Intelligent Agents in Brightspace

Intelligent Agents can 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 have not submitted an assignment.

1. How to create and run an Intelligent Agent: Access the Intelligent Agents Tool from your course navigation bar, Tools menu, and Course Admin. Click here for more information.

2. How to Schedule and Intelligent Agent: The agents can be scheduled to run daily, weekly, monthly or annually, and can have a start date and end date.

3. 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.

4. Perform a Manual Run: You set up an agent in your course and a schedule for it, but you want to run it outside that schedule. In this case, you need to run the agent manually. Note that your agent does not need to be enabled for you to run it.

5. How to delete and restore an Intelligent Agent: Deleting is easy, but restoring an item always takes more steps.

6. 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.
• {LastLoginDate} – The date the student last logged in.
  {LastCourseAccessDate} – The date the student last accessed the course.

7. 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.

8. 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).