It’s time for Wednesday Wisdom….on a Thursday! We apologize for the late post, however we have a great tip for you this week. Did you know that you can create letter grades schemes in Brightspace? With these schemes, you can automatically show a letter grade next to each student’s score on a graded assignment. To learn more, check out this article!
Did you know? If you use Groups in Brightspace, your students can’t see the group tool in their red navbar unless you manually customize it. Fortunately, customizing your navbar in Brightspace is a straightforward process that puts you in control of what your students can access with ease. By tailoring the nav bar to suit your specific course needs, you can enhance the user experience and streamline access to important resources.
With Brightspace’s customization options, instructors can add or remove shortcuts to various areas of the platform directly from the navbar. Whether you want to prioritize quick access to the Content tool, Discussions, Quizzes, or any other component within Brightspace, customization empowers you to tailor the nav bar according to your teaching style and course requirements. Additionally, instructors can rearrange the order of these shortcuts, ensuring that the most frequently used tools are prominently displayed for both you and your students. By taking advantage of these customization features, instructors can create a more intuitive and efficient learning environment within Brightspace. To learn more on how to customize your navbar, check out this article.
Do you curren
tly use the built-in Brightspace calendar?
Do you know how to add the Work-to-do widget to your Brightspace homepage?
As an instructor using Brightspace, keeping a tidy gradebook is essential to ensure grade calculations are accurate and easy to understand for both yourself, and your students. However, achieving this cleanliness sometimes requires a bit of digital housekeeping, especially when it comes to deleting grade items. You may find that the process of deleting some grade items is simple when running into old activities, or duplicate grades that need to be removed. However at times, you may run into a situation where some activities seemingly cannot be deleted. This week, we’ll be focusing on how to remove these pesky grade items that seemingly won’t go away.
The reason some grade items seemingly cannot be removed is because of their association to an assignment, discussion, or quiz. You’ll notice in the Manage Grades tab of the Grades area, certain grade items will have something listed next to them in the Association column. This will usually say Assignments, Discussions, or Quizzes.
This means that those grade items are associated to either an Assignment, Discussion, or Quiz created in Brightspace, and needs to be disassociated before it can be removed. To learn more about how to disassociate these grade items and how to delete them, check out this article! In addition, we’ll be talking about this and other gradebook topics in our webinar on Common Gradebook Issues and How to Resolve Them on Tuesday, April 16th from 1:00 to 2:00 pm. Click here to register! We hope to see you there!
Display all upcoming events to learners in one spot. 
Add items such as:
For more information: https://community.d2l.com/brightspace/kb/articles/18115-calendar
Thinking of what you could do this spring break?How about previewing your grades in Brightspace!
Make sure grades are accurate for your students before they return from break!
Use the Preview option to see exactly how a student sees his/her grades.
Scroll down (or use the View By or search tools) to find the student whose grades you want to preview grades for and select the dropdown next to the student’s name and select Preview
In Brightspace, instructors have the ability to create groups to facilitate collaboration amongst their students. Once groups are created, instructors can use the groups for various purposes.
Examples include creating:
The Question Library is a central repository that stores and archives questions which you can reuse within a course. You can create multiple collections within the Question Library to organize your questions by type and topic, making it easier for you to find questions for your quizzes, surveys, and self assessments.
As a best practice for storage, organization, and easy access, we 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.
Instructors can access Class Progress and see overall how all students are doing!
You may want to use the Class Progress tool to do any of the following:
Intelligent AgentsThe Intelligent Agent tool allows instructors to set up criteria to create a report of students who completed or did not complete an action within the course.
Once the instructor sets up the criteria, s/he can enable automatic emails (which are customizable) to students who met the criteria or just use of the report.