Posted on Saturday, March 21st, 2020
Most Asked Questions on ZOOM Classroom tool
- How many ways are there for setting up a Zoom meeting? You have three ways to schedule a Zoom meeting.
- From within a course in Brightspace – ideal for when you give lectures to your students. Go to your Brightspace course and access the Zoom Classroom link from under the Tools menu. After you schedule the meeting, the link to the new meeting will automatically show up in your students’ course calendar. They will have access to the meeting on the date and time you chose in the meeting’s settings. Note that your students won’t need to sign up for a Zoom account, as they will automatically have access to your Zoom classroom, as participants.
- Through the website, outside your Brightspace course, by signing into the Algonquin College Zoom Portal – recommended for small groups’ meetings, when the participants don’t have Brightspace accounts and/or you don’t want your students to join the meeting by mistake. Also, you may choose to use this Zoom portal for your open office hours, specially when you need all your students, from multiple classes, to have access to this room.
- Using the ZOOM app on your smart phone
- How do I share my screen? Click on the Share icon, down at the bottom of the screen. You may share your desktop (or choose which desktop, if you have more than one), share a whiteboard that allows you and your students to collaborate, or share one specific app (which you should have it open before you start your Zoom meeting). If you have all the info you need to share with your students in one app (Power Point, World, Excel, etc), then sharing an app instead of the desktop, will avoid the notifications that you usually get from other applications (new emails, new chat messages, etc) to pop up while sharing. But if you need to switch from an application, to a video and then to a website, etc, then Desktop sharing is the way to go. Watch this video for more details on running Zoom and screen sharing.
- How do I add a virtual background? For those days when your office does not look the best, but you need to turn on your camera while giving your lectures using Zoom, once you have the meeting open, click on the chevron beside the Start Video icon and select the Choose a Virtual Background link. Use one of the existing images, or upload your personal ones, by clicking on Add Image. Click here for more information on setting a different background.
- How do I record my lecture and make it available on Brightspace? We recommend opening your own Zoom meeting – find your personal meeting ID by logging in to your own Zoom account. Under the Profile menu, you will find your Personal Meeting ID .
- Start your session by going to Host a meeting menu, on the right hand side, up at the top. You can start the meeting with video ON, OFF, or only screen sharing. We may choose to bookmark this address for easy access, next time when you need to record. The link will look like this: https://algonquincollege.zoom.us/s/YourOwnMeetingID.
- Test your microphone and video settings.
- Decide if you need to share your desktop or only one application. Open only the websites or the applications you need to share, before you start sharing and recording.
- Don’t forget to click on the Record button. We recommend that you record on your computer. This video shows you how to record the meeting and also how to access the files with the recordings (under Documents/Zoom folder on your computer)
- Make the recordings available to your students – We are waiting on guidance for best practices – Please check the LMS Weekly Update website in the next few days.
- How do I use breakout rooms? Watch this video for details on this.
Online Faculty Brightspace Support Hours
Please know that you can still book 15 -minutes appointments with one of our Brightspace Faculty Support Team members by using this link. The appointments will take place using a ZOOM meeting or the Desktop Sharing in Teams. You will be sent by email a link to the ZOOM room where the session will take place, closer to the beginning of the appointment. Otherwise, please use the link included in the appointment confirmation email. Note that we are providing support Monday to Friday, from 9:00 am to 7:00 pm.
Multiple Ways to find Answers to some of your Brightspace Questions
Academic Continuity resources
LTS encourages you to check out their Academic Continuity resources, in particular the Teaching Remotely page, which includes teaching guidance and links to the recommended tools for delivery, one of which is Brightspace.
Posted on Friday, March 13th, 2020
Zoom Classroom
You can find the link to this video conferencing tool in each of your Brightspace courses, under the Tools menu in the navbar. When you use Zoom in Brightspace the first time, a Pro account will be automatically created for you, but you can also set up your Zoom account outside of Brightspace. Click here for more information on the Zoom Classroom, available to you in the Brightspace Essentials for Faculty course.
Using Groups in Brightspace
There are times when you would like your students to collaborate on activities and assignments, and this is when the Groups tool in Brightspace is very helpful.
