Tag Archives: brightspace

Brightspace March updates

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As with the February Brightspace release, the March 2024 release is also on the smaller side, however, I did want to highlight 2 of the items in the update here. This release is scheduled to be deployed on the evening of March 14th, 2024. The full release notes can be found here: https://community.d2l.com/brightspace/kb/articles/25427-march-2024-20-24-3

The two features highlighted in this email do not require any updates to permissions or enabling of variables.

Brightspace Editor – Consistent link creation with the ability to choose link format:

 

Inserting a link into the Brightspace Editor opens the Add Link dialog, allowing users to determine if their links open in a new window (default) or in the current window, as well as to add text to their link. This provides users with a consistent workflow and control over how links respond in their content.

Add Link opens when inserting links with the context menu or with the keyboard shortcut ctrl+K or command+K:

Additionally, the dialog includes a new Insert Quicklink option, allowing for users to insert a Quicklink:

[Note: a quicklink is a link to another location in your course and it will not break if you copy it forward to other courses.]

The same Link, Text, and Open In options are displayed whether adding a Link or Quicklink, which helps ensure a consistent link creation workflow:

Finally – this feature updates the icons shown in the Insert Quicklink menu so that they all have the same visual style.

In summary, previously, adding links had different field options and behaviors based on how the link was being added to the course. This updates makes the adding link menus consistent across all areas where this can be done.

I encourage you to read the full release notes for this specific update, located here: https://community.d2l.com/brightspace/kb/articles/25427-march-2024-20-24-3#brightspace-editor-consistent-link-creation-with-the-ability-to-choose-link-format-updated

Quizzes – Improved experience for generating quiz reports:

This release introduces a better experience for instructors when running and exporting quiz reports with large amounts of data:


  1.  As an instructor, select a Quiz inManage Quizzes> Statistics.
  2. Select one of the tabs on the top of the page:3. After selecting the desired tab, click either Export option (CSV or Excel)

Upon doing this, a new window appears with a message indicating that the report is being generated:

4. When the report is done being generated, users will be alerted via the Bell icon. Clicking the alert will bring them to the screen to download the report.

Previously, clicking either export button would open a new window and depending on the size of the report, it could hang, freeze or even time-out altogether. This new method of report generation prevents this from happening.

A note about Brightspace updates:

Brightspace uses a Continuous Delivery model for monthly updates and SUNY is part of “Wave 3” on the update schedule. Please see this Wave Schedule for the date range of when an update will be deployed: https://community.d2l.com/brightspace/kb/articles/1048-wave-schedule. Current, past and future release notes can also be located in the sidebar of this page.

Brightspace – Managing Restrictions in Discussions with Groups

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If you want to have discussion boards used in  your class, and also use groups in such a way that members of different groups do not see each others posts… rather they only see the posts from their own group in the discussion board – these are the steps you follow.

Please note that these are steps that should be taken before the discussion board has any posts.

Go to Groups:

Set up your Groups, by creating a Group Category:  I used the # of groups “Enrollment Type” option.

Click Save.

Go to Discussions:

*This assumes you already have the discussion boards in place.*

Use the drop down to the right of the Topic name to “Edit Topic”.

Go to “Availability Dates & Conditions” on the right hand part of the screen.

Click on “Manage Restrictions”.

Select “Restrict Topic and Separate Threads” Users in the selected groups/sections can view this topic but will only see threads from their group/section.

It is possible to have multiple Group Categories and Course sections to chose from.   You will probably have only one Group Category.

Click Add.  Click Save and Close.

 

You should now see under the topic name an indication that Group/section restrictions have been applied.

 

 

 

 

ALEKS (McGraw Hill) added to Brightspace.

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As you know, many items can be added to the basic Brightspace experience.  For a full list of the current “add ons” – you can look here: https://it.stonybrook.edu/help/kb/brightspace-add-onsltis

ALEKS is a product made by McGraw Hill “ALEKS is a research-based, online learning program that offers course products for Math, Chemistry, Statistics, and more. Rooted in 20 years of research and analytics, ALEKS is a proven, online learning platform that helps educators and parents understand each student’s knowledge and learning progress in depth, and provides the individual support required for every student to achieve mastery.” Right now it is being used in some Chemistry classes here at SBU.

Any additional instructors interested in using this should feel free to reach out and let us know so that we may turn it on for your course.

