DLE Weekly Update: March Release and Useful Articles

Posted on Friday, March 18th, 2022

Reminder: Emergency Support Week (Final Exams for Winter 2022)

Due to staffing issues, the Digital Learning Environment (DLE) team will NOT be able to cover the extended 7 am-10 pm emergency support window this semester (Winter 2022).

Last semester (Fall 2021) no emergency calls from instructors came in after 5 pm, or over the 2 weekends (5 interactions happened during that time and none were emergencies).

Prior to the exam week, the DLE team will communicate through the upcoming DLE Weekly Updates ways to solve common issues that have been reported to date (how to reset a quiz attempt, how to allow an extra attempt, what to do if a learner cannot submit their quiz attempt, how to make a quiz available, how to troubleshoot Zoom issues, etc). These issues can be avoided with proper preparation and testing. Of these reported issues, only the issues with the quiz availability and Zoom require immediate intervention. However, most Zoom issues have to do with the learner’s connection and cannot be fixed by DLE.

During the exam week, the DLE team will use the case management system as the only point of access to emergency support. Instructors can send an emergency email to brightspace@algonquincollege.com with their phone number and will receive a call back as soon as possible, between 8 am and 5 pm. The DLE team will NOT be taking direct phone calls during this time. A banner will be displayed in Brightspace during the exam week with this procedure.

For any questions on this, please contact Michel Marcheterre, Digital Learning Environment Strategist, at marchem@algonquincollege.com.

Brightspace March Release

The March system updates to Brightspace bring improvements to the Announcements Tool and Content.

Create new announcements quickly with a new Copy option

This feature adds a new Copy option in the context menu of an announcement in both the Announcements tool and the Announcements widget. When you click on Copy, a new unpublished announcement is created, and it contains the body of the announcement, attached file(s), and Release Conditions if they exist  This new feature could be very useful in combined courses, where you might need to release a different announcement for each section, with a slightly different content.

Content – Workflow improvements to creating media topics

When creating a new video or audio topic in Content, you no longer must wait for the uploaded media file to finish processing to continue creating the topic. While the media file remains unavailable during processing, you can navigate away from the upload page to work on other content-creation tasks. If another user attempts to access the media file in the topic before processing is complete, a message prompts them to wait for the media file to become available. When processing is complete (or the uploaded media file is invalid or corrupted), a notification displays from Update alerts on the navbar, with a link to the organization home page.

Previously, you had to wait for a media file to complete processing before they could continue creating the topic. Also, a lack of status information about the media file processing caused some instructors to upload media files multiple times, believing that the processing had completed or failed.

Useful Articles on Quizzes and Assignments

• Common Questions Before, During, and After an Online Exam
• Common Questions on the Assignments Tool
• Evaluating an Individual or Group Assignment