What’s New

Do you want to know how to hide your final grade? Check out this knowledge article in Brightspace Essentials to ensure you are following the right steps:

https://brightspace.algonquincollege.com/d2l/le/content/6832/viewContent/2641051/View

It’s Brightspace Survey time again! Your feedback is important to us and we would appreciate if you would take the time to share your opinions and experiences so we can support your Learning Management System needs. Please take five minutes to complete our Brightspace Faculty Satisfaction survey. In appreciation of your time, faculty can enter into a draw to win $50 on their AC Employee Card. Clicking the link below will redirect you to the official survey from Learning and Teaching Services. You will not be asked for any personal information except for your email, which is safe to provide through SurveyMonkey for the purposes of the draw.

Take the survey here.

This month’s updates to Brightspace include a much-requested feature that helps faculty manage quiz availability when copying content from other courses.

Previously, quizzes copied into a Brightspace course would copy over as “Active” and available to learners if that was the setting in their previous location. Faculty would have to toggle the quiz setting to “Inactive” manually to avoid immediate release to learners. Now, all copied quizzes will default to “Inactive” status and remain unavailable to learners until faculty choose to release them.

This update will ensure that learners do not accidentally access assessments before the appropriate time, and reduce workload for faculty in managing their content.

Organizers of the first Brightspace Symposium at Algonquin College, held in the DARE District in late February, describe the event as a successful opportunity to learn and celebrate the school’s first academic year using the cloud-based Learning Management System.

“Our purpose was to bring faculty and guests and Brightspace creator D2L together to learn best practices from each other and find solutions for common problems,” says Farbod Karimi, Chair of Learning and Teaching Services. “We also wanted to have a chance to empower our team to present on different tools and techniques.”

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There are some important changes coming to Brightspace that will be implemented on March 4, 2019. The first group of changes addresses email concerns, the second group addresses changes to the homepage of Brightspace, and the last introduces a new feature for annotating assignments.

Changes to emails in Brightspace

Change #1 – From Email Address

The LMS Team is implementing a solution that addresses the problem of invalid email addresses populating Outlook when emails are sent through Brightspace. For example, John Smith’s Algonquin email address is “smithj@algonquincollege.com,” not “smithj@algonquincollege.brightspace.com.” The second version is the Brightspace internal email address format that is automated within Brightspace when an email is sent through that system, but it is not used by our learners and teachers at Algonquin. Therefore, when users search for past email threads to locate an email address, they may be finding and using the automated, invalid address instead of the correct one.

All emails sent by users through Brightspace will have the sender displayed as “noreply@algonquincollege.brightspace.com” in Outlook. If a user replies to an email sent from Brightspace, it will still go to the correct email address. The “noreply” address solution avoids the problem of having users erroneously searching for past threads with invalid email addresses. Note that the combination of the class code listed in the email subject and the sender’s signature in the email body will continue to make it easy to identify the email sender.

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Space is still available for faculty interested in participating in the Brightspace Symposium on Thursday, Feb. 21.

The symposium is free of charge and people can attend all or just some of the scheduled activities taking place from 8 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. in Banquet Salon A in D building — but registration is required. The event is fully catered (breakfast, lunch and a reception are included for registrants) and features a wide variety of fun and interesting opportunities to learn, including speakers, presentations and workshops.

Come and meet the LTS team and hear guest presenters from the University of Ottawa, eCampus Ontario, College La Cite, Brightspace creator D2L, and Mohawk College.

Register for the event here.

Turnitin eRater Grammar Feedback

There has been a small change to Turnitin.

While setting up Turnitin for assignments, instructors can now turn on eRater Grammar checker for their students. This allows learners to review this Grammar feedback immediately upon assignment submission. This is helpful for assignments that are set up to allow multiple submissions. Learners can initially submit an assignment, receive Grammar feedback, and then submit another version that incorporates the feedback. On the due date, that last assignment submitted by the learner can be the final one for grading.

Coming to Brightspace

A new annotation tool for grading assignments will be available in Brightspace in March.

According to D2L, faculty will be able “to provide feedback in the Assignments tool with grades, high-level feedback, rubrics, video, audio, contextual inline annotations, or any combination of these. Annotations … are a great way to tie feedback to specific areas and provide meaningful suggestions.”

Go here to watch a video that highlights how to use the tool.

The Brightspace team would like to welcome faculty back for the Winter 2019 semester and extend an enthusiastic thank you for your valuable feedback to the Brightspace survey you received in December.

Your participation is vital to us in our continuing work to make your Brightspace experience — and those of your students — simpler, more intuitive and more efficient in the months ahead.

The next steps in our effort requires your participation in a focus group discussion where we will share the results from the survey and seek your feedback on how we can improve satisfaction with the LMS. We are hosting three focus group sessions the week of January 28. Lunch will be provided for all participants.

Sign up here

In these sessions, we will discuss the Top 5 feedback categories from the survey, the overall results, and what we are doing to address your suggestions and concerns. Download the results by clicking here.

Keshana King bubbles over with enthusiasm as she describes how the Brightspace Ambassadors are assisting new students at Algonquin College this term.

“Our program is most beneficial to students just out of high school who are completely new to the college experience and have never used a Learning Management System,” says King, Brightspace Ambassador Program Coordinator with Learning and Teaching Services. She notes it’s also especially useful to many mature students, people who are getting used to technology after a long break or who didn’t work with technology in their previous work experience, and international students.

“International students face huge changes coming to a new country, and Brightspace can be one of them. It’s a great feeling to be able to help people because you’re a student helping other students, knowing that they’re going through what you’ve gone through.”

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The latest update to Brightspace has a new feature that automatically changes the notification settings for all users. Now, all students and instructors will automatically receive an email when new announcements are posted or updated within a course.

Previously, students had to enable the check box themselves in order to receive notifications of emails. This will ensure that announcements are sent to their Algonquin email accounts. Students will now have to actively opt out of receiving emails if they do not want to receive announcements in this way.

The LMS team worked to find a solution and successfully made the change, addressing faculty suggestions to enable email notifications for announcements by default.