I usually get a lot of questions from faculty related to setting up their Brightspace courses. In the spirit of starting the academic year with less stress, I offer the following infographic with course design suggestions to reduce your course setup and management stress:
Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.
As you prepare to teach this fall, now is a good time to get started setting up your Brightspace courses. Our Information Technology Center (ITC) has created the fall courses in Brightspace.
NOTE: You should see your fall courses in the My Courses widget. Last month's Continuous Delivery Updates implemented the updated My Courses Widget sort logic. If you do not see your fall courses in your My Courses widget, you should click on the link to "View All Courses" (located at the bottom of the My Courses widget). Verify that you are listed as the instructor for the course in Banner.
To get started, you can post your syllabus, course documents, announcements, and setup your Grade Book in your Brightspace courses. You can also customize your course homepage and/or course image/banner.
If you teach a course that is cross listed you will have a Brightspace course for each cross listing. You can combine the cross listed courses into one Brightspace course so that you can post course materials and grades to one combined Brightspace course. Combining courses may also work for you if you are teaching different sections of the same course and would like to have the different sections combined into one Brightspace course so that you can post course documents and grades in the one combined course. The beginning of the semester is the best time to submit a request to merge your Brightspace courses before you add course materials or grades to the courses.
Additionally, if the fall course you are teaching is the same as one of your previous courses you can copy the entire course (or copy components) into your "empty" Brightspace fall course.
Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.
Each threat of heavy rains and street flooding in our area should be a reminder that course delivery is vulnerable to unplanned events. Potential interruptions to class activities include but are not limited to natural disasters, widespread illness, acts of violence, planned or unexpected construction-related closures, severe weather conditions, and medical emergencies.
Here are a few things you can do in Brightspace to help you prepare should the need arise.
Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.
One of the changes implemented in our system with last week's July Continuous Delivery Updates was the end-of-life status for the old My Courses Widget sort logic. This means the old My Courses sort logic has been retired. With this change, the My Courses Widget now uses the Updated Sort Logic setting by default.
The Updated Sort Logic is intended to better organize the courses in the My Courses widget. The Updated Sort Logic presents both pinned and unpinned courses in the My Courses Widget, promoting the pinned courses to be displayed first in the widget.
The updated sorting logic in the My Courses Widget does not auto-pin courses, and allows the end-user to pin and rearrange courses in an order that makes sense to them. The updated sort logic tries to populate the widget with up-to 12 courses, starting with the user’s pinned courses, then pulling in unpinned courses by enrollment date until the widget contains 12 courses. The result is that most users get a sensible My Courses Widget with no intervention on their part, while pinning and customization is still available for the users who need it.
The Pinned tab appears in the My Courses widget when users pin courses
A new Pinned tab now appears in the My Courses widget. The “Pinned” tab displays only the courses that a user has pinned, similar to the old sort logic. The Pinned tab allows learners and instructors to create a curated view of their pinned courses. The Pinned tab appears in the widget only after a user pins a course in the Course Selector. The tab remains in view until all courses are unpinned. The My Courses widget remembers the last viewed tab and shows that same tab the next time the homepage is viewed. This makes it easy for instructors and learners who only wish to view pinned courses to see those courses upon login.
NOTE: The Pinned tab only appears when a user has one or more course pinned – tabs are not displayed to the user that contain 0 courses.
The View All Courses navigation drills down into the courses by showing manually pinned courses, followed by current enrollments, then future enrollments (if available and visible to the user), then past enrollments (if available or visible to the user) as the default sort. If the user changes the sort order, the filter does not separate pinned courses from other courses based on sort order, filters, and search terms.
Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.
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 July 2021/20.21.7 release that were added to our system this month:
1) Assignments – Add categories in the New Assignment Creation Experience
This feature builds on the Assignments – Brightspace Editor in the new Assignment Creation Experience | New feature that was released in April 2021/20.21.4.
The new assignment creation experience supports the alignment of assignments to categories. Instructors can add new or existing assignment categories when creating or editing a new assignment.
The new assignment creation experience with the ability to align assignments to categories
2) Brightspace Editor – Available in ePortfolio External Comments and Quiz Builder
External users adding comments in Brightspace ePortfolio can now use the new inline limited version of Brightspace Editor.
