Category: Brightspace Small Plates

1) Discussions – Introducing the new creation and editing experience

The new discussion creation experience brings create and edit consistency changes from Assignments and Quizzes to Discussions, making it familiar and easy to learn. This first release is at full parity with classic discussions and brings refreshed workflows and improvements to restricting group topics and threads, associating topics to forums, and wording changes to a few settings that you may be familiar with.

The primary panel on the left contains the same frequently-used fields as Assignments and Quizzes. These fields are most relevant to learners and are core to discussion topic creation. The right-hand panel provides advanced options such as start and end dates and release conditions. These options follow the same logical groupings as found in Assignments and Quizzes. Other topic-specific settings can be found in the right-hand panel.

Refer to the Introducing the New Discussion Creation Experience knowledge article for an in-depth look at all the feature and capability changes with this update.

2) Quizzes – Confirmation dialog for learners exiting a quiz

This feature introduces a confirmation dialog to learners closing in-progress quizzes. The dialog is context-based, providing additional information about the impact of exiting the quiz (such as whether a learner will be able to return to their quiz after exiting).

Previously there was no dialog or warning to learners who exited a quiz accidentally or on purpose.

Note: The dialog only appears when the learner selects the X [Close this Quiz] for the quiz. Closing the browser window or tab does not display the confirmation dialog.

This feature implements the PIE item D7289 (Close/Exit Quiz errors correction).

The message shown when a student tries to exit a quiz depends on the time limit and end date settings for the quiz. In every scenario after exiting a quiz, learners are directed back to the Quiz Details page.

1) Awards – Share achievements to LinkedIn profiles

Learners can now share achievements from the Awards tool directly to their LinkedIn profiles.

This feature simplifies showcasing awards in LinkedIn profiles. Awards can now be shared directly from Brightspace without using a third-party tool or creating a link to the award first.

To share an award to their LinkedIn profiles, learners can navigate to the My Awards page, select the desired award, click Share, and then click the new Share to LinkedIn button.

Shared awards appear in the Licenses & Certifications section of learners' LinkedIn profiles.

Previously, awards could be shared to LinkedIn by first sharing the award to Badgr or creating a public link to the award (available as of November 2022) and then copying the link to LinkedIn.

This feature implements PIE item D8491 (Share Badges Directly to LinkedIn).

2) Calendar – Prevent duplicate calendar events on copy/import to reduce performance issues

With this release, calendar events are checked to see if they are duplicates when performing a course copy or import. When either action is performed, Brightspace only copies the following:

• Calendar events that have an association, such as to an activity that is being copied into the course offering.
• A single unique Calendar event that is manually created.

When a user manually creates multiple calendar items, Brightspace compares the following fields when checking for duplicates:

• Title
• Description
• Start Date (or Start Day for All Day Events)
• End Date (or End Day for All Day Events)
• If its an All Day Event
• Repeat Every (e.g.: every day, every second month)
• Repeat On (day of week, only valid for Weekly events)
• Repeat Until Date
• Repeat Type (None, Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Annually)
• Event Visibility
• Location
• Group associations

This feature only applies when performing a copy into a course offering and when importing course packages. It does not check if existing events are duplicates.

Previously, manually created or imported calendar events were not checked for duplication, creating duplicate calendar items.

3) Media Library – Adapt the player to match available space or video resolution while using ISF Plugin

The ISF player insert is now responsive and adapts to match screen size. When using Insert Stuff in Brightspace Editor to insert a video, the video preview screen is updated to show a responsive player and will now scale to the available maximum width. Height and aspect ratio are still respected. Previously, the player was too small, especially for users with smaller devices. In addition, users had to specify a size to embed the player via ISF.

The layout slider will be removed as the responsive nature of this update makes it redundant. Existing videos that were added to Brightspace Editor before the 20.23.3 release will remain statically sized.

For customers using the sample HTML v3.0 Templates, the Video Lecture page, or who are managing any Learning Creative Services or third-party HTML templates and styles: please be aware that after the 20.23.03 update, videos hosted in the Brightspace Media Library are responsive automatically without having to insert videos into the video wrapper sections. Customers can now insert Brightspace Media Library videos where needed into any template as there is no longer a need to insert into a video wrapper section to make the video responsive. Customers wishing to continue using the video wrapper section with Brightspace Media Library videos can explore how to update their versions of the Sample HTML v3.0 CSS by visiting HTML Template (Version 3.0) - Brightspace.

4) User Management and Settings – Easily change language preferences using the User Menu

A new language selector is available in the user menu to easily change the language setting to the user’s preferred language. Previously, a user had to navigate to Account Settings or use a custom installed widget with a complex workflow. Users can continue to access language and locale within the Account Settings page; this update provides an option that you can more easily access.

Note: Only languages that are enabled by your organization are available for selection.

This feature implements the following PIE items:

• D8920 (Language toggle feature)
• D7508 (Preferred Language Selector)