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 some of the updates in the June 2025/20.25.06 release that were added to our system this month:
1) Awards – Replacement strings for award issuer on certificates
Administrators and instructors can now personalize certificates and certificate templates in the Awards tool using new replacement strings. The {IssuerFirstName} and {IssuerLastName} strings insert the first and last name of the user who manually issues a certificate to a learner.
For manually issued certificates, the issuer name will utilize the name of the user that issued the certificate. In cases where a certificate using these replacement strings is conditionally released, the issuer name areas of the certificate will utilize the name of the account set by the d2l.Tools.Awards.AwardUserId configuration variable.
Note:
The replacement strings use preferred names if they are configured at the organization level.
If the issuer updates their name, the name that displays on the certificate reflects the current name setting at the time of issuance. Previously issued certificates do not update.
Depending on the certificate template, the inserted text may extend beyond the text box borders. Administrators and instructors may need to adjust the template layout to ensure issuer names appear correctly.
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.
Brightspace has a variety of formative and summative assessment tools available for instructors to use in their courses. You may be wondering which tool you should use. This blog post explains the difference between the Quizzes, Surveys, and Self-Assessments (SA) tools to help you determine which of the tools is the best tool to meet your needs.
A Quiz provides students with a score. Quizzes can be linked to the Grade Book to affect the final grade, but are not required to be linked to the Grade Book. This tool is commonly used for summative assessments (i.e., quizzes, tests, exams).
Surveys are not graded or scored, but do provide results to the instructor. Survey results can be viewed and downloaded as needed. Surveys can be anonymous.
Self-Assessments is a formative assessment tool that enables instructors to provide learners with a series of questions and give immediate feedback to their responses. A Self-Assessment is solely for the purpose of the learner to assess their understanding of the content. Instructors CANNOT view the results of a Self-Assessment, but they are able to see who has taken the Self-Assessment and the time spent on it. The omission of numeric evaluation enables learners to make reflective learning and course material comprehension their main priorities during a Self-Assessment.
The following table compares the feedback and reporting for each tool:
Quizzes
Surveys
Self-Assessments
Feedback for learner
Feedback is released based on the options set by instructor. Feedback can be setup to be instant (upon submission) or delayed.
Feedback is released after completion in the form of a report.
Feedback is provided immediately after answering question.
Reporting for instructor
Reporting for Instructors – yes, instructors can see summative feedback on scores and individual questions.
Reporting for Instructors – yes, reports are generated, and can be done so anonymously.
Reporting for Instructors – yes, but limited to who has taken SA and the time spent; instructors CANNOT view results of the SA.
This table provides some use cases for Quizzes, Surveys, and Self-Assessments:
Tool
Use Case
Quizzes
Measuring knowledge acquisition: Assess factual recall, comprehension, and application of learned concepts. Assess skills for the purpose of determining whether instruction has been effective.
Evaluating critical thinking: Open ended questions requiring analysis, synthesis, or evaluation can assess higher-order thinking skills.
Standardized test: Deliver high-stakes tests with secure features like time limits, question randomization, paging, and integration with lockdown browsers.
Formative assessment: Create low-stakes quizzes for students to practice and receive immediate feedback. Assess skills for the purpose of identifying areas needing improvement.
Surveys
Gauging student understanding: Use anonymous surveys to assess student comprehension of course material before, during, or after a lesson.
Gathering opinions on teaching methods: Evaluate the success of specific teaching approaches or gather suggestions for improvement.
Course satisfaction surveys: Collect feedback on student experience with the course content, delivery, and overall effectiveness.
Self-Assessments
Promoting metacognition: Encourage students to reflect on their learning progress, strengths, and weaknesses through self-evaluation activities.
Identifying learning gaps: Allow students to assess their own understanding of key concepts before moving on to new material.
Personalized learning: Use self-assessment results to tailor learning experiences or provide targeted resources based on individual needs.
By understanding the strengths of each tool, instructors can select the most effective tool for the job.
A Note About the Question Library
The Question Library is a central repository that stores and archives questions which you can reuse within a course. You can create multiple sections within the Question Library to organize your questions by type and topic, making it easier for you to find, use, and reuse questions in your quizzes, surveys, and self-assessments.
