a validation logic step to the course copy process, which can inform users if they performed a copy from the source previously, avoiding unnecessary duplication of copied course components.
5) Discussions – Assessment consistency changes
When assessing discussions, instructors have new multi-select options to Publish Feedback and Retract Feedback. In the Status column, the Draft / Published checkbox has been replaced by information on the date when feedback was saved as draft or published. These changes are visible on both the Users and Assessments tabs. The Save, Save and Close, and Cancel buttons have also been removed as their functionality has been replaced by the Publish Feedback and Retract Feedback options.
Previous view when assessing a discussion topic
Updated view when assessing a discussion topic
6) Grades – Export sorting options
This feature introduces the ability to sort exported gradebooks based on the following options: OrgDefinedID, Username, Last Name, and First name. The sort options available are based on the User Information Privacy permissions for the role.
7) Groups – Self-enrollment group capacity, start dates and descriptions
This feature includes three improvements to Groups:
Group members can now see the description of their group. For self-enrolled groups, group members will now see the group description at all times, including before and after enrollment. For other group types, instructors can now choose to display the description to members of the group. This visible group description setting is off by default for non-self-enrollment groups. Previously, all group descriptions were hidden from group members.
An instructor can now increase or decrease the capacity for self-enrollment groups after they have been created, and prior to the group sign-up expiry date. Decreasing a group size to an amount smaller than has already signed up for a group will not re-allocate users to other groups. Previously, self-enrollment groups were not editable after they were created.
Instructors can set Start dates for self-enrollment groups. This feature allows them to schedule self-enrollment groups availability, ensuring learners are prepared and have equal opportunity to self-enroll.
8) Quick Eval – Dismiss activities from list
To improve the ability to manage items on their Quick Eval list, instructors can now select items that appear in their Quick Eval list and remove them temporarily or permanently. Instructors can view their dismissed items in the Dismissed Activities List and restore them to the Quick Eval list at any time.
9) Quizzes – Synchronization with Grades
Quiz scores and feedback entered in Grades now synchronize automatically with Quizzes. To further streamline the workflow, the Overall Feedback fields in Grades and Quizzes are now consolidated, and the Grade Item Public Comments field has been removed from Grades. All comments entered in the Overall Feedback field in Grades synchronizes automatically with the Overall Feedback field in Quizzes. This update creates a more direct workflow and aligns Quizzes with the consistent feedback experience implemented in Assignments and Discussions. Refer to the blog post Improving Consistency Of Synchronization Between Grades And Quizzes Tool (20.20.01 – January Release) for more information.
Note: Synchronization only occurs for new grade entries. Existing grade data for quizzes will not be migrated due to the high impact to all past data and reports.
10) Rubrics – Share rubrics with other org units during creation
When creating new rubrics, users can now share the rubric created at the organization level with other org units (courses). The rubric creation process provides the capability to either share or, conversely, block rubrics from being shared with other org units (courses). Previously, this was only possible by using the legacy rubric editor.
The Add Org Units button enables users to make the rubric available to other org units
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.
Increase Efficiency - Rubrics are built into the grading workflow. Rubrics click-and-score simplicity saves time.
Provide Consistent and Quality Feedback - Rubrics enable instructors to provide consistent evaluation and contextual feedback to students.
Promote 21st Century Skills - Rubrics make it easier to assign essay questions, individual and group assignments, and discussion forums as assessment activities which foster critical thinking and collaboration.
Rubrics allow instructors to establish set criteria for grading assignments; instructors can attach rubrics to submission folders so that the criteria are available to students before they submit their assignment.
Weighted analytic rubric creation example
Rubrics contain criteria that list the attributes on which an assignment will be assessed and levels that list the standards each criterion must meet. A specific grade or score is usually assigned to each level. In Brightspace, you can use a rubric to calculate scores for multiple criteria to determine an overall score for an assignment.
Grade using a rubric example
Rubrics can be used to display the number of points students were awarded for each criterion after the assignment is graded and rubrics can also be used to provide customized feedback.
Instructors can choose to have the rubrics visible to students at any time, only after grading has been completed, or not shown to the students at all.
NOTE: The Brightspace Rubrics tool is different from Turnitin Rubrics.
Follow these steps to do it.
To create a rubric you should:
On the navbar, click Course Admin.
Click Rubrics.
On the Rubrics page, click New Rubric.
Enter a name for your rubric.
Change the status of your rubric, if necessary.
Choose the rubric Type and Scoring method.
Enter the criteria, levels, criteria/level details, and initial feedback for your rubric.
Enter details for the Overall Score feedback.
Click Options and choose the options for your rubric.
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.
Many instructors are using reflective journaling as a teaching strategy. Reflective journaling is used as a means of aiding reflection, deepening students' understanding and stimulating critical thinking.
Brightspace does not have a Journal tool. However, you can setup private discussion forums for journaling using the Groups and Discussions tools. A private discussion forum is the same as any other discussion forum, except that only the instructor and an individually assigned student have access to the posted threads and replies. A private discussion forum ensures that students cannot see each other’s posts, but instructors can still respond and assign grades to the discussion threads.
IMPORTANT: Each group in Brightspace has a maximum capacity of 200 participants and is restricted to 200 groups per category. You WILL NOT be able to set up private discussions for journaling if your enrollment is more than 200.
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.
