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: In order to see the course in Brightspace you must be assigned as the instructor of record for that course in Banner. 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). If your summer courses are listed when you "View All Courses" but are not shown in your My Courses widget, you should pin the course in order to have it appear in the My Courses widget. Follow these instructions for pinning/unpinning courses.
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 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.
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 a few updates in the April 2021/20.21.4 release that were added to our system this month:
1) Accommodations - Improvements in Classlist, Quizzes, and User Progress
The following improvements have been made in the Classlist, Quizzes, and User Progress tools:
Improvements in Classlist for Instructors:
An icon now appears next to the learner’s name in the Classlist to indicate that the learner has an accommodation.
Instructors can filter the Classlist by Accommodations.
Instructors can also Print or Email a list of users with accommodations by adding the filter to those pages.
Improvements in Classlist for learners:
An icon appears next to learners’ own names to indicate they have an accommodation. To view accommodation details, learners can click My Accommodations from their learner context menu.
When commencing a quiz, the accommodation icon appears next to a learner’s quiz time to indicate that their accommodation has been applied. If a learner’s time accommodation has been overridden by a quiz-specific special access, this icon does not appear.
Improvements in Quizzes for instructors:
Instructors can now grant learners special access in terms of quiz time multipliers (for example, 1.5x quiz time) or +minutes (for example, an additional 30 minutes). Refer to the Quizzes – Improvements to Special Access functionality release note below for more information.
Quiz-specific special access can overwrite an accommodation for any user on a quiz-by-quiz basis. When you overwrite an accommodation and then click Save, a warning describing the impact of overwriting the accommodation appears. Previously, this warning appeared at the top of the Quiz special access screen. Now, it appears on clicking Save.
Improvements in User Progress:
The accommodations icon now appears in the User Progress tool alongside the Quiz domain if the learner has a quiz accommodation in that course
The User Progress screen (Classlist>User drop-down menu > User Progress)
2) Assignments - Action menu for group assignments in New Assignment Evaluation Experience
The New Assignment Evaluation Experience now includes a drop-down menu from the group name. This menu contains links to:
Email the group (opens in a new window)
See all group members
Instant message the group (opens in a new window)
The drop-down action menu appears from the Group Name on the File Submission page in Assignments
3) Assignments - Anonymous marking in the New Assignment Evaluation Experience
This feature makes anonymous marking fully supported in the New Assignment Evaluation Experience. When using Anonymous marking, the Anonymous User number appears in place of the username, just as it appeared in the legacy Assignments experience. In addition, the following features of anonymous marking remain the same:
No profile card appears for anonymous users
Usernames become visible once any learner’s evaluation is published
Group names are always visible even when using anonymous marking
Rubrics do not include the user’s name
Anonymous marking uses Publish All instead of the Publish button. If no feedback for anonymous users has yet been published, the Publish button is disabled and a message appears to direct users to the Publish All button. If any user feedback has been published, all Publish buttons become automatically enabled.
Anonymous marking in Assignments displays learners as Anonymous User [#] instead of by username.
4) Assignments - Brightspace Editor in the new Assignment Creation Experience
The new Brightspace Editor replaces the previous HTML Editor as the default HTML Editor in the new Assignment Creation Experience.
6) Assignments - Context menu on the Evaluation screen in the New Assignment Evaluation Experience
A new context menu appears in the side panel of the updated assignment evaluation screen. This menu links to the following:
Edit Activity (opens assignment page in new tab). This option appears for users who have the See and Manage Assignment Submission Folders permission.
Special Access Dates (opens the Edit Activity screen so users can update Special Access rules). This option requires the Set Special Access on Assignment Submission Folders permission.
The new context menu appears when grading a submission in the New Assignment Evaluation Experience
7) Assignments - Single file submissions open directly in the New Assignment Evaluation Experience
In the New Assignment Evaluation Experience, when a learner has submitted only one file, the evaluator no longer has to click into the evaluation and then into the file. The file opens directly for the evaluator, saving a click during the evaluation process. Late submission information continues to display above the file, as it currently does.
8) Quizzes – Improvements to Special Access functionality
This feature is in line with the improvements made to the Quizzes tool as listed in the Accommodations – Improvements in Classlist, Quizzes, and User Progress feature. However, it is not dependent on granting any accommodations permissions, and is visible to any user with permission to Add Special Access.
Instructors can now grant learners special access in terms of quiz time multipliers (for example, 1.5x quiz time) or +minutes (for example, an additional 30 minutes). For example, if an instructor has a 30-minute quiz and using the Special Access page, grants three learners 1.5x the quiz time, their updated quiz time of 45 minutes displays. Instructors no longer have to manually calculate the updated quiz time.
