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 2020/20.20.6 release that were added to our system this month:
1) Assignments - Create and edit experience
The create and edit Assignments page has an updated look and feel. The classic tabbed view has been transformed into a new, fully immersive page layout.
The primary panel on the left contains frequently used fields that are always displayed. These fields are most relevant to learners and are the core details instructors want to add; a due date, instructions, and attachments.
The panel on the right organizes additional, more advanced options such as start and end dates, rubrics, annotation tools, and Turnitin. When these options are collapsed, summary text provides details about which settings are active and subtle hints that aid in the discovery of additional settings. As a result, you can see everything at a glance with little to no scrolling, and without having to navigate through any tabs.
The new experience streamlines the process of linking assignments to your gradebook and builds on a pattern first introduced in Activity Feed. When you enter a score, your assignment is added to Grades, and the name and score are automatically synced for you. If you traditionally create grade items in advance, support for selecting existing grades and categories is also available.
2) Rubrics – Accessibility improvements in Rubric creation workflow
The following updates have been made to improve the accessibility of the rubric creation workflow:
- The button next to the page title is now labeled so a screen reader reads “Actions for [title]” when the button has the focus.
- The Overall Score now has the proper heading level so screen reader users can navigate directly to it from the heading list. Previously, users were required to tab through all previous headings in the list first.
- There is no longer a skipped heading level between Rubric Levels and Criterion (both level 3) and Standards (previously level 5).
- In the rubric preview window, Criterion Score has been added as a column header. Previously, the column did not have any header text.
3) Widgets - My Courses and Updates widgets display unevaluated assignment submissions
The My Courses Widget and the Updates widget now display new, unevaluated assignment submissions instead of unread assignment submission files to instructors. This change aligns the widgets with the Assignments page and the Quick Eval tool to consistently notify users of unevaluated submissions and help them to track their work.
If you are interested in getting more information about these and all the June Continuous Delivery updates, refer to the Brightspace Platform June 2020/20.20.6 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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