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 March 2022/20.22.3 release that were added to our system this month:
1) Announcements — Create new announcements quickly with new Copy option
This feature adds a new Copy option in the context menu of an announcement in both the Announcements tool and the Announcements widget. The Copy option is applicable to both course level and global announcements. This only appears when you are in the org unit where the announcement was created.
Users click Copy, which opens a new edit announcement page in draft mode with the details of the original announcement copied over. The following details are copied:
- Headline, with "Copy of " appended to the front
- Content
- Display Author checkbox setting
- Show Start Date setting
- Attachments
- Release Conditions
Start dates and/or end dates are not copied over. No notifications are triggered by this action until the edit page is saved.
Previously, users had to manually select the content of an announcement and paste it into announcement creation.
This feature implements PIE item D4608 – Ability to Copy Announcements.
2) Content — Media Library added to Classic Content Experience
This feature adds the Media Library to the Classic Content Experience, which is accessible by navigating to Existing Activities > Media Library.
For more information about the Media Library functionality, refer to Evolving The Audio-Video Experience in Brightspace Community.
3) Content - Workflow improvements to creating media topics
When creating a new video or audio topic in Content, instructors no longer must wait for the uploaded media file to finish processing to continue creating the topic. While the media file remains unavailable during processing, instructors can navigate away from the upload page to work on other content creation tasks. If another user attempts to access the media file in the topic before processing is complete, a message prompts them to wait for the media file to become available. When processing is complete (or the uploaded media file is invalid or corrupted), a notification displays from Update alerts on the navbar, with a link to the organization home page. Previously, instructors had to wait for a media file to complete processing before they could continue creating the topic. Also, a lack of status information about the media file processing caused some instructors to upload media files multiple times, believing that the processing had completed or failed.
If you are interested in getting more information about these and all the March Continuous Delivery updates, refer to the Brightspace Platform March 2022/20.22.3 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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