Posted on Friday, May 3rd, 2019
Mark your calendars – Brightspace Pro Tips Week is quickly approaching! From May 27-31, the Learning & Teaching Services will be hosting a fun, food-focused week of Brightspace tips and training. Designed with convenient, bite-sized workshops and events, the full schedule will be revealed gradually as the first day nears. Until then, here’s a glimpse of our first event:
The Brightspace Best Practice Potluck
Have you served up the perfect Brightspace course for your students? If yes, submit your course and help guide our team as we push the envelope with our LMS to create engaging and consistent courses for learners. Just for submitting your course, we will enter you into a draw to win $50 on your employee card (and priceless bragging rights). Professors who submit their courses to the contest may be invited to present during Brightspace Pro Tips Week. The deadline for submissions is May 17.
To submit your course, click here.
Posted on Wednesday, April 24th, 2019
Summer Hours
Beginning April 29, Brightspace support will be available from 8 a.m.-5 p.m., Monday to Friday. Employees can book an appointment here, walk in to C123, call 613-727-472 ext. 6943, or email for support. If there are faculty who need support outside of these times, please email us and we will do our best to accommodate you.
Satisfaction Survey Response
The LMS team would like to extend their thanks to faculty who responded to the recent Brightspace survey.
The data gathered through the survey provides us with useful and actionable information about satisfaction with the Learning Management System (including its communications and assessment tools, discussion boards, groups, quizzes and surveys, and more) and with Brightspace support and communications.
The data will be put to use to make improvements in three areas highlighted as faculty priorities: support, Brightspace Essentials and communications.
Read more >
Posted on Thursday, April 18th, 2019
As we approach the end of term, your LMS team has prepared a useful list of items for you to get ready to wrap up the semester. To access these tutorials you need to be logged in to Brightspace and be enrolled in the Brightspace Essentials (Faculty) course.
- Submit your final Grades. Learn how to download your grades from Brightspace and upload them into ACSIS by clicking here.
- Need to hide/release your final grade? Click here for more information.
- If you want to make your course inactive to prevent learners from accessing it, remember to uncheck the Course is Active box in your Course Offering Information Settings. Read more by following this link.
- Need a better workflow for grading finals? Access the Quick Eval tool on the navigation bar on the homepage of Brightspace, which allows you to see a list of unevaluated submissions from across courses and tools in one single place. This tool will save you time and clicks. Learn how to use this efficient tool here.
- We are offering a one hour face-to-face walk-through for using Quick Eval on Thursday, April 25 at 1 p.m. To register, go here.
Posted on Thursday, April 11th, 2019
The April release update to Brightspace provides Algonquin College with early access to the Quick Eval tool, which allows users to see a list of unevaluated learner submissions from across all courses and tools in one place.
By sorting and filtering the list you can prioritize your evaluation work, and by clicking on the user’s name you can open the evaluation screens right from the Quick Eval list. Learner submissions for an assignment, a quiz or a discussion topic all show up in Quick Eval. Starting April 18, you can access the Quick Eval tool on the navigation bar on the homepage of Brightspace.
Posted on Wednesday, April 3rd, 2019
The Centre for Continuing and Online Learning is pleased to welcome three members of the Brightspace technical administration team to its ranks.
Michel Langlais, Mariana Pietraru and Vanessa Tran — who formerly reported to Information Technology Services — moved to CCOL this week and will continue to work in the Employee Learning Exchange (ELX) alongside their ITS, Learning and Teaching Services (LTS), Centre for Organizational Learning (COL) and CCOL colleagues.
Read more >
Posted on Thursday, March 28th, 2019
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.
Posted on Thursday, March 21st, 2019
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.
Posted on Wednesday, March 13th, 2019
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.”
Read more >
Posted on Wednesday, March 6th, 2019
Are you aware of all the features that are available to create and manage quizzes? Today’s tips from your LMS team provide insights into how to create a question pool with a unique random bank of questions, how to reset a quiz attempt, and how to submit quizzes that are still in progress. You also can access the Brightspace Essentials module about quizzes here.
In addition, we want to remind you that Blackboard will be decommissioned by the end of this month. Check out the FAQs about the Blackboard decommission here.
Posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2019
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.
Read more >