As a better practice for storage, organization, and easy access, I recommend that you create all your questions using the Question Library. You can also consolidate questions created within the Quizzes, Surveys, and Self-Assessments tools by importing them back into the Question Library.
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.
Image credit: image by StockSnap from Pixabay (image cropped)
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 some of the updates in the May 2025/20.25.05 release that were added to our system this month:
1) Assignments – Retract feedback in bulk on the Submissions page
The Submissions page in the Assignments tool now aligns with Discussions and Quizzes, allowing instructors to retract feedback in bulk. This enhancement improves consistency and eliminates the need to use multiple tools for retraction tasks.
The bulk Retract Feedback option allows instructors to choose how many learners to retract published feedback from.
Selective retraction is also supported. Instructors can select users by checking the box next to their names and then clicking More Actions > Retract Feedback.
The More Actions > Retract All option retracts feedback for all users, regardless of which users are selected.
From the Submissions page, click More Actions and select Retract All to remove published feedback in bulk.
After clicking Retract All, instructors are notified of the number of evaluations to be retracted and must confirm by clicking Retract.
A confirmation dialog displays the number of learners affected. Click Retract to proceed or Cancel to exit.
Previously, instructors could only retract feedback individually in the Assignments tool.
This feature implements the following PIE items:
D1361 (Allow method to bulk unpublish dropbox feedback)
D5593 (Retract Assignment Feedback in Bulk)
2) Quizzes – Improved quiz monitoring with Session IDs in Attempt Logs
This release introduces the new d2l.Tools.Quizzes.ShowSessionId (Org Unit) configuration variable, which allows administrators to control whether instructors can view the Session ID column in quiz attempt logs.
When enabled, instructors can use session IDs to discern when learners have multiple sessions within a quiz attempt, helping detect potential academic dishonesty.
Check the Session ID column when viewing Attempt Logs > Detailed.
3) Quizzes – Enhanced Learner Submission View
The quiz submission page now features a sleeker, modernized layout. The previous banner image has been replaced with a checkmark icon, along with other visual updates.
The quiz submission page before this update.The quiz submission page after this update.
4) Groups – Export group enrollment data
Instructors can now export group enrollment data from the Groups tool for group-specific class lists and contact list creation.
A new Export button now appears in the Groups tool for users with the Manage Groups and Categories permission. Instructors can use this button to export group data to a CSV file. The exported content includes:
Group category details
Group names
User enrollment information
Enrollment dates
You can choose a specific group or all groups within a selected category to include in the export.
Previously, there was no built-in method to export group data or user enrollment dates from the Groups tool.
From the Manage Groups page, click Export to download group data.From the Export page, use the Select Category and Select Group drop-downs to choose the desired group set, then click Export to download group data.
This feature implements the following PIE items:
D295 (Export Groups: Export Group Enrolments and/or Statistics to a CSV spreadsheet)
D9175 (Add times and dates of students enrolled in groups created)
This feature partially implements the following PIE items:
D7413 (Viewing Group Category/Group Enrollments Quickly)
D345 (Show all Group Categories (or more than one Group Category) on the main Groups page)
D5236 (Printing Groups)
D454 (Group Statistics: View the date and time students self-enrolled in a group)
5) Quick Eval – Evaluate learners across Assignments, Discussions, and Quizzes
This release enables instructors to quickly iterate through their list of submissions in Quick Eval even if those submissions are sourced from different activity types or courses. For example, an instructor has activities to grade in Assignments, Discussions, and Quizzes and has been assigned items that appear in Quick Eval Submissions. The instructor directly accesses each submission to evaluate the items instead of navigating back to Quick Eval and going into each item again.
Previously, instructors had to click into each submission to view the evaluation and then click Back to Quick Eval to go to the Submissions view and then find the next submission to evaluate. With this release instructors are redirected to the next evaluation as listed in the Quick Eval.
From the Submissions view, select a submission and click on the linked learner’s name. In the activity evaluation page, use the forward and backward arrows to toggle to the next or previous learner to evaluate.
This feature implements the following PIE items:
D5475 (Add a "Next Item" button when grading from Quick Eval)
D8199 (Auto Advance to next item in Quick Eval)
6) Pulse – View recurring events
Pulse now displays recurring events from the Events tab. This ensures that any recurring events that an instructor creates using the Calendar tool properly displays in Pulse. Previously, recurring events did not display in Pulse.
