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.
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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.
To manually release final grades:
On the NavBar, click Grades.
On the Enter Grades page, from the Final Calculated Grade or Final Adjusted Grade context menu, click Enter Grades.
To release grades for all users, on the Final Grades page, from the Final Grades context menu, click Release All. To release final grades for a specific user, do one of the following:
Select the check box by the user name and click the Release/Unrelease link.
Select the check box in the Release Final Calculated Grade or Release Adjusted Final Grade column.
Click Save.
OR watch this video for instructions on how to release final grades:
NOTE: There is a slight change in the video instructions. The "Enter Grades" option should be used anywhere in the video where "Grade All" is referenced.
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
Instructors can create surveys in Brightspace and use the statistics tools to monitor current course trends, seek opinions, and assess user satisfaction.
Surveys are an excellent way to solicit feedback from learners regarding any aspect of a course. You can gather anonymous or non-anonymous opinions and information from users. Unlike Quizzes, survey questions do not have to have right or wrong answers and Likert-style rating questions are possible.
Some examples of the types of uses for surveys are: seeking feedback on the effectiveness of active learning exercises, the need for clarification of course material, and/or seeking suggestions for course improvement.
On the NavBar, click Activities, then click Surveys.
On the Manage Surveys page, click New Survey.
Enter a Name and select additional settings for your survey (e.g. choose the option to give instant feedback and/or make results anonymous).
To add questions directly to the survey, click Add/Edit Questions. Alternatively, you can add questions from the Question Library.
Click Done Editing Questions to return to the survey page.
Click the Restrictions tab to modify the survey's availability.
Uncheck the Hide from Users checkbox.
Specify a date range for the survey, if appropriate.
Set the attempts allowed for the survey.
Click Save and Close.
To track survey progress and results:
Based on how you have set up the survey properties, you might see a list of all users or just the overall survey results with anonymous responses.
On the NavBar, click Activities, then click Surveys.
On the Manage Surveys page, click the context menu next to the name of your survey and click Statistics.
In the Users tab, search for users and their listed attempt types. You can restrict your search of survey results by attempt in the Attempts tab.
To view a specific user's results, click on an individual attempt. To view the number of attempts per question within a survey, click View Overall Results at the bottom of the page.
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 November 2023/20.23.11 release that were added to our system this month:
1) Announcements – Copy announcements to other courses
This feature adds the ability to copy announcements to other courses when the new permission Announcements > Copy to Other Courses is enabled for the user role. Users must be enrolled in both the source and destination courses with a role that has the new permission enabled to copy announcements. The permission is disabled by default for all roles.
A single announcement can be copied to multiple course offerings. Users can copy announcements from the Announcements tool or the Announcements widget from the context menu of an announcement by selecting Copy to Other Courses. Once copied, the announcement is in a draft state and users must publish the copied announcement in the destination course to complete the copying process.
The following attributes are copied:
Headline
Display Author Information
Content - Note: The copied Content attribute includes any associated files such as inserted images.
Start and End Date
Attachments
Pin state
Note: Release Conditions are not copied.
Click Copy to Other Courses from the announcement drop-down menu.
This feature implements the following PIE item D10642 (Send Announcements to Multiple Courses at Once).
2) Assignments and Discussions – Review key assessment information when publishing evaluations
The Publish All dialog for Assignments and Discussions is improved and standardized to show key information about learner evaluations. Dialog messaging is consistent for both Assignments and Discussions as it notes complete and incomplete learner evaluations and other key information, like how many learners have feedback and how many learners or groups are assigned to an activity. This change improves the user experience by including additional information about the status of learner evaluations and creating evaluation consistency across Brightspace.
Previously, the Publish All dialog did not display any information about learner evaluations or other key information, and the dialog messaging was not consistent across the Assignments and Discussions tools.
Review learner evaluation information in the Publish All dialog before clicking Publish.
3) Quizzes – Deduction option for incorrect answers
Instructors now have the option to set up a quiz to deduct a percentage of a question’s point value for incorrect answers submitted. This feature applies specifically to question types that can be auto-graded, for example, multiple-choice and true or false questions. The only question type that can’t be auto-graded is written response.
Under Evaluation & Feedback, instructors can select Deduct points for incorrect answers and enter a Deduction percentage.
Instructors can also enter negative values when manually grading individual quiz questions or manually updating all quiz question attempts from the Quizzes tool.
Instructors can manually enter negative grades when grading quiz questions.
To ensure that instructors can view accurate quiz statistics, Question Statistics are also updated to account for this new functionality. Therefore, if negative grading is enabled, Question Statistics may display the following differences in statistics:
Point Biserial results may be lower when negative grading is enabled.
Standard Deviation has a wider distribution to account for negative grading.
Questions with a negative average score appear below zero in the Grade Distribution graph.
