What’s New with D2L Brightspace?

Consolidated Assignment Availability Dates

Instructors now have greater control over assignment visibility and can include availability dates in the Calendar. With these new availability settings, you can prevent early or late submissions while still allowing students to view the assignment description/instructions, attached files, and associated rubrics, as well as schedule when an assignment becomes visible to students.

When selecting a Start or End Date for an assignment, a link appears below the date indicating how the assignment appears to students prior to or after those dates. Click on the link to open a new menu and select from the following options:

• Visible with access restricted – Students will be able to see the link for the assignment but not be able to open it.
• Visible with submission restricted – Students will be able to access the assignment, e.g., to view the description. But they will not be permitted to submit to the assignment.
• Hidden – Students will not be able to see the link for the assignment.

For more information, see D2L’s article on the New Assignment Date Feature.

Increased Pagination for the Classlist and Gradebook

You can now view more users per page in the Gradebook and Classlist. Click on the “results per page” drop-down menu at the bottom of the screen to select up to 250 users per page. The default minimum is 50 users per page.

Access Ventus (PMC Academic Accommodations Portal) in Brightspace

Instructors and Students can now access a link to the Ventus Academic Accommodations Portal via the “Jump To” menu on the Brightspace navbar.

For more information about academic accommodations, see the PMC’s Accommodation Process page. 

Link to an Ares Course Reserve Reading

It is now possible to create links for individual Ares Course Reserve items in course Modules and text editors. Use this feature to direct students to specific readings rather than the general Ares portal.

For more information, see our support page on how to use Ares in your Brightspace course.

Revisions to Teaching Assistant Role

The Quizzes permissions for the Teaching Assistant role have been reduced to grading only. Users with the regular TA role cannot edit quizzes, view question details, or enter the Question Library.

To permit an assistant access to view and edit quizzes and questions, you can enroll them in the course as Teaching Assistant (Full Rights).

For more information, see our support pages on roles and permissions in Brightspace and how to add a TA to your course.

Did You Know?

You can compose announcements in advance and schedule when they will be published for the class. When creating your announcement, select your future posting date and time in the Availability section and then click the Publish button. The Status of the announcement on the Announcements page will now be listed as Scheduled. Only after the Start Date has passed will the students be able to view the announcement on the course page and receive a notification that a new announcement is available.

For more information, see our support page on how to create announcements.

Self-Enrolment Group Descriptions

When signing up for a group in the Groups tool, students can now view the general description for a Group Category that has been set up for self-enrolment. Category descriptions for self-enrolment groups can be entered in the Descriptions field when creating or editing a Group Category. Use this to add instructions and details to the Category overall instead of creating descriptions for individual groups!

For more information, please see our support site on how to create Groups.

Deletion Warning for Groups

When you are deleting a Group Category, a warning now appears telling you how many Assignment and Discussion activities are associated with that Category and will be deleted along with it.

For more information on which elements can be undeleted, please refer to D2L’s article on how to restore data in Brightspace.

Editing Text for Locked Rubrics

It is now possible to edit the text of a rubric after it has been used for an assessment / become locked. No changes can be made to point values or the group/criteria/level structure of the rubric. Only written aspects of the rubric can be adjusted, such as the names of criteria or level descriptions. Use this to correct typos or change wording for better interpretation.

For more information, please see our support site on how to create Rubrics.

Did You Know?

You can use Intelligent Agents to notify you when a new student has been added to your course page (i.e., has enrolled in your course). To create this, the following settings should be enabled:

• For the Scheduling settings, select the Hourly frequency and set it to repeat every 1 hour until the enrolment deadline for the term.
• When setting the Criteria, select the Release Condition Classlist > Org unit enrollment and add the current course in the Select Org Unit
• For the Actions, select the Take Action only the first time the agent’s criteria are satisfied for a user.

In order to streamline this notification system, you may want to have the Agent send you (or even the new students) an email every time a new enrolment is detected. However, we strongly advise that you leave the email option disabled until the first class. This will prevent you from being spammed with email notifications for every student currently enrolled in the course.

For more information on Agent settings, manually running an Agent, and enabling email notifications, please see our support site on how to create Intelligent Agents.

Displaying Student IDs

Student ID numbers can now be viewed in more Brightspace tools to help in discerning students with the same or similar names. These ID numbers, which Brightspace calls an “Org Defined ID”, are visible only to Instructors and Teaching Assistants; students are not able to see each other’s student numbers in any Brightspace tool.

Gradebook

The student’s ID appears next to their name in the far left-hand column of the Gradebook. This is also a sortable field—click on Org Defined ID in the column header to arrange this userlist according to student number.

Profile Cards

When evaluating a student’s Assignment or viewing a Discussion post, hover your cursor over the student’s icon to display additional information, including their student number.

Did You Know?

You can create hyperlinks for students to external tools, such as ARES or the Brightspace-Zoom tool, in the Brightspace HTML Editor.

To create a hyperlink:

1. Click to place your cursor in the Editor where you want to insert the link.
2. Click on the quicklink icon in the Editor toolbar.
3. Select External Learning Tools from the pop-up menu.
4. Click on the name of tool in the list to insert the link.

Use this method to make links to important course elements more visible in areas such as the Announcements tool, a Content Module description, or even a custom widget on your course homepage!

For more information on creating custom widgets, visit the Customizing your Homepage and Widgets page.

Quizzes: No Time Limit

The timing restriction settings for quizzes now include a “No Time Limit” option. Use this for quizzes where you would like students to take as much time as they need once they start. (For newly created quizzes, this is now the default setting.) When accessing the quiz, the launch page states “Time Allowed: Unlimited”. And while taking the quiz, there is no countdown timer. See our support site on Quiz Restrictions for more information.

Classlist: View Section Enrolments

Now you can view students’ section enrolments in the Classlist for course pages with multiple course codes. Simply click on the chevron next to a student’s name in the Classlist and select “View Group and Section Enrollments” from the menu. The pop-up window that opens includes that student’s section enrolment details below the list of groups they belong to in the course.

Did You Know?

You can program extended quiz time accommodations for students in the Classlist using the Edit Accommodations feature. This method will apply the additional time to all quizzes, eliminating the need to create special access permissions individually. For accommodations such as “25% more time”, use the multiplier option (i.e., 1.25) to scale the amount of additional time according to the time limits of different quizzes. For instructions and details, see our support site on Setting an Accommodation for All Quizzes in the Classlist.