New feature!
Echo360!
Change you ASR to be something other than English at the course section level!!
Log into echo360.org
Go to your desired Course, then to Settings and then Features.
and find ASR Language Settings
Then select the new language that you would like your section transcribed to.
Obviously this is fantastic news for language courses. Let me know in the comments what other courses you will be using this for!
Here is some regular info on creating groups.
Additionally:
You can restrict the quiz to be available to a specific group. So if you had five different versions of a quiz, you can assign each group to their own quiz.
Setting up an organized gradebook isn’t the same as in Blackboard. If you are used to Bb, there are going to be some headaches and confusion.
Some things are organizationally nice. For example, you can assign items to belong to grading categories, and they stay grouped that way in the grading spreadsheet. Not only that, but items in a grading category will get a subtotal column auto created for you, which I think can be particularly helpful if you are keeping track of attendance in your gradebook. (Note: the attendance tool in Brightspace does not report into the grade book. This is something I manually setup.)
To create new categories or items (columns), you will want to go to “Grades” -> “Manage Grades” and then “New”.
To decide on your categories, you should refer to your course syllabus. You should have something like:
Class Participation/Attendance – 15%
Quizzes – 20%
Midterm – 20%
Project(s) – 25%
Final – 20%
You can see that every item listed that has multiple items nested (Class Participation/Attendance, Quizzes and possibly Project(s)) will be your categories. Since there will only be one midterm and one exam, you cou hold them as just singleton items that are not in a category, OR you could make a category called exams and add them both to that.
First make the Categories, then the Items inside the categories.
Since you indicated in the Category that all items would have a total value of 100, the maximum points fills in automatically for all associated items and is a graded out field.
Resulting spreadsheet with grades filled in:
Note: I manually filled in these grades and you are able to do that. If you want these grades to auto populate from an actual brightspace exam, you will want to go to your Exams/Quizzes area from the NavBar and create or find the exam you want to use, and associate it with the right Grade Item.
Warning: This is one of the places where Brightspace can be … shall be say, confusing? When you go to edit your exam/quiz, you will see this:
That Category pull down… even though. yes, we were just calling things items and categories in the Manage Grades area, has NOTHING to do with categories in Grades.
Instead, you will want to switch to the Assessment tab and find the pull down for Grade Item.
If you haven’t already setup the Items in your grade book, you do have an opportunity to select [add grade item] and throw in the item into an existing category.
Now it knows that this Quiz is from the Category “Exams” and will grade it and submit it into the grade spreadsheet appropriately. It also knows that it will be worth up to 100 points and will be equally weighted with the other exams to the 20% total value of the final grade, because that is how the category Exams is setup.
End of Part 1
SUNY CPD’s Brightspace Training Options
As the Fall 2022 semester approaches many SUNY faculty and staff are preparing to design and/or deliver their digital course materials in the new SUNY Brightspace Digital Learning Environment (DLE). The SUNY Center for Professional Development (CPD) is pleased to support SUNY faculty and staff by providing a variety of Brightspace training opportunities and asynchronous resources. These training workshops and resources are available for free to all SUNY campuses and are detailed below.
The CPD offers a variety of training opportunities to provide as much flexibility and choice to our SUNY faculty and staff. Registration for August sessions is open and new sessions are released based upon registration demand. If you don’t see the workshop you want at the time you need, please continue to check back, the registration site is updated regularly.
Asynchronous Online Modules
Scaled Webinars
Remote Synchronous Workshops
Illuminations
We offer multiple training levels to help ensure that faculty and staff receive the style and pace of training that works best for them. Registrants are encouraged to take a brief self-assessment to help identify their training preferences. Upon completion of the self-assessment faculty and staff will be provided a recommended training path. All training opportunities are available, however, regardless of the recommendation.
Recommended paths:
We look forward to seeing our SUNY faculty and staff in our upcoming SUNY DLE Brightspace programming. For questions regarding programming, please reach out to Jamie Heron, SUNY Online Program Manager, SUNY CPD (jamie.heron@suny.edu). For technical questions regarding the registration process, please reach out to Viktorya Mirzoyan, Program Coordinator, SUNY CPD (viktorya.mirzoyan@suny.edu).
Jamie Heron
SUNY Online Program Manager
SUNY Center for Professional Development
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”.
How to setup your alerts and register your mobile device on Brightspace:
Find Notifications under the location where it says your name.