To locate these tools inside of Brightspace, you would go to Content, find or create the module that you want your link to appear within, and then go to Existing Activities search through the list to see if what you are looking for is there and if not, click on External Learning Tools for access the more items.  Make sure to click on the link to the tool after creating it to assure that it is fully configured for your class.

 

 

Uses of Groups in Brightspace

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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.

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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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I hope that helps.  Feel free to send your ideas for how you use groups!

Brightspace Training Options

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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.

Training Options:

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

• SUNY DLE’s Asynchronous Brightspace modules are a convenient way to progress through the Brightspace training at your own pace.  Progress in the recommended order, or pick and choose which topic(s) are most relevant to your purposes.
• There are optional knowledge checks at the end of each topic sections. Participants who successfully complete all assessments will earn a Brightspace Fundamentals Certificate and Badge from the SUNY CPD.
• Access to asynchronous modules will be staggered to accommodate the priority needs of Cohorts 1 and 2, as well as the availability of faculty accounts in the new Brightspace environment.  When your campus Brightspace account has been created, your campus will provide your login instructions.

Scaled Webinars

• Targeted for larger audiences, these scaled Zoom webinars offer live demonstrations of the Brightspace learning environment and other training topics.  There are opportunities to ask questions of Brightspace experts at each webinar.
• These webinars are open to all SUNY faculty and staff, regardless of cohort.

Remote Synchronous Workshops

• These live “point & click” workshops are offered via Zoom and will cover the Brightspace Fundamentals training materials. Select a training session based upon your preferred training pace (see Training Levels, below).
• These sessions are limited to 10-15 participants per session.
• Currently, Remote Synchronous Workshops are available to Cohorts 1 and 2.

Illuminations

• These advanced Brightspace workshops are offered in the scaled webinar format and feature Brightspace tools and topics not covered in the Brightspace Fundamentals training.
• These workshops will commence September 2022.

Training Levels

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:

• Spark – Synchronous remote workshops at the “Spark” pace, with supplemental Scaled Webinars and Asynchronous Modules, as desired.
• Ignite – Synchronous remote workshops at the “Ignite” pace, with supplemental Scaled Webinars and Asynchronous Modules, as desired.
• Blaze – Scaled Webinars, supplemented with Asynchronous Modules, as desired.
• Bonfire – Asynchronous Modules, supplement with Scaled Webinars, as desired.

Recordings

• Recordings of all training options are available to SUNY faculty and staff on the SUNY DLE website behind authentication. Log in using your SUNY Federated ID (your campus username and password through single sign on) and you will be granted access to the recordings.
• As new workshop topics are introduced, new videos will be released.

Resource Guides

• Faculty resource guides will be available by August 4, 2022 on the DLE website.
• These guides will provide written instructions for all topics covered in the Brightspace Fundamentals workshops.
• In addition to written instructions, the resource guide page contain links to videos that demonstrate specific tools and actions within the Brightspace environment.

Registration

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

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”.

 

Brightspace Notifications

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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.

Need to Move a Course from Blackboard to Brightspace?

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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:

  • Videos can be moved to echo360 or youtube
  • Documents can be moved to google drive
  • etextbooks can be moved to google drive or check to see if they are available via the library

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”. 

THEN UNSELECT SETTINGS — this is the new part that changed

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.

 

A Great Free Training Opportunity – The OTTER Institute

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The SUNY Center for Professional Development (CPD) is hosting the OTTER (Online Teaching: Technology & Educational Resources) Institute July 25-28, 2022. The OTTER Institute is an opportunity for online practitioners to learn more about the innovations, trends, and challenges with online education. This year we are responding to the DLE Implementation and focusing all our programming on the new Brightspace Learning Environment. See examples of best practices for course design and delivery within Brightspace. Learn about the tools and features within Brightspace that will help you create and deliver effective and engaging digital course content.
The OTTER Institute is free to all SUNY campus members. The webinars will be recorded and the recordings will be available on the DLE website (this requires SUNY Federated ID/campus login credentials).
Topics to be covered in this Brightspace Edition of OTTER include:
  • Design Considerations
  • Brightspace Document Templates
  • Getting Started Module
  • FAQs & Glossary
  • Rubrics
  • Groups
  • Discussions
  • Assignments
  • Quizzes
  • Pulse App
  • IM & Email
  • Attendance & Checklists
  • Awards/Certificates
Registration is open and more details can be found on the event website:
Warmly,
The SUNY Online Team