7) Notifications – Unsubscribe from all
To improve user experience and reduce unwanted emails, notification emails from Brightspace now include an Unsubscribe link. Selecting the link opens a confirmation screen that allows users to opt out of email notifications, including instant and summary notifications.
Previously, users without login access could not unsubscribe unless they logged in to adjust their notification settings.
The Unsubscribe All Notifications confirmation page appears after clicking Unsubscribe in an email.
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.
Do you want your students to take a quiz or test online? Do you have a test that you normally administer on paper and you don’t want to retype all the questions into Brightspace? Learning and Teaching Services at Algonquin College developed a Test/Quiz Question Generator that provides an easy way of creating a collection of questions that can be imported into Brightspace.
Quiz questions have to be in a special format in order to be imported into Brightspace. The Test/Quiz Question Generator allows you to reformat your questions and it will create a CSV file that can be imported into Brightspace.
Additionally, the Brightspace Community developed a Quiz Question Converter that you can use to add a bank of questions to the Quiz Question Library. One benefit of using the Quiz Question Converter is that you can add feedback and hints to the quiz questions you are importing into Brightspace. Therefore saving you time in importing quiz questions with feedback and hints into Brightspace.
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.
Thursday, May 15th, is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). GAAD aims to get you talking, thinking, and learning about digital access/inclusion and people with different abilities and talents.
Accessibility is about everyone. It is extremely important for students with disabilities to have access to accessible course content.
Video Notes is a built-in media recording tool in Brightspace that allows instructors and learners to record short videos with a webcam. This makes it easy to personalize the learning experience with short, video-based feedback, comments, or instructions. Video Notes can be added where video attachments are supported and when the Brightspace Editor’s Insert Stuff option is available.
People who are deaf or hard of hearing rely on captions and subtitles to understand video content. But there are a lot of other great reasons for using captions. For example, you may have some learners who choose not to use the sound or they cannot use it without disturbing those around them. You may have some learners who are not native in your language or who have trouble understanding you. Closed captions and subtitles will allow these individuals to receive your message and understand it.
Did you know you can generate automatic closed captions for newly created Video Notes AND you have the ability to manually add or edit closed captions for all previously recorded Video Notes?
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.
Thursday, May 15th, is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). GAAD aims to get you talking, thinking, and learning about digital access/inclusion and people with different abilities and talents.
Accessibility is about everyone. It is extremely important for students with disabilities to have access to accessible course content.
The Brightspace Editor has a built-in accessibility checker that makes it easy to check for issues or offer suggestions to fix identified accessibility issues.
Follow these steps to do it.
To check for accessibility issues:
After you add content to the Brightspace Editor, click the accessibility checker icon.
The checker indicates if the content is free of accessibility issues, or offers suggestions to fix them.
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 summer, now is a good time to get started setting up your Brightspace courses. Our Information Technology Center (ITC) has created the summer courses in Brightspace.
NOTE: You should see your summer courses in the My Courses widget. If you do not see your summer 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. You can find more information about the updated My Courses Widget sort logic at this link.
To get started, you can post your syllabus, course documents, announcements, and set up 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 summer 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 summer course.
About Inactive Courses:
When ITC creates the Brightspace courses, they are set to inactive by default. Instructors have access to inactive courses but students who are enrolled in an inactive course do not have access to it. Faculty have no control over the active/inactive status of courses. Brightspace will not send alerts or notifications from inactive courses.
ITC will make courses active after the first deregistration (dereg) of students who are not fiscally cleared. At that point students will be able to access their courses. The dereg process usually occurs after registration. The registrar informs ITC of when the dereg process is complete.
NOTE: Even though a course is inactive, instructors can still email students. This can be done in several different ways. Instructors can send email within the course (even though it is inactive); the email will go out to the students. Instructors can send email to their students in Banner, and can also email the students through EAB.
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.
Instructors who want to build their course before the normal course creation schedule can request a Brightspace Master Course Shell that can be used to develop and maintain their course materials.
A Master Course Shell:
Is a course environment an instructor uses to develop and maintain course materials that are used from semester to semester.