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Under Contact Methods:
Register your Mobile Device
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Set your SMS and eMail notifications:
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When you have everything setup, click Save at the bottom left corner of the page.
Remember to check your email inside of Brightspace. You can see that by clicking on the icon that looks like an envelope.
Brightspace has its own email and it can push notifications out to our stonybrook.edu e-mail.
It is found by clicking on the envelope icon.
Turning Technologies, our polling/clicker system was purchased by Echo360, our capture system.
What we referred to as Turning Point or Turning Point Anywhere, has been rebranded PointSolutions.
In Brightspace in order to link the course to polling, the instructor will need to make a link available for the students to be able to register their devices and/or licenses. To create this link you will go to the Content Menu item, then click on “Existing Activities” -> “External Learning Tools” and select Turning Account Registration.
You may see some overlap between it being called Turning Something-or-other and Pointsolutions for some time, so I wanted you to be aware.
If your course was not one of the courses that was automagically moved from Blackboard to Brightspace, you may be wondering how to move it yourself.
The first thing you should look for is whether ANY version of the course you want to export has already been brought to Brightspace. You may have more than one. For example you might have a Fall 2021 copy and an empty shell for Fall 2022. If what you want is in the Fall 2021 copy, you don’t need to export anything from Blackboard – it is already there.
If absolutely no version of the course you want to bring over exists in Brightspace (perhaps something you haven’t taught in a while AND you aren’t teaching it in the fall either), pause following these directions to make a ticket for a “Bb course copy shell in Brightspace” where you will include the Course Designator & Number (example: BIO 203). After you have some place to put your export, continue with these steps. If you only have the 2022 shell in Brightspace and you don’t want to move your old course directly into 2022 (very wise move!), also complete that same ticket.
The second thing that I want you to know is that Brightspace cannot import courses that are greater in size than 2 gigs. You may not know what the size of your Blackboard course is until you export it, so perhaps don’t worry about this right away, but if after exporting the course it turns out to be too big, just remember what I started with here. If it is too big, this will probably be due to large presentations or documents that you loaded directly into your blackboard course. You will need to remove these items and host them elsewhere.
For example:
Exporting a course doesn’t work exactly like it used to work in Blackboard, so if you have done it in the past, read this anyway.
NOTE: For a far less verbose version of this post, please see this link.
Go to your course that you want to bring into Brightspace. Go to Packages and Utilities under Course Management in the left menu. Under Packages and Utilities, select Export/Archive Course.
Select Export Package.
Under Select Course Materials, “select all”.
Click Submit and wait.
Success: This action has been queued. An email will be sent when the process is complete.
When the export is finished it will show up on this page if you hit refresh.
You might, like me, think “download” would be in this pull down menu:
It isn’t though. Just click on the name of your export to download it to your computer.
Now go to Brightspace.
Enter the course you want to import the content into.
TIP: You can use your Fall 2021 course to bring in other semesters content too. That way you have one place for all versions of a particular course you have taught. Like a box of all things BIO 203 – regardless of what semester it came from.
Go to Course Admin
Find the Catagory “Site Resources”
Click on Import/Export/Copy Components
Select Import Components (at the bottom of the page) and click start.
Click upload and select the zip export file you downloaded from Blackboard. If this is a big file, it will take a little time to upload and you won’t be able to select Import All Components until it has finished. If your export file was bigger than 2 gigs, see the “second thing” to know at the top of this blog post.
Assuming for a moment that you imported the content into a location that is not the “live” course you will be teaching from, go to the course that you will be teaching from and go back to the Course Admin -> Site Resources -> Import/Export/Copy Components area again, and this time select “Copy Components from another Org Unit”.
You will be able to search for the location you copied the course to, and select just the items you want to bring to the “live” course shell. This way you aren’t pulling years worth of unneeded items into the live course, just the pieces that you know you want.
TIP: Keep your non-live course storage organized by semester and year if you have the desire to bring many semesters worth of the same course over. Try to help your future self find what you would be looking for.
Don’t forget to do some housekeeping on any content you bring over to the “live” course. Check for correct dates, availability, exceptions, links, formatting, accessibility, etc.
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You can set up each group to access quizzes at different times. Here’s a link to the article that has steps on how to set up special access in quizzes, https://community.brightspace.com/s/article/000017306
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If you had everyone doing the same quiz at the same time, but in groups, you can sort your gradebook by group, and then when you see the first grade come in from a group, manually assign it to the rest of the students in that group.
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