- How do I set up groups? Click here to view step by step instructions on how to create a group category and groups (Activities/Groups/New Category)
- How many group enrollment options do I have? You have the options to allow the students to self enroll in groups, or you can add them manually into each group. Watch an overview of group enrollment options.
- How do I manually enroll my students into groups? Once your groups are created, click on each group and then on Enroll Users.
- How do my students submit their project when they work in groups? You set up an assignment from Activities/Assignments and make it available for a group category. Click here to learn how to create an assignment.
- Some of my students can not access a group assignment. On the Manage Group page, from the contextual menu for the group category, choose Enroll Users. The next screen will display all your students on one page, and the group they belong to. This view will help you quickly identify students who are not part of any group.
- I need my students to colaborate on their activity in one private area. You have the option to create group restricted discussion areas.
- I have two different projects in my course and students are collaborating with different classmates for each project. How do I deal with this? You will just need to create a different group category for each project.
- I have all my groups created, but I need to add an extra group to a group category. On the Manage Groups page, click on the chevron beside the category’s name and then on Add Group.
Academic Continuity
LTS has created a website to provide faculty with support for the alternative delivery of course material online.
Posted on Friday, March 6th, 2020
Successful Brightspace Symposium
Thank you to everyone who attended this event, in person or online. The goal of the event was to create visions for effective teaching and learning in Brightspace, by showcasing faculty successes and highlighting additional features and integrations in the system. The winners of the So You Think You Can Brightspace contest were among the presenters, alongside a live Zoom demonstration and a fantastic student panel. The entire event was live-streamed via Zoom, one of the two sponsors for the day alongside D2L. You can watch a rerun of the day here, via YouTube.
Most Useful LMS Weekly Updates
As many of you are going back to tips on different Brightspace tools published in previous LMS weekly updates, we have summarized the most common and important ones in this week’s update.
Quizzes
Gradebook
Discussions
Surveys
Intelligent Agents
Assignments
General
Please email us at pietram@algonquincollege.com if you would like to see news on other Brightspace tools.
Posted on Friday, February 28th, 2020
Respondus Lockdown Browser Pilot
As promised, here’s the official announcement about this upcoming pilot!
AC Online has entered into an agreement to pilot Respondus LockDown Browser. This pilot will run from May 1, 2020, through August 31, 2020, and includes unlimited installations of LockDown Browser software. Respondus LockDown Browser is a custom browser that locks down the testing environment within Brightspace. When students use LockDown Browser, they are unable to print, copy, go to another URL, or access other applications.
You can find more details about this Pilot on the Respondus Lockdown Browser Pilot page.
Providing Quiz Feedback
Did you know that, when grading your students quizzes, you have multiple ways of providing feedback? Also, your students have different ways of accessing the feedback, depending on the way you chose to enter your comments.
- Overall Feedback – general feedback for all of the quiz attempts.
- Attempt Feedback – feedback provided for each quiz attempt.
- Question Feedback – feedback entered for each individual quiz question, for each student.
Overall Feedback
There are two ways to provide overall feedback, along with the grade for a quiz, regardless of the number of attempts your quiz allows:
- Overall Feedback entered from Grades/Enter Grades – The feedback will automatically update in the Overall feedback text box available to you when you grade the quiz.
Want to save time? When you need to provide all students with the same overall feedback and have it personalized for some of them, while you are still here in Grade/Enter Grades, select all student’s names and click on the Add Feedback button. The comments entered here will populate the Overall feedback area for all those students.
- Overall Feedback entered from Activities/Quizzes/Grade – When you grade the students’ quiz attempts from the Activities/Quizzes, choose Grade from the contextual menu of the quiz. On the Users tab you will see all students who have completed an attempt. Click on the Overall Grade (highest attempt) and then scroll down at the bottom. Here you will see details on the student’s quiz attempt(s) and also the feedback that you entered from the Grades.
Note 1: It is recommended to enter the overall feedback starting from the Grades, as currently there is an issue with updating the feedback in the Grades, if you do it the other way.
Note 2: The Overall Feedback will be visible to your students even when you keep the Default View on the Submission View tab, in the properties of the quiz, when only the quiz score will show up after students submit the quiz.