Is not tied to Banner. Therefore, no students or other users are enrolled into this Shell.
Can be used as a "master" where one keeps permanent changes to a course.
Faculty may copy content from a Master Course Shell into a Brightspace Course shell as long as they are enrolled as an instructor in both shells.
Master Course Shells are not deleted except upon the request of the instructor or when the instructor is no longer employed at Xavier.
A Time-Saving Tool for Instructors
Master Course Shells can be a timesaving tool for instructors. Using a Master Course Shell gives instructors time to build their courses the way they want, when they want, and update it as needed. Think of a Master Course Shell as a template course instructors can build once and use repeatedly. Here's how instructors typically use Master Course Shells:
Build Master Course: Develop a course (e.g., lectures, assignments, instructional materials, assessments) in the Master Shell. This becomes your baseline course structure.
Copy to Current Course: When ITC has created your course for the new semester, copy the Master Course Shell contents into your new empty course that ITC created.
Adapt for the Semester (Optional): Instructors can customize the copied course content to fit their needs for the current semester. This might involve adding new material, removing outdated content, or adjusting deadlines.
Keeping the Master Course Shell Up-to-Date: If you make significant changes to the active course during the semester, the Master Course Shell becomes outdated. To update the Master Course Shell with these changes, you can request a Course Reset for your Master Course Shell. A course reset permanently deletes course content, activities, and associated files. After the reset, you would copy the contents from the active course into your Master Course Shell. So, now your Master Course Shell has the latest course materials and information.
NOTE: To request a course reset for a Master Course Shell, send an email to jflorent@xula.edu and include the exact name of the Master Course Shell that you would like reset.
Follow these steps to do it.
If you want to build your course from scratch before your Brightspace course shell for the upcoming semester is made available, you should:
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 approach the end of the semester there are a few things you can do in Brightspace to wrap up for the semester.
Release final course grades
Unlike other grade items and categories in the Grade Book, final grades are not available to students by default. Final grades must be released. If you did not choose to enable the automatic release of final grades when setting up your Grade Book, you will have to manually release final grades in order for students to see their final grade.
Export your Grade Book
Student access to courses is removed two weeks after the end of a semester. This process of making the courses inactive allows student work and grades to be visible to instructors but students no longer have access to the course. Courses will remain on the Brightspace system for three semesters before they are removed. You should export (download) your Grade Book to your local computer after you submit your final grades.
NOTE: The export file that is created will NOT contain any student work or instructor feedback. Only the grades in your Grade Book will be exported.
Create a master copy of your course
Courses remain on the Brightspace system for three semesters before they are removed. You can request a Master Course Shell that you can use to develop and maintain your course materials. Master Course Shells will not be removed from the Brightspace system.
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 some of the updates in the April 2025/20.25.04 release that were added to our system this month:
1) Assignments – Update to assignment annotations software version
With this release, the software that powers annotations in the Assignments tool is updated to the latest version, Nutrient 1.0.0 (formerly called PSPDFKit).
This version update resolves the following defects:
WCAG/A11y layout issues in the Layout tool are now resolved. Previously, the options were not read by the NVDA screen reader.
Cursor behavior now works as expected. Previously, the cursor would return to the start when typing notes in Assignment Annotations.
All formatted annotation text in text boxes now saves correctly. Previously, italicized and bold text elements would not save.
The annotations software no longer crashes on iPad OS versions 16 and below.
Additionally, minor UI updates are introduced in Nutrient 1.0.0. In the previous version of PSPDFKit, the following buttons displayed tooltips when hovering with a cursor:
Next Page
Previous Page
Page Mode buttons
Page Transition buttons
Page Rotation buttons
The previous version also highlighted the Search button when clicked.
Now, in Nutrient 1.0.0, the buttons tooltips are removed, and the Search button no longer highlights when selected.
In the previous version of the UI, annotations buttons appeared with a tooltip. In the updated version, the tooltip is removed.In the previous version of Annotations, the Search bar appeared highlighted when clicked. Highlighting is no longer visible in the updated version.
2) Assignments and Discussions – Bulk feedback for instructors
This feature enables instructors to provide bulk feedback to learners directly within the Assignments and Discussions submission pages, enhancing efficiency and user experience.
