Wednesday Wisdom

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Welcome to the Spring 2024 semester! ☀️

We hope you had a relaxing break.

As we embark on a new semester, we wanted to share some useful Brightspace tips.

Have you ever wondered what your course looks like from your students’ perspectives? Wonder no more! Brightspace allows you to easily view your course in a learner view, giving you an insight to what your students see. Click here to learn more!

In addition, instructors can also use another preview option in Grades to see exactly what a specific student sees in their Grades for a course.

Check back every Wednesday this semester for updates/tips!

Stony Brook’s new LMS after 24 years…

Blackboard, Brightspace

After impacting the educational experiences of thousands of students since January 1999, Blackboard Learn is sunsetting during Fall 2023.

When it was initially implemented, we were looking for a tool that would allow instructors the ability to post their content online.  We were the first SUNY school to use Blackboard and never, did I imagine at the time, how much our campus would depend on the system years later.

Spring 2023 is the final semester .

As we transition from Blackboard to Brightspace, please know that the team is here to help.

 

Brightspace Grade Check

Academic Technologies, Brightspace

Over the weekend, I received a few emails from some of my students stating that Week 10 reflection in grades showed they had a 0 but on the assignment, they saw they received all 10 points.

I checked the Assignment and saw that I had attached it to the wrong grade item and resolved the issue

But then curiosity got the best of me and I wondered if there was a place that showed all my grade items and how they are connected.

In Grades / Manage Grades, you can see the Grade Items and which areas they are attached to but , it does not display the specific items.  Clicking on the ? mark next to the association will show the item.

So I submitted an Idea to the Brightspace Community  asking to add a column to Manage Grades that identifies the specific item at a glance

 

If you would like the same, please vote it up**: https://desire2learn.brightidea.com/ideas/D9813

** Brightspace Community account required…this is not the same as your Stony Brook log in …we encourage all members of SBU to join the Brightspace Community!

Copies of Blackboard courses are now in Brightspace from Fall 2021-Summer 2022

Blackboard, Brightspace
Stony Brook Instructors:
You do not need to submit requests to move Blackboard courses from Fall 2021, Winter 2022, Spring 2022, & Summer 2022 into Brightspace**.  This has been done for you! .  When you log into Brightspace (https://brightspace.stonybrook.edu)  ,  you should see your courses under the Conversions Tab In the My Courses box  …  All converted courses start with STB

 

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You should also have a sandbox under the NOTERM ongoing courses term
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AND
See your Winter 2023 & Spring 2023  courses as well!

 

**Fall 2022 Bb courses will be imported over after the semester ends
If there is a course that you teach that has not been offered since Summer of 2021, and you would like a copy of it in Brightspace, submit a service ticket at: https://service.stonybrook.edu

 

If you have content from an older semester for a course that has already been copied for you into Brightspace,  you will need to export the content that you need from Blackboard and import into an existing Brightspace course of your choice. See https://it.stonybrook.edu/help/kb/exporting-your-course-content-from-blackboard-and-importing-it-into-brightspace for details!

 

Visit our Brightspace Service  for additional support information!

For Spring 2023, all courses are encouraged to use Brightspace!

Academic Technologies, Blackboard, Brightspace

Blackboard will no longer be an option after Spring 2023.    The system is retiring in October: https://it.stonybrook.edu/news/articles/blackboard-access-ends-1042023

DoIT’s Brightspace team is here to help !

Attendance Tool in Brightspace?

Brightspace

Some  Instructors are asking about the Brightspace Attendance Tool.

After exploring this tool, I have constructed the following If…Then  statements:

If attendance is part of your grading criteria, Then do not use this tool.  Instead post attendance in the Grades area so it’s part of the automatic calculation.  Mine looks like this:

Screenshot of attendance in grade center

 

Interested in learning more about Grades in Brightspace?  Check out DoIT Training’s Minibyte slideshow/videos

If you aren’t concerned about incorporating it into grades, then read on!

Brightspace Attendance

The attendance is a tool that you will find in  Course Admin

Directions on how to  set it up can be found here.

I could not find any directions on how the students can view it but I did figure out that you can add it to your Nav bar. if you want the students to see the available Attendance data.

Note that this tool will work fine without the students having access to view it.  The students do not check themselves into class, this is a manual process that the instructor must enter, one by one. (This is a large reason why simply using the Grades area and marking off any absences may be less time consuming.)

This shows the pull down process for marking each learner present or absent:

It is easy to see how a long class roster would be a burden.

… and If you choose to enter this into the Course Nav Bar, this is what a student sees:

While it does not connect to the grade center, you can export the information out if you would like into a csv file.

The file looks like this:

export of attendance roster contains Name, username, ID#, Weekly attendance and summary of how many Present, Absent, Late & Excused.

 

Brightspace: e-mail the whole class

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So, in my last post, I showed how users can opt in and out of notifications.  In this post we get around students being able to opt out of announcement notifications and also help keep your course site a little cleaner.

As opposed to sending an Announcement, you can email the whole class by going to “Course Admin” in the NavBar -> Learner Management section and click on “Classlist”.

Then select from the top “Email Classlist”

Click on “Send Email”

and compose your email to the whole class here.  Click “Send”.

originally published: https://wp.me/p4md28-nx