How do students view the Overall feedback? Students will access the overall feedback either from their Grade menu, or from the Activities/Quizzes in the Evaluation Status column.
Attempt Feedback
If you allow your students to have one or multiple quiz attempts, you will have the option to provide feedback for each attempt. From Activities/Quizzes, click on Grade from the contextual menu. The Users tab will display your students names and their quiz attempts. Click on the attempt (1, 2, 3, etc) you want to give feedback to and enter the comments in the Attempt Feedback text box. The Attempt drop-down list gives you the option to select different quiz attempts for the same student, while the arrows at the top of the screen allows you to move to the next student.
Note: The Attempt Feedback will be visible for your students without you, the instructor, needing to change the Default Submission View.
How do students view the quiz attempt feedback? They need to go to Activities/Quizzes and click on the Feedback link in the Evaluation Status column and then on each Attempt link.
Feedback per Quiz Question
If you want to give feedback for individual quiz questions (for instance, for written response type of questions), then you will need to set up a different Submission View for your quiz, other than the default one. In the Submission View for the quiz, either “Show questions answer incorrectly”, “Show questions answered correctly”, or “Show all questions with user responses” must be selected.
Click here in order to read about Submission Views.
How do students view the feedback for individual questions? Students will need to go to Activities/Quizzes and click on the Feedback link from the Evaluation Status column. Once there, there will be a link to their quiz attempt.
Important! For the type of feedback that requires students to go to Activities/Quizzes, the quiz (active or inactive) needs to be displayed on that page. Even if you don’t want the quiz open anymore, you will just need to keep it active an set up an end date under the quiz Restrictions tab.
Posted on Friday, February 21st, 2020
Brightspace February Release
The February system release brings exciting improvements to the LMS.
Quick Eval – Course Level filtering
In addition to the Quick Eval tool accessible from the org navigation bar, tool that allows you to see a list of unevaluated submissions from across courses and tools in one single place, now you can access it from within a course. When you choose Quick Eval from the Progress menu on the course navigation bar, you will see a list of activities and submissions belonging ONLY to that course.
Quick Eval – Dismiss Activities until Next Submission
As a follow up to the Dismiss Activities feature added in January, now you can can choose to dismiss until the next submission is received for the activity. Previously, you could only select a specific date or forever when dismissing an activity. The dismissed items display in the Dismissed Activities List and can be restored at any time.
Assignments – Streamlined access to Inline Feedback
Your students can now immediately access inline feedback from Progress, Grades, and Assignments. From these tools, the View Inline Feedback link takes the learner directly to the annotations view (or Turnitin viewer, if that is the tool you used to provide feedback). The inline feedback also includes a link to the file for the assignment, so learners know which document contains the feedback. Previously, the View Inline Feedback link took the learners to the Assignment feedback summary page, where they had to click a second link to view the feedback.
Grades – Tab delimited import into Gradebook
When importing grades and other type of feedback into your gradebook, using the Import button from the Enter Grades tab, you can now import .tsv files (tab delimited). Previously, users could only import comma delimited files into Gradebook.
Classlist – New View
In addition to the change introduced by the January release – having the number of users displayed at the bottom of the Classlist page – now your course users are divided by role, displaying in multiple tabs (All, Learner, Instructor and Other). The All tab displays all users enrolled in your course, while the Other tab will show all the other users with roles different than instructor or learner.
Video Note – Automatic Closed Captioning
To improve accessibility, video notes now provide automatic closed captioning for newly created videos and the ability to manually add or update closed captioning for all previously recorded videos. After video processing, users can view closed captions using video player controls. In addition, users can now download a transcript and the closed caption file associated with a video independent of Video Notes. Please note that the Video Note Captions option is accessible from the admin tools (gear icon), in the top right corner, just beside your name.
Reminder – Brightspace Symposium
Don’t forget to sign up for the Thursday, February 27th, from 8:00 am to 4:00 pm.
Respondus LockDown Browser Trial
You’ve been asking for a little while and we are almost ready to announce a trial. Make sure you read the next LMS Weekly Update for details!
