DLE Weekly Update: Brightspace Tips and Improvement to the Assignment Tool

Posted on Friday, September 17th, 2021

Brightspace Tips – Answers to Common Questions this past Week

• Q: How do I view grades for a student who has transferred sections?
  A: In the learner’s previous section, navigate to “Tools/Classlist”, click on “Enrollment Statistics”, scroll down the Enrollment Statistics page to view a list of Withdrawals. Click the chevron next to withdrawn learner’s name and select “View grades”.

  Important: When students need to switch courses sections, please ask them to do it through the Registrar’s office. Do NOT manually add them to your section, as the student enrollment must match in ACSIS and Brightpace.

• Q: How do I copy a quiz/exam/assignment between two courses?
  A: Use the Course Copy process and, rather than copying everything, use the Select Course Components and choose the Brightspace activity you need to copy over.
• Q: I would like to create an assignment that allows students to offer feedback to each other’s work. Can I do this in Brightspace?
  A: This article describes how to create and set up a PeerMark Assignment in Brightspace.
• Q: Some of my students can not access their group assignments. Is there any easy way to view the groups’ enrollment at once?
  A: 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 groups they belong to. This view will help you quickly identify students who are not part of any group. Click here for more tips on Groups. 
• Q: Can I post an announcement visible ONLY to the students who have not submitted yet to an assignment?
  A: When creating your course announcement, under “Additional Release Conditions”, click on the “Create and Attach” button. Select the “No submission to folder” menu option, and then choose the assignment. The announcement will be visible ONLY to the students who have not submitted, and it will also be sent as an email ONLY to those students. Make sure you use Replace Strings in the announcement for a personalized message.
• Q: How can I add closed captions to My Mediasite presentations?
  A: Closed captions are provided by a third party, and you have to request closed captions by using the steps described in the My Mediasite FAQ page, on the LTS website.
• Q: How do I share My Mediasite presentations in my Brightspace course? 
  A: This article describes the steps you need to know. You will need to use the “Insert Stuff” tool available under Content (“Create a file” option), and also available when you create/edit an Announcement.

Assignments – Restricting file extensions for submissions

The September system release introduced an exciting update to the Assignment tool. You can now specify the extensions of files that learners can upload as assignment submissions. When you will create a new assignment, or edit an existing one, there will be a drop-down list in the Submission and Completion section, and you will be able to choose the restrictions you want:

• PDF only
• Annotatable Files, which include all file types that are supported by the Annotation tool in Assignments. For more information, see File types supported by Annotations.
• Files that can be previewed without conversion, such as .HTM, .HTML, .MHT, .MHTML, and .BMP
• Images and Videos
• Custom Type Files