Several upgrades to the Brightspace learning management system are being introduced at Saint Mary’s.  These will significantly improve the user experience of faculty and students, says Paul Maher, the Studio’s Educational Developer for Digital Learning. While several of these improvements are already in place, others will be rolled out in coming weeks.

The landing page in the Discover tool shows courses which are available for self-registration. For a number of these courses, registrants will require approval from course owner prior to course access.

The Discover Portal

Discover is a portal allowing users to search and self-enrol in active non-credit courses. This tool is replacing the ‘Restricted Courses’ menu.  Course environments eligible for self-registration are those which fall outside the credit course registration process and typically offer program support or training or bring learners together on a special topic. Some courses (such as program specific offerings) will require approval from the course owner for the registrant to gain access, .  

The Discover interface is visually engaging and offers an improved navigation through the filter and search functions. Start by accessing  Discover  from the navigation bar. From here eligible courses appear on the homepage screen. Courses are organized by filters: 

• The New section includes some courses recently added to Discover (within the last 6 months)

• The Updated section includes some courses recently updated (within the last 6 months)

• The Featured section includes promoted courses or those courses with broad relevance  

Using Discover to self-enroll in a course

Find and select the course using any of the above filters or via the search function. Once you have enrolled in the course it will disappear from the Discover portal.  

Adding a self-enrol function within a non-credit course

Contact SAS [sas@smu.ca] to add self-enrolment into an existing course or create a new course for self-enrolment.  You will be able to decide if registrants need to be approved before they can access the course environment.  

The view of a course home page with the Slim Announcements and the Course Overview widget applied. Neither are part of the default home page but can be added by request.

New home-page widgets 

Two additional widgets are available to be added to course homepages in Brightspace. Faculty can request the Slim Announcements widget be added to any of their courses. We are currently seeking Faculty to assist with user testing of the Course Overview widget (Insights).  

Slim Announcements 

The Slim Announcements widget replicates functionality of the general news or announcement tool. The slimmed down format presents a summary of the topic with option to click ‘more’ to see the full announcement. Slim Announcements can optimize your homepage layout and identify new and relevant information quickly. In doing so there is potential to avoid overwhelming learner with information and limits the need to scroll down to view multiple announcements from their instructor. 

The standard Announcement (News) tool is still the default option for course homepages. If you want to give Slim Announcements a try, simply request for this to be swapped into any of your course homepages from the SAS [sas@smu.ca].  

Course overview widget: Insights 

The Studio is now testing new features available with the Performance Plus upgrade. While faculty can view information about student activity in the Course Progress tool, the Course Overview widget complements that information to provide a more comprehensive picture of student engagement. Once the widget is applied faculty will be able to view information about the degree of engagement students have in terms of course access, time spent in content, discussions and other activity set up within the course. At present the Course Overview widget is not available for all courses, however we are looking for faculty to conduct some user testing for us.

If you are currently teaching and interested in trying out this feature, please contact the SAS [sas@smu.ca].