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 June 2019/20.19.6 release that were added to our system this month:
1) Discussions - Save feedback in draft state when associated with rubrics
This feature provides instructors the option to save feedback as a draft on discussions associated with rubrics before publishing it to learners. Now, when instructors add feedback for discussions with rubrics, the Save Draft and Publish buttons display. This feature extends existing Save Draft and Publish options available in other assessment tools to discussions that are only associated with a rubric.
Note that if a discussion topic is associated with more than one rubric, then both the rubrics are now visible in the same pop-up dialogue. Previously, the rubrics had to be opened individually to complete evaluation.
2) Quick Eval – Improvements to Quick Eval list
To improve the Quick Eval experience, the following updates are now available:
- A Draft icon displays in Quick Eval for discussion posts that have feedback in draft status
- Evaluators only see discussion posts and quiz attempts from learners in sections they are enrolled in. This matches the behavior of assignment submissions.
3) Quizzes - Arithmetic and significant figures questions round up from .5
Arithmetic and Significant Figures questions in quizzes now round up from .5 by default. Previously these types of questions were rounded down from .5.
4) Rubrics - Consistent assessment experience for Discussions
When instructors use the updated rubrics grading experience with Discussions, the following workflows present the same assessment experience:
- if a rubric is attached to a discussion that is not associated with a grade item
- if a rubric is attached to a discussion and associated with a grade item, but the instructor clicks on the rubric name to assess instead of topic score
In these workflows, the same assessment screen displays, with the details, score, feedback, post information, and all rubrics available to grade.
If you are interested in getting more information about these and all the June Continuous Delivery updates, refer to the Brightspace Platform June 2019/20.19.6 Release Notes.
Additionally, refer to the Brightspace Release Notes for Continuous Delivery Releases, for details about current, past, and to preview upcoming continuous delivery updates.
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View current, past, and preview upcoming Continuous Delivery release notes
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