Posted on Friday, February 14th, 2020
Reminder – Brightspace Symposium
Don’t forget to sign up for the Thursday, February 27th, from 8:00 am to 4:00 pm. The goal of the event is to create visions for effective teaching and learning in Brightspace, by showcasing faculty successes and highlighting additional features and integrations in the system. The event is part of the LTS PD Break Week offerings, which you can check out in full on their website.
The Discussions Tool in Brightspace
This tool provides an area for collaboration and communication, allowing learners to post, read and reply to messages on different topics, share thoughts about course materials, ask questions, share files and work with peers or colleagues.
Discussions can be broken down into 3 elements:
- Forums – The forum is an area (heading or category) where one or multiple discussion topics exist. Discussions can NOT happen in an empty forum without one or more topics. Look at a forum as being a garage that can hold one or multiple cars (topics)!!!
- Topics – The topic is where you state what is to be discussed and it MUST be part of a forum.
- Threads – Students can create a discussion thread or just comment to a thread started by a classmate. A thread is part of a topic and a topic belongs to a forum.
Questions and Answers:
- How do I create a forum? From Activities/Discussions in the course navigation bar, click on New Forum. This video has step by step instructions.
- How do I create a discussion topic? There are open topics, where all learners from that course can contribute to, and topics restricted only to groups or sections (for combined courses) contributions. You can create anonymous or moderated topics. Learn more about this.
- How do I grade a discussion topic? Go to Activities/Discussions and choose “Assess Topic” from the contextual menu for the topic. Note that you will see that option ONLY if you have associated a grade column with the topic from the “Assessment” tab. Also, you will have the option to grade using a rubric. Watch this video for detailed instructions.
Important: Quick Eval can also be used to grade discussions.
- How do I add a rubric to a discussion topic? Watch this video to learn how to add a rubric to a discussion topic.
- How do my students access a discussion topic? They can access it from the Activities/Discussions or from a Content area – You need to use the”Existing Activities” button to create a link to the topic.
- Why can’t my students post a thread? Start by making sure you have a topic in the forum, then check the topic date restrictions, and also if the topic is locked or not. The last step is to verify if the forum where the topic exists does not have availability restrictions, as all the topics contained in that forum will inherit the forum restrictions.
- How do I restrict my students from viewing the discussions until they first post a thread? When you create the topic, in the topic’s properties you must have the “Users must start a thread before they can read and reply to other threads” checked off.
- I gave feedback on the discussion topics, but my students don’t see it. Make sure your forum is not hidden or has an end-date restriction. Students won’t be able to see your feedback after the end date. The solution is to lock your forum, in which case the students will be able to view the forum and the feedback, but won’t be allowed to post.
- How do I keep a forum available to students for read-only access? You have the option to lock the forum.
- My students can not seem to be able to reply other students’ threads. First, verify if the forum/topic is not locked. Also, in some situations the Reply button is not visible when you just view the threads. Students will actually need to click on the title of the thread first and then the Reply button will show up.
- Can I have students part of a group see only their own group’s threads? When you set up a topic, create it as a group topic type by checking off the “Group or section topic, everyone can access this topic but students only see threads from their own group or section”.
- How can I create private discussions for Journaling? Using a combination of the Groups and Discussions tools will allow you to create a private discussion (journal) between a single learner and the instructor. Step by step instructions are provided here.
- How do I moderate discussions? Click here for details on this.
- How do I make sure I keep up to date when new discussion posts are made? You and your students must subscribe to the thread, topic or forum in question. Students are automatically subscribed to a thread that they create, but not when they reply to the threads of others. They must manually subscribe using the star icon at the top, and can either receive notifications within Brightspace or by email.
Posted on Friday, February 7th, 2020
Brightspace Symposium
We’ll be holding our second annual LMS showcase event on Thursday 27th February, from 8:00 am to 4:00 pm. The goal of the event is to create visions for effective teaching and learning in Brightspace, by showcasing faculty successes and highlighting additional features and integrations in the system. The winners of our recent So You Think You Can Brightspace contest will be among the presenters, and we will be launching another ‘season’ of the contest soon. Here is the Eventbrite page for registration and further information – we have the capacity for around 100 people to attend.
