End of Life Notice: Game Based Learning Tool

The Game Based Learning tool will be permanently removed in the July 2024 release. This change removes the game map completely. You can continue to use gamification strategies using release conditions and badges. For more information, refer to Intent to EOL Game Based Learning on the Brightspace Community website.

Awards - Export achievements as digital credentials

Learners can now export their earned awards in a standards-compliant format using the new Export Digital Credential option. This feature allows the download of certificates or badges as an industry-standard Open Badges 2.0 compliant Badge for their own record keeping or sharing.

Badge Baking is the process of embedding digital credentials within the badge image. This approach ensure that the user has legitimately earned the badge by including a verification link used to check the integrity of the embedded information. To learn more about Badge Baking, refer to Open Badges Baking Specification.

For Baked Badges, the supported format in Brightspace is PNG only, and the recommended pixel size of the badge should be no smaller than 200 px x 200 px.

To download an award, learners must navigate to the My Awards page, select the desired award, click Share, and then click the new Export Digital Credential button. In the opened window, learners must provide their email address to link to their award and ensure verification, and then click Export. Exporting a digital credential downloads badges or certificates as a .png file with the award data embedded in the image.

Quizzes - Written response questions remain as pending evaluation until manually graded

When instructors grade quiz attempts, any ungraded written response questions remain as pending evaluation until the instructor manually grades them. Previously, when instructors clicked Publish or Update for a quiz attempt, the written response question's pending evaluation status would be removed.

If a written response question is not graded, the status shows a pending evaluation message for the learner view. In the learner view, learners always see the message "This question has not been graded" until the instructor grades the question.

The instructor view displays the message "not auto-graded; a default value of 0 was assigned" until they grade the question.

New Content Experience – Interact with assessable activities directly in Content | New

The new display pages in the New Content Experience render assignments, quizzes, discussions, and LTI assessments directly within the Content tool. Users can now view relevant content about assessable activities like descriptions, due dates, and grading information without being redirected to the activity in a different tool. This does not affect the learner's view for LTI topics.

The new display allows instructors and learners to consistently view the activity details to ensure all users in the course are aligned with the requirements of that activity. Learners can complete activities and review feedback or grades without leaving the Content tool. Instructors can view the status of learner completion and achievement results and complete evaluation workflows within the Content tool that are otherwise done in assessment tools.

Figure: Instructors can access and monitor progress on assessable activities directly in the New Content Experience.

Figure: Learners can submit activities and review feedback on assessable activities directly in the New Content Experience.

To learn more about the New Content Experience" , reach out to sas@smu.ca

Quizzes - Improved experience for generating quiz reports | Updated

This release introduces a better experience for instructors when running and exporting quiz reports with large amounts of data. To avoid time-out failures and screen freezing, the following report types now run asynchronously:

• Attempt Details
• Question Statistics
• Question Details
• User Statistics
• User Attempts

When reports are ready for downloading, Brightspace generates a notification that instructors can access from the bell icon in the navbar. Previously, quiz reports were generated slowly and would time-out in large classes.

Grades – Feedback files are now available in Grades for Assignments, Quizzes, and Discussions | New - Upcoming May 2024 update

This feature allows instructors to ensure that learners can easily review feedback from the Grades tool. Instructor feedback files added in Assignments, Quizzes, and Discussions is now visible to learners under Grades. Previously, feedback files were only available to the learner by accessing the activity.

Figure: Learners can review feedback from the Grades page.

Announcements - Copy Announcements to other courses

This feature adds the ability to copy announcements from one of your courses to any of your other courses. A single announcement can be copied to multiple course offerings. Users can copy announcements from the Announcements tool or the Announcements widget from the context menu of an announcement by selecting Copy to Other Courses. Once copied, the announcement is in a draft state and users must publish the copied announcement in the destination course to complete the copying process.

End of Life Notice: Chat Tool

Users accessing the Chat tool now see a banner indicating the tool will no longer be available as of January 2024. For more information about this update, refer to Intent to End Of Life Notice for: Chat.

Brightspace Pulse App Update

Brightspace Pulse app is updated to provide a more consistent assistive technology experience between iOS and Android platforms. In addition, there is an added option to enable 3rd Party cookies within the Pulse app settings. As a result of these changes, users are required to log back in to the Pulse app.

Quizzes - Synchronous Quizzing

This release updates the Quizzes for instructors and learners by adding a new synchronous quiz option.

Instructors can facilitate quizzes where learners take their attempts simultaneously, which is convenient for in-class sessions. The new addition of synchronous quizzes enables instructors to set up a quiz where the quiz timer starts on the start date for all learners rather than when the learner launches the quiz (asynchronous). The quiz timer then ends for all learners at the same time.

