This section contains recourses related to other tools not covered in the previous sections that an be found in Brightspace, as well as the Course Admin tab.
The Survey Tool in Brightspace is an excellent choice for course introductions, student feedback on assessments, and overall course evaluation. This tool integrates with the Quiz Tool & Question Library and will use the same question styles, without marking an answer right or wrong.
Brightspace Survey Tool [PDF]
Collaborate Ultra is used mostly as a real-time video conferencing tool with a multitude of functions and settings, depending on the individual needs of a course. One such feature is the ability to record sessions.
The following document will outline the steps for viewing and downloading Collaborate recordings.
Engagement between instructors and students is key in the success of any course, but in particular those that are online. Utilizing the Intelligent Agent (IA) tool in Brightspace can help instructors boost engagement in an automated way for a number of different scenarios. While not all communication should be facilitated with IA, the tool can provide instructors additional flexibility in their teaching.
The IA works by setting up pre-determined times and circumstances to send emails to your students, to gently nudge students or to provide congratulatory feedback. Initial set up will not require substantial effort, after you’ve chosen what circumstances make the most sense for your course.
Brightspace homepages are a great way for instructors to communicate with students and keep online courses up to date. They can be used to display class announcements, reminders of upcoming due dates, instructor information, course policies and more.
The groups tool within Brightspace is very useful for both discussions and group assignments. It is also commonly used as a ‘sign-up’ sheet or as a way to allow students to form working groups. Making the group tool accessible to students is as critical a step as setting up the groups.
As many have learned through experience, good organizational habits are key in keeping online courses running smoothly. To assist with course file organization, each Brightspace course comes equipped with the Manage Files tool. This tool stores all files within the course and gives a useful overview of these files. The following document will outline the best practice for using Manage Files.
Brightspace offers instructors the enhanced ability to monitor student progress and receive early indication of students who may be falling behind. The Class Progress tool will be invaluable to instructors in their quest to prevent student disengagement.
Class Progress Guide [PDF]
Prior to each semester, course spaces are created empty and inactive for each course in the academic calendar for the upcoming semester. To prevent students from seeing unused courses, each course is set to “inactive” by default. To allow students to see the course in Brightspace, Instructors must make their courses active (available to students). Once activated, courses will open the first day of classes, unless you modify the start and end date. This can be done by going into course admin, course offering information, and scrolling to bottom of the page. Instructors can adjust the start date to suit their needs.
One of the most time consuming tasks at the beginning of a semester is changing due dates and availability dates for your course components. The offsetting dates function allows you to change some, if not all, of these dates in your course by a specific period of time; either days, hours, or minutes. You can offset all of the dates at the same time, so they happen “x” number of units after the original dates.
Use the Bookmark feature for ease of returning to a specific page in the course.
If you want to easily return to a particular area of a course, selecting the bookmark icon that is available throughout the environment will add a link in the “Bookmarks” in the Content page. The Bookmark feature is available to students as well; however, bookmarked items are private for each user.
You can add a bookmark widget to your homepage as well.