News on the Email Sent from Brightspace
A solution has been implemented to address the problem of invalid email addresses populating Outlook when emails were sent through Brightspace. All emails sent from within Brightspace by teachers and learners, with external email addresses such as username@algonquincollege.com AND username@algonquinlive.com, are NOW displaying as they should. Please note that the email notifications sent by the system when a new announcement is posted will still come from noreply@algonquincollege.brightspace.com
Common questions on the Surveys Tool
A new menu item has been recently added to the Activities menu on the course navigation bar and it is a direct link to the Surveys tool. This tool has lot of potential and it is a useful way to gather anonymous and non-anonymous feedback from your students, and also help you gain insight in how your students rate your course.
How do I create a survey? The Surveys Tool is accessible from the Activities menu or from the Tools menu/Course Admin/Surveys. Watch this video for step by step instructions.
I would like an easy and quick way to add questions to a survey. You have the option to add the survey questions one by one during the survey creation, but we recommend you creating the questions first in the Question library and then import them to the survey. A quick way to add questions to the Question library is by using the Test Question Generator.
I need to run a survey, but it is important to view the student names. Unlike the survey tool we used in the previous LMS, the Brighspace Surveys tool allows you to gather non-anonymous feedback from your students. By default, a new survey is non anonymous, unless you check the “make results anonymous” from the Properties tab. Note that once you make a survey anonymous, you can NOT go back and change your mind. You will need to delete it and then create a new one.
How can I preview the survey before I make it available to my students? Go to Activities/Surveys, click on the quick menu for the survey and then on Preview.
How do my students access the survey? Your students have access to your surveys from Activities/Surveys. You could also create a link to a survey from within the Content area (go to a module under Content and click on the Existing Activities/Surveys – Note this is just a link to the survey.)
How do I view the results of a survey? Go to Activities/Surveys, click on the chevron for the survey and choose Statistics. For anonymous surveys you will view the overall results page for all the attempts of all students. If the survey is not anonymous, you will view the attempts of each participant separately.
How do I share the survey results with my students or print them? You will have the option to create multiple reports of the survey. Go to Activities/Surveys, edit your survey and click on the Add Report from the Reports Setup tab. Choose what you would like to view in the report, when you would like the report released, and also what role you would like to release the report to (learner, teaching assistant, etc ). To access the reports of the survey you will need to use the survey quick menu (arrow next to survey and then Reports). To view and print a report, you will also have the option to download it to Excel and print it from there.
Posted on Friday, January 31st, 2020
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.
Posted on Friday, January 24th, 2020
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.
PD Sessions
There will be a couple of Brightspace PD sessions on offer most weeks for the rest of the semester, starting next week with some Beyond Brightspace Essentials sessions. Check out the latest offerings in the Professional Development Registration System.
TEN Things about the Brightspace Assignment Tool
This week we have answers to your questions on the Assignment tool, in addition to the documentation that exists in the Essentials for Faculty course in Brightspace that is available to all instructors:
- How do I create an assignment? Click here for step by step instructions.
- Why do I see my course Assignments under the Activities menu on the nav bar, but not under the Content area? Once in a while we see a bit of confusion about the area where you should make your assignments accessible for your students. Regardless of the way you create your assignments, they will ALWAYS exist under the Activities menu on the course nav bar. There is nothing wrong with directing your students to access the assignments from the Activities menu, but sometimes, depending on how your course is structured, your might want to make them available under one particular module, under the Content area. This is when you will be using the Existing Activities/Assignments to create a link to the existing assignments.
Important! Removing the link from the Content area and choosing the second option on the confirmation pop-up screen, will delete your assignment from your course.
- I need to allow some of my students alternate time restrictions, due dates, etc. How do I do this? You can accomplish this by using the Special access option from within the Assignments properties screen.
- How do I grade an assignment using a Pass/Fail scheme? An assignment can be associated only with the numeric or selectbox types of grade columns, allowing you to grade using numeric or letter grades. For a Pass or Fail grade, ensure that you use a selectbox type of grade column at the same time with a Pass/Fail Grade Sheme.
- Can I make annotations when grading assignments? Assignment submissions will automatically load with the Annotation Tool bar withing the Evaluation Submission Screen.
- I have different points possible for the assignment and for the grade column. What do I do?