A synchronous quiz starts at the Start Date and ends when the time limit has lapsed, regardless of any action taken by the learner. For example, if a learner clicks Start Quiz! 15 minutes after the start date on a 1-hour quiz, they only have 45 minutes left to complete it. To indicate when a quiz becomes available, learners have a countdown timer on the Quiz Information and Start Quiz pages. The Start Quiz! button becomes available when the start date and time is reached.

For more information on how to set up Quizzes in Brightspace, including info on synchronous quizzing, please visit our Quizzes webpage.

Announcements - Pin Announcements

Instructors can now pin announcements and global announcements to the top of the Announcement Widget, allowing important information to remain visible to learners. Announcements so pinned are indicated to learners as such with the use of a new pinned icon that appears on the announcement. Pinned global announcements appear at the top of the page before any announcements pinned within a course offering.

Creator+ - Layouts now supports Insert Element

Creator+ Layouts now supports inserting elements in a Layouts panel. Elements inserted into panels are responsive and follow the same behavior when displayed on smaller screens, like in mobile view. These elements include:

• Accordions
• Carousels
• Hotspots
• Tabs
• Callouts
• Timelines
• Click and Reveals
• Stylized Quotes
• Flip Cards

Previously, creators could not insert any elements into a Layouts panel.

Rubrics - Improve your evaluation experience with the new collapsible panel for Assignments and Discussions in mobile view

When evaluating assignments or discussions in a mobile browser, instructors can now collapse the containers for Rubrics, Grades & Feedback. The new collapsible container appears in the right-hand panel and reduces unnecessary scrolling, giving instructors more control over which fields are displayed to them. Each component is open by default when the instructor accesses the item. Instructors can open and close each collapsible component by selecting the triangle beside the name of the container.

User Progress - Class Progress displays absent periods more clearly

This feature updates Class Progress to better align the login date and the absent period. When viewing data for Course Access, Login History, and System Access History, the absent period now correlates to the login date on the same line.

Discussions - New Experience is ON by default

The default state for the new Discussion experience for is now set to ON. The New Creation Experience for Discussions was previously introduced in the April 2023, as an opt-in feature.

To learn more about the new Discussions experience, please visit our Discussions webpage.

Quizzes - Auto-Submission

This release updates the Quiz Creation experience for instructors by simplifying the quiz timing setup workflow, adding useful new features, including the ability to auto-submit, and removing obsolete quiz timing options.

With this release, learners can show or hide the timer, receive time warning messages, and access more information about their quizzes.

Simplified and redesigned Quiz Timing & Display settings:

• The updated settings allow instructors to choose if they want to set a time limit by selecting the Set time limit checkbox, which is cleared by default. If Set time limit is selected, instructors can add a Time Limit and edit the Timer Settings.
• The previous Prevent the student from making further changes option has been changed to Automatically submit the quiz attempt. Quiz auto-submission automatically hands in quizzes on enforced time limit quizzes at the end of the set time, improving quiz integrity. This behavior is changed on all existing and in-progress quizzes with the update.
• The previous Allow the student to continue working option has been changed to Flag the attempt as exceeded time limit and allow the learner to continue working. This behavior is changed on all existing and in-progress quizzes with the update.
• The Grace Period and Allow student to continue working but automatically score zerooptions are removed to further streamline the process of quiz creation. With this update, any existing and in-progress quizzes that include these settings are changed to the following new behavior:
• A quiz that previously had a grace period now uses the time limit set on the quiz.
• A quiz previously set to Allow student to continue working but automatically score zero now sets the quiz to Automatically submit the quiz attempt.
• The Timing & Display section displays comprehensive summary information in either collapsed or expanded view, helping instructors to find errors and to understand which settings they could change.
• The Special Access settings are updated to simplify setup and incorporate the updated settings.

For more information on Quizzes in Brightspace, please visit our Quizzes webpage.

Creator+ - Create a full presentation from you browser with Capture Web

Capture Web is a new tool available with the Creator+ package, which enables users to create a full presentation from their browser without the need to download a desktop client. The tool includes both screen capture and mixed camera and screen presentations. The initial release of Capture Web supports Firefox, Chrome, and Microsoft Edge for desktop; but mobile browsers and Safari are not supported. As a workaround, users can use one of the supported browsers for their presentations.

The current Capture implementation requires users to download a desktop client. However, the desktop client is only supported on macOS and Windows. As a result, Capture is not available on many platforms, including Chrome books.

Capture Web is scheduled to replace the existing Capture App. Users that downloaded the app can continue to launch it from their desktop.

To learn more about Capture Web, please visit our Media Library webpage.