Question Statistics displays updated values to account for negative grading, including a below zero average score.
To ensure that learners are fully aware that negative marking is enabled for a quiz, the Summary page of a quiz explicitly notifies the learner that for each question answered incorrectly, a percentage of that question's point value is deducted from the final attempt grade.
Before starting a quiz, learners are notified on the Summary page that point values are deducted from the final attempt grade for incorrect answers.
Also, learners are given the opportunity to explicitly clear previously-selected answers to auto-graded questions by clicking Clear Selection. This gives learners the opportunity to leave the question blank and receive a mark of zero (0), instead of forcing them to guess and enter an answer that could possibly incur a percent deduction.
Learners can select Clear Selection to remove their answer from a multiple-choice or true or false question.
Learners who are given the ability to view questions after submitting their quiz by their instructor can review questions that received negative score deductions for incorrect answers.
Learners can review incorrect questions with negative deduction grades when they submit a quiz.
Previously, instructors could not set a quiz to deduct a percentage of a question's point value for incorrect answers submitted.
Note: The overall quiz score cannot be negative and caps at zero.
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 October 2023/20.23.10 release that were added to our system this month:
1) Brightspace Editor – Users can set the Text Direction attribute for the entire page
This feature allows instructors, when creating Content or Widgets, to set the directionality for all text on a page when using the Attributes menu in Brightspace Editor. The Text Direction attribute can be applied to the entire page by navigating to Attributes > Page Attributes and selecting the desired text direction. The attribute can have text be Default, Left to Right or Right to Left.
Previously it was only possible to set the text direction attribute on Selected Items.
Set the text directionality of your Content or Widget by selecting it from the Text Direction drop-down menu.
2) Assignments and Discussions – Limit for field restrictions enforced
When evaluating activities in Assignments and Discussions, users can no longer use the Publish or Save Draft buttons if their evaluation exceeds the limit for field restrictions. This limitation applies to the Overall Grade, Overall Feedback, and Annotations fields. Previously, a warning was displayed in the Overall Feedback field when the limit was reached, but the limitation was not enforced; and users could continue attempting to save their evaluation by clicking Publish or Save Draft.
3) Chat – Intent to end-of-life for Chat
With this release, users accessing the Chat tool now see a banner indicating the tool will no longer be available as of January 2024.
The Chat tool displays a banner about the tool's EOL date.
Brightspace Pulse app is updated to provide a more consistent assistive technology experience between iOS and Android platforms. In addition, there is an added option to enable 3rd Party cookies within the Pulse app settings. As a result of these changes, users are required to log back in to the Pulse app.
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 Virtual Assistant (BVA) is a new AI-based help tool that is integrated directly into Brightspace. The BVA appears as a pop-up from the speech bubble button in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.
Click the Brightspace Virtual Assistant icon to ask a question
The tool provides immediate access to help documentation so users do not have to do research in another browser tab or window. After typing in a question, the tool provides persona-specific documentation available in Brightspace Community.
Brightspace Virtual Assistant dialog box
Persona-specific information is derived from the user’s role in Brightspace, for example:
Instructors can find persona-specific step-by-step guides and video tutorials on how to set up a course and other activities.
Students/Learners can find help documentation related to their Brightspace how-to questions without having to leave the page.
Administrators can find resources to complete tasks with how-to instructions available directly in the right-hand corner of their page.
All users have the option for further assistance. Brightspace Virtual Assistant contains options to Ask the Community or to contact Support for further assistance by email or chatting with a live agent.
Brightspace Virtual Assistant is available in all four EUS-supported languages: English (CA), French (CA), Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese. The user’s chosen Language and Locale settings in their profile determine the language of the Brightspace Virtual Assistant output messages, the language of the support articles provided, and the language of the support received by email, or chat.
Note: If a user’s chosen Language and Locale setting is not supported, the default language is English.
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.
Wednesday, October 18th, is International Pronouns Day. International Pronouns Day is celebrated on the third Wednesday of October and seeks to make respecting, sharing, and educating about personal pronouns commonplace. Referring to people by the pronouns they determine for themselves is basic to human dignity. Being referred to by the wrong pronouns particularly affects transgender and gender nonconforming people. For more information about International Pronouns Day visit pronounsday.org.
Did you know, users now have the option to indicate their pronouns in their Brightspace user profiles? Brightspace user profiles are visible to anyone who shares a course with a particular user, including students, instructors, administrators, etc.
The area in your Account Settings, where you can set your pronounsA user profile card with the pronouns displayedPronouns display in the 'Last Name, First Name' column of Classlist, to the right of the user's name, in parentheses. User name text is blue, pronoun text is grey.
Celebrate International Pronouns Day by entering your pronouns into Brightspace and invite your students to do the same.
If you are looking for a good pronoun primer on inclusive teaching, check out this Gender Diversity and Pronouns resource from the University of Michigan.
