All About Brightspace Intelligent Agents
Intelligent Agents can be used to send automated emails when students meet, or fail to meet, certain criteria within a course. Login patterns, course activity, assignment completion, discussion participation and a range of other criteria can be used by the system to send these emails.
For example, you can choose to use Intelligent Agents to send automated emails to students who have not checked into the course or who have not submitted an assignment.
- How to create and run an Intelligent Agent: Access the Intelligent Agents Tool from your course navigation bar, Tools menu and then Course Admin. Go to the Essentials for Faculty course in Brightspace for step by step instructions.
- How to Schedule and Intelligent Agent: The agents can be scheduled to run daily, weekly, monthly or annually, and also can have a start date and end date.
- How to perform a Practice Run: Your agent is ready to send out an email to your students who have not accessed your course in the past 5 days, but you are not sure how this works! Performing a practice Run, that won’t send an email to the identified students, is highly recommended.
- Perform a Manual Run: You set up an agent in your course and also a schedule for it, but you want to run it outside that schedule. In this case, you need to manual run the agent. Note that your agent does not need to be enabled in order for you to run it.
- How to delete and restore an Intelligent Agent: Deleting is easy, but restoring an item always takes more steps.
- Special Replace Strings to include in an email sent by an Intelligent Agent: Replace strings allow you to customize course content and communications.
The following are replace strings you can use in the subject line and the email message.{OrgName} – The name of the organization (Algonquin College).
{OrgUnitCode} – The code of your current course.
{OrgUnitName} – The name of the current course.
{OrgUnitStartDate} – The start date of your course.
{OrgUnitEndDate} – The end date of your course.
{InitiatingUserFirstName} – The first name of the student.
{InitiatingUserLastName} – The last name of the student.
{InitiatingUserUserName} – The username of the student.
{LastCourseAccessDate} – The date the student last accessed the course.
{LastLoginDate} – The date the student last logged in.
- Images and Intelligent Agents: You can insert images directly into the body of the Intelligent Agents emails using the Add Image button and also add attachments to automated email messages when creating and editing intelligent agents. The intelligent agent email template contains an Attachments area that enables you to upload local files, select from available course files, or record audio.
- How to copy Intelligent agents to another course: If you want to copy an Intelligent Agent from one course to another, make sure that you also copy the associated Release Conditions and Activities (if applicable). These will be separate items on the Components list when you go through the copying steps (see points 7 and 8 in this guide to copying course components).
So You Think You Can Brightspace – Second Season
The second Season of this contest will launch at the end of next month. Are you doing something exciting with your Brightspace course that you might be willing to share? Get in touch with Rob Kershaw (kershar@algonquincollege.com) for an opportunity to showcase your work as part of the upcoming Brightspace Symposium.
Satisfaction Survey
We would like to have your responses to a few simple questions about the Learning Management System. By responding to the survey, which should take less than five minutes of your time, you can help the LMS team understand how satisfied you are with Brightspace, which elements are most useful to you in your work, and which features you feel can be improved. By completing the survey, you will be entered into a draw for a $25 gift card for Connections. Access the survey from here.