Brightspace Tip #462: August Continuous Delivery Updates

1) Assignments – Assessment workflows enhanced and available in all environments

Advanced Assessments help instructors and administrators to better manage courses with large class sizes and multiple evaluators, delegate and manage evaluator workflows, and reduce bias in marking.

Advanced Assessments allows instructors to:

• Assign multiple evaluators to evaluate a single assignment submission when creating or editing assignments.
• Choose which evaluators can publish grades for the assignment from the Assignment tool by setting them as publishers.
• Match evaluators to learners.
• Choose from two multi-evaluator workflows: One Shared Evaluation (Co-Marking) or Multiple Individual Evaluations.

For more information, refer to the Create an assignment topic and watch the Assign Evaluators and Publishers in Assignments | Instructor video.

Prior to the release of Advanced Assessments, there was no ability to create and evaluate delegated co-mark or multi-evaluate assignments.

In the May 2024/20.24.5 release, Advanced Assessment features were released to test, development, and staging (non-production) environments.

With this release, Advanced Assessment workflows for Assignments are available in all production environments of Brightspace. New features that are added to Advanced Assessments with the August release include:

• Turnitin integrations
• Accessibility improvements, including assistive technologies for keyboard-only users

Refer to the Advanced Assessment for Assignments in test, development, and staging environments of Brightspace blog post for details.

This feature implements the following PIE items:

• D6901 (Restrict Teaching Assistant to Publish The Assignment Grade)
• D142 (Multiple Graders in Dropbox)
• D6977 (Assignments Role Permissions: Separate See/View from Submit)
• D6654 (Auditor to view submissions of Assignments)

2) Assignments – Email status message no longer displayed after an assignment submission

With this release, the Confirmation Email Sent Successfully message is no longer displayed for learners in the Email Status field after they submit an assignment. However, when a learner submits an assignment, an email as a receipt of the submission is still sent to them.

Previously, even if a confirmation email was not sent to a learner, they also received the Confirmation Email Sent Successfully message in the Email Status field on their Submission History page.

3) Discussions – Reading View improvements

To improve the user experience for learners, this release introduces several updates to the learner Reading View in Discussions. These improvements include the following:

• The Start New Thread button is duplicated at the bottom of the page when viewing a topic, eliminating the need to scroll back to the top of the page.
• The Add Attachments section is opened by default when creating a new post or new topic. Previously learners had to open the section manually to add attachments.
• The Add Attachments section is wider on screen when learners create a new thread.

This feature implements the following PIE item:

• D8141 (Add a second Start a New Thread button to the bottom all threads)