Key capabilities:
Add and save bulk feedback as a draft if none exists.
Update existing drafts or published evaluations for multiple learners simultaneously.
Apply feedback to selected learners using Add Feedback or to all learners using Add Feedback to All.
Display a warning message when saving an empty Feedback dialog as bulk feedback, as this action overwrites existing drafts or published evaluations.
Notes:
Due to how Quizzes records attempts and completion summaries, bulk feedback is not supported for Quizzes
The Grid View in Discussions does not support bulk feedback.
File Attachments with Bulk Feedback
When using bulk feedback in Assignments or Discussions:
Brightspace Editor includes the Insert Stuff functionality but does not support file uploads from My Computer. Instructors can insert links to YouTube videos or other external resources. These links are stored in Manage Files.
Insert Image supports image file uploads from My Computer and the system stores them in Manage Files.
The Submissions page in Assignments displays options to add bulk feedback, including Add Feedback to All and Add Feedback (for selected learners).The Assess Topic page in Discussions displays options to add bulk feedback, including Add Feedback to All and Add Feedback (for selected learners).On the Assess Topic page in Discussions, select learners to add feedback, then click Add Feedback.On the Assess Topic page in Discussions, after selecting learners and clicking Add Feedback, the Add Feedback dialog box opens, allowing feedback entry.
This feature implements the following PIE items:
D10673 (Bulk Edit Discussion / Dropbox Feedback)
D4921 (Bulk grading & Feedback in Dropbox / Assignments)
D6429 (Bulk feedback upload for non-submitted assignments)
D6739 (Assignment Bulk Edit Features)
3) Grades – Access Quiz Feedback
This new feature allows learners to quickly access quiz attempt feedback from the Grades page.
On the Grades page, click View Quiz Attempts to access feedback on quiz attempts.
Previously, learners could view quiz attempt feedback only in the Quizzes tool, depending on how the instructor configured the review process. This option remains available.
Before, learners could access quiz attempt feedback only through the Quizzes tool on the Quiz List page.
This feature implements the following PIE items:
D5170 (Learner Access Quiz feedback via Grades)
4) Media Library – New User Interface for Media Library
This release introduces a redesigned User Interface (UI) for Media Library, aligning it with the look and feel of other Brightspace tools. The updated interface allows administrators and instructors to manage media files more efficiently across multiple courses and content objects. Any change to a media file is automatically reflected in all courses it is added to, ensuring consistency and saving time.
The new UI of the Media Library page.
All the functionality of the old Media Library still exists but is now presented in a modern way:
The Add Assets button launches a dialog where users can upload new assets and record audio or video. It replaces the previous Upload and Record buttons.
In the Add Assets dialog, select Record Audio or Record Video to create new media. Alternatively, drag and drop files into the upload area or click to browse for files.
The Recycle Bin icon has been moved to the top-right corner. The updated interface now displays how long files will be stored before permanent deletion.
From the Recycle Bin page, select media items and click Restore Selected to recover them. In this example, the item is permanently deleted after 90 days.
The Source filter was removed from the Media Library due to lack of relevance.
5) Quizzes – New Quiz Evaluation Experience transitioning to default, with opt-out until July 2025
Originally released for the Quizzes tool in September 2024 / 20.24.9, this update now turns on the new Quiz Evaluation Experience by default for all clients, promoting broader adoption while still allowing users to opt out until July 2025, at which time it will be made the default experience for all users.
This update streamlines the transition to the new Quiz Evaluation Experience, enhancing grading workflows and ensuring consistency while allowing clients to adjust settings before the opt-out option is removed. Administrators can continue to offer users the choice to manually opt into the new Quiz Evaluation Experience through the June 2025/20.25.06 release. However, starting with the July 2025/20.25.07 release, all clients will be automatically transitioned to the new experience, and the opt-out option will no longer be available.
The new quiz evaluation experience is enabled by default on the quiz evaluation page. Click Turn it off to revert to the classic experience or Leave it on to continue using the new experience.
Previously, administrators had to manually enable the new Quiz Evaluation Experience as an opt-in feature.
On the quiz evaluation page, users could select Turn it on to enable the new quiz evaluation experience or Leave it off to continue using the classic version.
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.
