Brightspace Tip #363: December Continuous Delivery Updates

1) Assignments – Consolidate availability dates

This feature updates the assignment availability dates to be consistent with the new availability date model, which was previously added to Discussions. Instructors can now include availability dates in the Calendar and have greater control over the behavior of availability dates for their learners. As a result, instructors can:

• Stop late submissions.
• Let learners view assignment information and submissions after it ends.
• Schedule the visibility of an assignment.
• Allow learners to view an assignment while preventing them from attempting it.
• Post the start and end of an assignment to the Calendar.

The Assignment list page for both instructors and learners now contain all activity dates and date settings, including:

• Access restricted
• Submission restricted
• Hidden

Previously, most Brightspace tools restricted access to assignments outside of availability dates with a manually managed visibility toggle (except the New Content Experiences, which will continue to hide both access restricted and hidden assignments).

Instructors can choose the default settings for availability dates for any new assignment. The settings are available on the Availability Date Defaults page, which can be found under Course Admin.

Important: Making a change on this page will not affect the availability dates of any previously-created assignment or discussion, but it will affect the date properties of special access dates.

NOTE: For more details about changes to Assignments, refer to: New Assignments Date Feature - Updated Date Availability, Visibility, and Access Options.

This feature implements the following PIE items: D6797, D8173, D8004 (partial), D7195, D4958, D7273, D4900, D4217, D3670, D3153, D2536, D1746, D1672 (partial), D1396, D3398.

2) Quicklinks – Easily find audio-video content with improved Quicklink filters

To help users more easily find Media Library content, users can now use improved Brightspace Editor Insert Quicklink filters to better locate content available in Media Library. These new filters include:

• Ownership: Filter by the owner of the audio-video (AV) content (administrator only).

Note: The owner of AV content is the person who initially uploaded or added the content.

• Content Type: Filter by either audio or video content type.
• Source: Filter by where content was added from. Multiple filters can be selected:
  • Content: Filter by AV content uploaded from the Content tool and Lessons.
  • Media Library: Filter by AV content uploaded or created in Media Library.
  • Audio or Video Note: Filter by content created using Audio and Video Note.
  • Imported: Filter by content added from course imports.
  • Other: Filter by content added prior to the addition of source tracking.
• Date Modified: Filter by date modified. This changes to Date Deleted on the Recycle Bin screen.
• Date Created

Previously, the Insert Quicklink feature included in Brightspace Editor did not provide the ability to filter Medial Library content.

3) Intelligent Agents – Improved consistency with the removal of legacy scheduling options

Building on the Intelligent Agents – Create Agent page facilitates more flexible scheduling and frequency options | Updated feature released in April 2022 / Version 20.22.4, this feature cleans up the Intelligent Agent scheduling interface by removing the unused Scheduled Agents Run Time area from the Intelligent Agents Settings page. This also entails the removal of the unused d2l.Tools.IntelligentAgents.PreferredRunHour configuration variable.

Clients with a course export package containing Intelligent Agents created prior to the 20.22.4 release, those agents are now imported without a schedule. Previously, these agents' schedules were supported based on the PreferredRunHour configuration.