- If there are no submissions for the assignment, you only need to edit the associated column from Grades/Manage Grades and adjust the points.
- If you already have graded the assignment, once you edit the grade column and change the points, the existing grades won’t get automatically adjusted. You will need to go to Activities/Assignments/View Submissions and Update the grade for each student (the same screen you use when you first graded the assignment and published the grades).
- I deleted an assignment by mistake! To recover deleted assignments go to Activities/Assignments/More Actions/Event Log. The deleted assignment will have a Restore button available.
- Need to grade assignment files offline? You have the option to download all the assignments files in a zip file, grade them, save the files, create a new zip file and upload all the graded files as a package file. Go to Activities/Assignments/View Submission and then the Submissions tab. Select all submissions and click Download. When you are ready to upload them, from the same screen, click on the Add Feedback Files tab and upload the zip file.
- Grade Sync – When you enter a grade for an assignment submission in the standard or spreadsheet view of GradeBook, the grade will appear with the submission in the Assignment tool.
- How do I check students’ assignments for plagiarism? When you create an assignment you have the option to enable Turnitin. Click here to learn how to do this.
Posted on Friday, January 17th, 2020
The January system release brings a few small improvements:
Tools/Classlist – Total number of users field and floating buttons: Now the number of users displays at the bottom of the Classlist page for at-a-glance viewing to help instructors keep track of the total number of learners, which may extend beyond the users visible on the page. On the Print Classlist and Email Classlist pages, the clickable Print and Email buttons now float consistently on screen, to ensure easy access to these actions without excessive scrolling.
Copy Course Components – Add validation logic to the copy process: When using the Import/Export/Copy Components from under the Tools/Course Admin menu, the Copy Course Components now contains a validation logic step to the course copy process, which can inform users if they performed a copy from the source previously, avoiding unnecessary duplication of copied course components.
Discussions – Assessment consistency changes: When assessing discussions, instructors have new multi-select options to Publish Feedback and Retract Feedback. In the Status column, the Draft / Published checkbox has been replaced by information on the date when feedback was saved as draft or published. These changes are visible on both the Users and Assessments tabs. The Save, Save and Close, and Cancel buttons have also been removed as their functionality has been replaced by the Publish Feedback and Retract Feedback options.
Grades – Export sorting options: This feature introduces the ability to sort exported gradebooks based on the following options: OrgDefinedID, Username, Last Name, and First name.
Groups – Self-enrollment group capacity, start dates and descriptions
This feature includes three improvements to Groups:
- Group members can now see the description of their group. For self-enrolled groups, group members will now see the group description at all times, including before and after enrollment. For other group types, Instructors can now choose to display the description to members of the group. This visible group description setting is off by default for non-self-enrollment groups. Previously, all group descriptions were hidden from group members.
- An instructor can now increase or decrease the capacity for self-enrollment groups after they have been created, and prior to the group sign-up expiry date. Decreasing a group size to an amount smaller than has already signed up for a group will not re-allocate users to other groups. Previously, self-enrollment groups were not editable after they were created.
- Instructors can set Start dates for self-enrollment groups. This feature allows them to schedule self-enrollment groups availability, ensuring learners are prepared and have equal opportunity to self-enroll.
Quick Eval – Dismiss activities from list: To improve the ability to manage items on their Quick Eval list, instructors can now select items that appear in their Quick Eval list and remove them temporarily or permanently. Instructors can view their dismissed items in the Dismissed Activities List and restore them to the Quick Eval list at any time.
Tip of the week: I have different points possible for gradebook column than the quiz itself. What do I do?
If there are no submissions for your quiz, you just need to edit the points for the associated column, from Grades/Manage Grades (edit the column).
If you already have grades for the quiz, then you will need to “force” the quiz grades to be readjusted in the gradebook.
- Once you correct the points for the quiz column in your Grades area, go to Activities/Quizzes/Grade/Users tab. Select all the students and then click Retract Feedback.
- Go to Grades and choose Enter Grades for the quiz column. Select all students and click on Clear Grades (please note that this will NOT clear the quiz attempts)
- The final step is to go back to the quiz, Activities/Quizzes/Grade/Users tab and use Publish Feedback for all students.