The Quiz Builder now supports the new inline Editor
The inline Editor in the Quiz Builder
The right-click menu is no longer available when creating tables.
3) My Courses Widget - Updated Sort Logic configuration variable
The d2l.Tools.MyCoursesWidget.UpdatedSortLogic configuration variable has now reached end-of-life status and no longer appears in the Config Variable Browser. With this change, the My Courses Widget now uses only the Updated Sort Logic setting by default.
Previously, the My Courses Widget sorting logic was set by the d2l.Tools.MyCoursesWidget.UpdatedSortLogic configuration variable. By default, this configuration variable has been set to ON since 2018, with the option to revert to the old sorting logic. The option to revert to the previous sorting logic in the My Courses Widget is no longer available with the removal of this configuration variable.
The Pinned tab appears in the My Courses widget when users pin courses
To reduce redundancy in the Quizzes tool, the Introduction field is being phased out. In this release, when an instructor creates and/or edits a quiz, the Introduction field is no longer available.
If any quiz previously had text in the Introduction field, on clicking Edit, the text is automatically appended to the Description field. A message appears indicating that these two fields have been merged. Instructors can review the modified quiz description prior to saving the quiz.
Note: In some interfaces, for example Classic content, the Instructions field is displayed. This Instructions field already maps to the quiz Description field. Hence, there is no change to this workflow.
The Edit Quiz page with the message that appears when you edit a quiz containing an introduction
Note: Check the visibility of the Description field prior to saving the quiz.
When importing a course using Import/Export/Copy Components, text in the quiz Introduction field automatically appends to the quiz Description field. The export and copy workflows remain unchanged.
When viewing a quiz topic in the Classic Content tool, the text in the Introduction field now appears under the Instructions header.
A view of a quiz in the Classic Content tool - text in the Introduction field will appear under the Instructors header
5) Quizzes – Relocation of the Reports Setup functionality
The Report Setup tab on the Edit Quiz page is now available on the context menu of a quiz and reads as Setup Reports.
The Reports option available on the quiz context menu is also updated and reads as View Reports.
The New Quiz page with the Reports Setup tab before the updateThe Quiz context menu before the updateThe updated quiz context menu with the Setup Reports and View Reports options
6) Quizzes - Set grace period time to 0 minutes
When setting an enforced time limit for a quiz, instructors can now set the grace period for a quiz to 0 minutes, in place of the default grace period setting of 5 minutes. Entering a 0 minute grace period flags the quiz attempt as exceeded immediately when the quiz time limit is reached by the learner. Quiz attempt logs display when the learner attempt exceeds the regular time limit, grace period time limit or any extended time limit. Grace period of 0 minutes can be set for quizzes with special access restrictions as well.
Note that setting a grace period can support learner accessibility requirements and other situations, such as slow internet connections when completing quizzes.
Enter 0 in the Grace Period field that appears with the Enforced Time Limit option for a quiz
7) Quizzes - Status and workflow changes for quizzes with ungraded questions
To support instructors who need to manually score questions within quizzes, the following quiz status and quiz grading workflow updates are available:
For quizzes that contain questions that need to be manually scored (such as Written Response questions) AND that have the "Allow attempt to be set as graded immediately upon completion" option disabled, a new Pending Evaluation status appears beside the quiz attempt on the Grade Quiz page.
While evaluating a quiz attempt with unevaluated questions, the instructor can now select Pending evaluations in the Question View drop-down menu to filter for only the questions that require manual evaluation.
Instructors can now filter the Users tab by status. The available filters are: Published, Saved as draft, Pending evaluation and an empty status. The empty status denotes a quiz with auto-scored questions, where all questions are evaluated and there is no question evaluation pending.
The updated quiz status filters appear on the Attempts tabThe new Pending Evaluation filter appears in the Question View drop-down menu to easily locate questions requiring manual evaluation by the instructor
Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.
As we prepare to return to campus this fall, we're also planning to bring back our popular mid-week meditation meeting, with a shift to an earlier time: morning instead of afternoon.
This is an experiment. Many traditions emphasize morning meditation as a way to start the day. That's great — but does it work with your schedule? We'll just have to see. Read on for all the details.
The Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Faculty Development invites you to join us for a regular group meditation. We'll meet in the Meditation Room of the St. Katharine Drexel Chapel each Wednesday morning throughout the 2021 fall semester. Drop in when you can.
What to expect?
As the meditation room is located directly beneath the bell tower, we are using the bells in our meditation. They chime quarterly. Our period of silence begins at 8:30 and ends at 8:45.
But I've never done this before!
You needn't have any experience with meditating; just stop by and give it a try. There's no commitment and no pressure. There's also really no right or wrong way to do it. Just sit quietly. Of course, if you'd like some basic instruction we can help; contact Bart Everson.
Why meditate?
Meditation has numerous well-documented benefits, including stress management, improved emotional balance, increased focus and awareness and increased responsiveness to student needs.
Date: August 25, 2021 - December 15, 2021 (when classes are in session)
Time: 8:30 - 8:45 AM
Location: Meditation Room, St. Katharine Drexel Chapel
A conversation between Pamela Waldron-Moore (Xavier University of Louisiana) and Bart Everson (CAT+FD) on teaching, learning, and a just transition.
Pamela Waldron-Moore is Professor of Political Science at Xavier University of Louisiana, where she has taught since 1998. She also has the distinction of being named the Leslie R. Jacobs Endowed Professor in Liberal Arts Education at her institution. She holds a Ph.D. in political science with specialization in comparative politics and international relations. She has taught a range of courses at the university level in the Caribbean and the United States. Her teaching and research expertise lies in exploration of themes related to the political economy of development, industrialized democracies; international political economy, international law and politics, gender inequality, climate justice, knowledge economics, democratization, global citizenship and African feminisms. The idiographic breadth of her focus includes Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America; Eastern Europe, and the Southern United States. Empirically, race, ethnicity, gender, class and culture are at the intersections of her analyses on perceptions of environmental risk, economic insecurity, gender inequity and strategies for reimagining an international economic order in pursuit of global social justice. She is published in several peer reviewed journals and is an annual contributor to discourses on transformative pedagogy. She is trained in the implementation of mental health practices and approaches to restorative justice within the academy. Growing up in Georgetown, Guyana, she has served as a career diplomat representing her homeland at the United Nations and the Court of St. James, London. Her hobbies are global travel, poetry, elocution, and exercise with Zumba. She has received Keynote Speaker awards for invited addresses to women’s leadership organizations and won the prestigious 2018 Jewel and James Prestage Mentorship Award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists.
Bart Everson is a media artist and creative generalist at Xavier University's Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Faculty Development. His recent work draws on integrative learning, activism, critical perspectives on technology, and Earth-based spiritual paths.
VoiceThread (VT) transitioned to new VoiceThread assignments on yesterday (June 30th). The new VoiceThread assignments are a major overhaul and redesign of the entire experience. VoiceThread has added lots of new features, tightened the integration with our learning management system, and streamlined workflows to better guide everyone through the assignments process.
The new interface for the VoiceThread Assignment types
What do you get in this automatic update to new Assignments feature? First and foremost, none of your past assignments will break! You and your students will start seeing the upgraded interfaces described in the videos below, but no work will be lost, and everyone can continue completing and grading existing assignments without interruption. Just keep in mind that old assignments will retain old features and policies. To take advantage of all new policies and features, instructors will need to build a new assignment. Once you update, the new assignments you create will use all new features.
Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.
Traditional testing relies on multiple choice, true/false, and written response type questions. In authentic assessments, students apply concepts to real world situations by completing meaningful task-based assessments. This type of assessment engages a variety of skills and effectively measures higher levels of learning than traditional assessment.
Authentic assessments are widely viewed as pedagogically superior, yet multiple-choice assessments are often preferable to instructors and students alike.
In an Inside Higher Ed opinion piece, Eric Loepp challenges instructors to rethink the premise that multiple-choice questions cannot meet the standards of authentic assessment. He argues that there are situations where higher-order multiple-choice questions can be used for assessment. If this has piqued your interest, you can read more in his “The Benefits of Higher-Order Multiple-Choice Tests” opinion piece for more information.
Image credit: Exam by Alberto G. licensed under CC BY 2.0
![[headshot]](https://i0.wp.com/cat.xula.edu/food/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Waldron-Moore-Dr.-Pamela.jpeg?resize=250%2C262)