Also, check out name.pn if you or your students are looking for an easy way to share how you would like people to use your name. You can create a URL that links to information to help users get your preferred pronouns, title, and the pronunciation of your name correct.
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.
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.
Quiz Results Displays (formerly known as Submission views) can be created to allow students to go back and review a submitted quiz. Customizing the Quiz Results Displays allows instructors to choose what information the student sees upon completing the quiz, as well as what they can see when they go back to review a quiz. The default Quiz Results Display shows the overall score to the student (when they submit their quiz) and nothing else. To release more information to students (i.e. feedback, their submitted answers, the answers to each question, class averages and statistics, etc.) you need to either edit the default view or set up an additional view.
The Default View is what students see immediately upon submitting their quiz. The Default View typically does not allow students to see answers to a quiz, but does allow them to view their score on auto-graded items. You can adjust the Default View to allow students to see the answers to a quiz, keep in mind the Default View is what students see as soon as they submit their quiz. Thus, auto-publishing the attempt results and/or showing the answers in the Default View while the quiz is still in progress would reveal the score and/or answers to the quiz before ALL students have submitted the quiz.
Additional Views can be created with a specified release date and time that allows instructors to release information, or answers, after a certain time. For example, an Additional View could be created for after all students have submitted the quiz (i.e., after the quiz is closed) to allow students to view their score and which questions they answered correctly and/or incorrectly, as well as answers to questions. Another Additional View could also be created to allow students to see the class statistics and could be set to release at the end of the semester. If a quiz has multiple attempts, you can also specify a score required on an attempt in order to release the submission view. You may want an Additional View to be available to the students for a short period of time. To make this happen, you would create another Additional View with the date/time you would like the system not to show any questions.
You may decide that you want the Additional View to be available to your students through the end of the semester. In this case, I suggest creating a “Shutdown View” with an end-of-semester date/time. Creating a “Shutdown View” with an end-of-semester date/time is good practice if you are planning to copy a course with quizzes that have Additional Views into another course. This ensures that a quiz with a Shutdown View will force you to update the settings in the course you are copying to. Thus reducing the possibility that you have a Additional View enabled before you want it to be.
Important Notes:
Additional Views DO NOT take effect until the quiz scores have been published.
The Limited Duration option allows students to only be able to access the submission view for a short period immediately after completing the quiz. This option SHOULD NOT be used if you want students to review at a future date/time. In this case you should set up an additional view for the date/time you want the view to start AND set up a “Shutdown View”.
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.
You asked for synchronous quizzes and D2L answered! Instructors can now set up quizzes that start and end at the same time for ALL learners with the new synchronous quizzing option. This feature was introduced with our September Continuous Delivery updates.
The addition of synchronous quizzes enables instructors to set up a quiz where the quiz timer starts on the start date for all learners rather than when the learner launches the quiz (asynchronous). The quiz timer then ends for all learners at the same time. This facilitates quizzes where the instructor requires all learners to take the quiz at the same time similar to in classroom learning and supporting medium-high stakes quizzing.
Example of settings for a synchronous quiz
A synchronous quiz starts at the Start Date and ends when the time limit has lapsed, regardless of any action taken by the learner. For example, if a learner clicks "Start Quiz!" 15 minutes after the start date on a 1-hour quiz, they only have 45 minutes left to complete it. To indicate when a quiz becomes available, learners have a countdown timer on the Quiz Information and Start Quiz pages. The Start Quiz! button becomes available when the start date and time is reached.
A countdown timer on the Start Quiz page
Note: If no start date and time is set for the synchronous quiz, the No Start date set alert appears under the selected option, and you cannot save the quiz. The Due Date option is disabled for synchronous quizzes because students do not choose the time frame of when to take the synchronous quiz, therefore there is no need to set a due date.
To ensure that learners are aware of upcoming synchronous quizzes, instructors should create instructional or manual solutions. For example:
Make a synchronous quiz visible in the calendar:
Instructors should use the Start Date parameter when setting up a synchronous quiz and leave the End Date field empty.
Instructors can select Add availability dates to Calendar or set up an event showing the whole time.
Create an announcement with information about the synchronous quiz.
Set up an event and give a link to the quiz to provide more context.
Note: Instructors must modify or review quizzes one-by-one to avoid accidentally modifying quiz availability dates for synchronous quizzes.
Instructors should provide learners with information about a synchronous quiz before it starts. Learners can also access information about synchronous quizzes in the Quiz Information page.
Follow these steps to do it
To set up a synchronous quiz:
From a quiz page, expand the Availability Dates & Conditions accordion.
Set Start Date and Time. NOTE: Leave the End Date field empty.
Expand the Timing & Display accordion.
Click Timer Settings.
In the Timing dialog, under Quiz Start, select Synchronous: Timer starts on the start date.
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.