The Add Special Access screen before the updated quiz time functionalityThe Add Special Access screen with the updated Timing area
Note: After extending the learners quiz time by way of quiz time multipliers or +minutes on the Special Access page, if an instructor updates the duration of the quiz, the learner’s quiz time on the Special Access page does not dynamically update at this time.
9) Quizzes – Secure and consistent editing experience
For a more secure and consistent editing experience in Brightspace, creating any of the following question types now automatically filters out JavaScript and non-standard HTML: Likert, Ordering, Matching, Fill in the Blanks, Short Answer, Multi-Short Answer, Arithmetic, and Significant Figures. For existing questions containing JavaScript and non-standard HTML, the questions continue to display as intended until an instructor edits and saves the questions, which removes the JavaScript and non-standard HTML. Previously, instructors could add JavaScript or non-standard HTML to question types in order to create dynamic content for quizzes.
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 calculates final grades for each student based on the grading system and the students' grades that are entered into the Grade Book. If the instructor wants more control over the final grades, perhaps to adjust the final grade for a student that is on the cusp of a higher grade, then adjusted final grades can be used and released to students instead of the calculated final grade.
If the instructor decides to use adjusted final grades for one student in the course, adjusted final grades must be used for all students in the course. This does not imply, however, that final grades must be manually adjusted for all students.
Adjusting final grades are implemented by the instructor for only the student or students that are deemed to need an adjusted grade. The remaining students final grades would be the final grade as calculated in the Grade Book.
Note: The Grade Book must be configured to use adjusted final grades. If you plan to use adjusted final grades, you should make the adjustments before you release final grades.
Follow these steps to do it.
To adjust final grades for all students:
Get into the course where you want to adjust final grades and click Grades in the NavBar.
Click on the Enter Grades link.
Scroll over to the Final Calculated Grade column and click on the arrow on the right of the column name and select Enter Grades.
In the Final Adjusted Grade section for each student, enter the adjusted grades and then click Save.
Once you have ensured that students' grades are accurate, you can release the final grades.
To adjust final grades for one or more specific students:
Get into the course where you want to adjust final grades and click Grades in the NavBar.
Click on the Enter Grades link.
Scroll over to the Final Calculated Grade column and click on the arrow on the right of the column name and select Enter Grades.
Click on the arrow on the right of the Final Grades and click Transfer All, then click Yes.
In the Final Adjusted Grade section, enter adjusted scores where necessary and click Save.
Once you have ensured that students' grades are accurate, you can release the final grades.
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.
Unlike other grade items and categories in the Grade Book, final grades are not available to students by default. Final grades must be released. When setting up the Grade Book, the instructor can choose to automatically release final grades so that the students can see their final grade throughout the semester. 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.
Additionally, you can selectively release final grades for some students now and release the final grades for other students later. For example, you can release the final grades for graduating seniors on one date and release the final grades for everyone else on a later date.
Follow these steps to do it.
Watch this video for instructions on how to release final grades:
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: "final grades" by jflorent is dedicated to public domain under CC0 and is a derivative of grade by OpenClipart-Vectors on Pixabay
I am writing this blog post as a follow up to Brightspace Tip #216: Use Submission Views to Show Quiz Results. As you may know, Submission Views are created to allow students to go back and review a submitted quiz. The Limited Duration option allows the instructor to choose what information the student sees immediately after completing the quiz (i.e., after the student clicks on the Submit Quiz button).
Additional Views are created with a specified release date and time that allow instructors to determine what students can see when they go back to review a quiz. Currently, there isn’t an option to set an end date for a Submission View. Therefore, a Submission View is active until the system encounters a subsequent Submission View with a later date/time making it the active view.
Better practice when setting up Submission Views is to create a “Shutdown View”. This ensures that quiz questions and answers are not available past the time the instructor plans to have it available. A Shutdown View will eliminate the need for the instructor to remember to delete Submission Views when they are past their usefulness.
Well-structured Submission Views for an exam where the instructor wants students to be able to see the quiz questions and user responses for a limited amount of time could look like this:
Example of an exam that is available for a limited amount of time for students to review
In the example above, the testing period for the quiz ends on April 3rd at 6 PM. The “After Testing Period Ends” Submission View will be active on April 5th at 6 AM. The Shutdown View will be active April 6th at 11:59 PM. Students will be able to see the quiz questions with their responses in between April 5th at 6 AM and April 6th at 11:59 PM.
Creating a “Shutdown View” with an end of the semester date/time is good practice if you are planning to copy a course with quizzes that have Submission Views into another course. This ensures that a quiz with a Shutdown View will force you to update the Submission View settings in the course you are copying to. Thus reducing the possibility that you have a Submission View enabled before you want it to be. Even if you do not plan on reusing the exam in the future, setting up a “Shutdown View” is a better practice that can prevent future problems.
Example of an exam with an End of Semester Shutdown Submission View
Did you know you can use the Manage Dates tool to edit dates in bulk? Also, the Manage Dates tool provides you with a quick way to see which quizzes have Submission Views set. You can edit Submission Views from the Manage Dates tool as well.
Example of quiz with Submission View dates displayed in the Other Dates column of the Manage Dates tool
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 March 2021/20.21.3 release that were added to our system this month:
1) Assignments - Copying an assignment
Previously, when you copied an assignment, the copied assignment was set to active and you had to open the newly copied assignment to edit it.
Now when you copy an assignment, the copied assignment is set to inactive and you are directed to the Edit Assignment screen to continue editing it as part of the copy assignments workflow.
2) Assignments – Learner profile card in New Assignment Evaluation Experience
Starting with the March 2021/20.21.3 release, the Consistent Evaluation experience in Assignments is now referred to as New Assignment Evaluation Experience.
This feature updates the Assignments - Consistent evaluation experience | New feature released in December 2020/20.20.12. When hovering over a learner’s name or profile picture in the new evaluation experience, the learner’s user profile card appears. The card displays the user’s online/offline status as well as links to:
Email
Instant Message
User progress
User profile
Clicking any of the links in the profile card opens a new window.
Hovering over the name of profile image of a learner opens a profile card with links to Email and Instant Message the learner, plus User Progress and the learner’s User Profile.
NOTE: More information about the New Assignment Evaluation Experience can be found in this What is Coming in Evaluation article.
3) Assignments – Turnitin support in New Assignment Evaluation Experience
Starting with the March 2021/20.21.3 release, the Consistent Evaluation experience in Assignments is now referred to as New Assignment Evaluation Experience.
This feature updates the Assignments - Consistent evaluation experience | New feature released in December 2020/20.20.12. The New Assignment Evaluation experience now supports Turnitin Similarity and Turnitin Grademark in Assignments. The existing Turnitin workflows and functionality appear on the User Submissions page in the new experience. The Turnitin workflows are also supported in the mobile experience.
Turnitin Similarity and Turnitin Grademark feedback appears on the User Submissions page
NOTE: More information about the New Assignment Evaluation Experience can be found in this What is Coming in Evaluation article.
4) Awards – Password-protected certificates
To prevent plagiarism and protect an organization's intellectual and branding copyrights, all earned certificates downloaded from the Awards tool are now password-protected from editing. Each certificate is generated with a random password that is not displayed to users, preventing anyone from editing the certificate in Adobe® Acrobat® or Adobe Reader®. Previously, if an administrator or instructor uploaded a password protected certificate, any learner that downloaded the earned certificate could edit it in Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader.
A password-protected certificate downloaded from the Awards tool
5) Brightspace Pulse – Notifications for upcoming quizzes and assignments
In Brightspace Pulse, learners now receive push notifications that remind them about upcoming quizzes and assignments. By default, notifications display two days before each activity's due date or end date.
Learners receive a notification in Brightspace Learning Environment and Brightspace Pulse under the following conditions:
If the assignment or quiz has a due date, the learner is notified two days before the due date.
If the assignment or quiz has no due date, but has an end date, the learner is notified two days before the end date.
Learners do not receive a notification in Brightspace Learning Environment and Brightspace Pulse under the following conditions:
Learner completed the assignment by submitting to the assignment folder.
Learner completed the quiz according to the defined completion criteria (attempt submitted or score threshold achieved).
The assignment or quiz has no dates attached.
The assignment or quiz includes only a start date.
Brightspace Pulse notifications for an upcoming assignment and quiz
6) Calendar – Improvements to date and time selection web components
To improve the ease of use for clients using the date and time picker in Brightspace Learning Environment, there have been updates to the web components related to date and time selection. These changes are intended to provide better usability for keyboard users and better integration with assistive technology. Changes include:
Ability to use arrow keys rather than the Tab key to improve keyboard navigation and accessibility.
Aesthetic changes to hide unused elements until they are active.
New selectable values of 12:01 AM and 11:59PM in the time picker
New default values for Start, Due, and End dates.
The new Set to Today button inside the date picker replaces the Now button outside the date picker.
Note: There may be some instances of the older date picker remaining in Brightspace Learning Environment. These instances will be changed to the new date picker in a future release.
7) Quizzes - Copy quiz workflow
Previously, to copy and continue editing a quiz, you had to navigate to the Manage Quizzes page, click the More Actions > Copy functionality, and then select the quiz you wanted to copy, rename it, and click Edit quiz after copy completes.
This feature updates the copy quiz workflow to better align with Assignments. Now, the copy functionality is available on the individual quiz drop-down menu. When you copy a quiz, the copied quiz is set to inactive (as per the original copy quiz workflow) and you are directed to the Edit Quiz screen to continue editing it. Now, the copy quiz workflow also copies over Special Access settings and aligned Learning Objectives.
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 have the option to give learners multiple quiz attempts in order to improve their test scores. A new option for Quizzes Attempt settings that allows learners to only retake their incorrectly answered questions from previous quiz attempts is a new feature that was implemented in our November Continuous Delivery Update. Instructors can select this new option in the Assessment tab of a quiz. When the Retake Incorrect Questions Only check box is selected for subsequent quiz attempts, each learner only sees the questions they had previously answered incorrectly in the same order as the initial attempt (including quizzes with random sections and random questions).
When grading a Retake Incorrect Questions Only quiz attempt, the instructor can only provide a score for the questions answered on this attempt. If you are using Automatic grading, Written Response questions will be marked as 0 and included in future attempts until they are graded manually.
A learner's score for a Retake Incorrect Questions Only attempt remains at minimum, the score they had on the previous attempt. Correctly answered questions on the Retake Incorrect Questions Only attempt add to the learner's attempts score. The Quiz Overall Grade is calculated using the overall grade calculation option the instructor selects (i.e., Highest Attempt, Lowest Attempt, First Attempt, Last Attempt, or the Average of all Attempts).
The Retake Incorrect Questions Only option can be selected when setting Attempts Allowed
The "Average of all Attempts" can be used to give the student partial marks for questions that were not answered correctly on the first attempt. For example, you create a quiz worth 100 total points, allows 2 attempts, the Retake Incorrect Questions Only option is checked, and the “Average of all Attempts” is selected for the overall grade calculation. A learner takes the quiz and scores 75 out of 100 points on the first attempt. When the learner takes the second attempt, they will only be able to answer the questions that were answered incorrectly on the previous attempt. In this case, the learner will be able to answer the incorrect questions from the first attempt. Let’s assume the learner answered a few more questions correctly and earned a score of 85 out of 100 points on the second attempt. The overall grade for the quiz is 80%, which is the average of the two attempts (75 + 85 = 160 ÷ 200 = 80%). Assume the learner did not answer any of the first attempt's incorrectly answered questions correctly on the second attempt, their overall score would be 75%. When using the Retake Incorrect Questions Only attempt option the overall score will remain at a minimum, the score they had on the previous attempt.
The Users tab indicates the retaken attempts for the quiz
A learner view of a Retake Incorrect Questions Only quiz attempt
If this post has piqued your interest, you may be interested in these articles that provide information on the pros and cons of allowing learners to retake tests:
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: "try again sign" by jflorent is dedicated to the public domain under CC0 and is a derivative of directory by geralt from Pixabay
Turnitin is a plagiarism detection tool that is integrated into our Brightspace system. Turnitin checks student work for potential plagiarism and allows instructors to provide electronic feedback to students through markup, proofing, and rubrics tools.
Instructors typically create an Assignment submission folder with Turnitin enabled. When students submit their assignments they are checked for potential plagiarism. However, there may be situations where an instructor needs to submit a paper to be checked by Turnitin.
The Quick Submit feature allows instructors to submit papers and receive Similarity Reports without creating an Assignment in their course. This is ideal for instructors who would like to use Turnitin to spot check submissions and have these papers in electronic format. Quick Submit SHOULD NOT be used if the instructor desires to have students submit their own papers or plans on using PeerMark (peer review assignment tool) or GradeMark (make comments on and assess student papers). Instructors should create an Assignment and enable Turnitin for the assignment instead.
Follow these steps to do it.
To use Quick Submit to submit a paper:
Log in to your Turnitin account natively through www.turnitin.com.
Activate Quick Submit by clicking on User Info from the top of the instructor homepage.
On the preferences page, select yes from the activate Quick Submit drop-down menu. The Quick Submit tab will appear on the instructor homepage, making the Quick Submit inbox available for use.
To start the upload process, click on the Submit button in the Quick Submit inbox and follow the instructions.
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.
Pi (π) Day is celebrated on March 14th (3.14). Did you know the Brightspace Community has a PIE? Yes, there is a PIE (Product Idea Exchange) in the Brightspace Community. The PIE is a system that allows users of Brightspace to share their suggestions on how to make Brightspace better. I invite you to celebrate Pi (π) Day by taking a few minutes to explore the Brightspace Product Idea Exchange (PIE).
We’ve put together this collection of PIE ideas you can consider upvoting so that we can add our voice to the community to make the Brightspace experience better. You can also search the PIE for ideas to upvote or submit your own idea to the PIE. Let us know if you submit your own idea to the PIE so that we can upvote it. Here is a resource on navigating the PIE, just in case you need it.
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.
![Anonymous marking in Assignments displays learners as Anonymous User [#] instead of by username.](https://i0.wp.com/cat.xula.edu/food/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/anonymous-markings-in-assignments.png)
