Brightspace Tips and Tricks

Brightspace Tips

Below are past Brightspace Tips emailed to faculty.

July 2023

Release the Final Calculated Grade

In the gradebook, grades with an eyeball with a slash through it means the grade has not been released and the student cannot see it. If students cannot see their calculated grade, select Enter Grades from the Final Calculated Grade context menu. On the Final Grades page, select all students, and choose the button to Release/Unrelease Final Grades. Each student should have a checkmark under the Released column. Choose Save and Close to release grades. After releasing grades, you will see the visible eye icon next to each student's name that indicates they can view their calculated grade. See Brightspace Resources for video tutorials on how to troubleshoot grades.

Automatically Calculate and Release the Final Calculated Grade

To automatically calculate the final grades and release them, go to Grades>Settings(gear icon)>Calculation Options tab. Check the box to Automatically release final grade, and Automatically keep final grades updated.

Using Grade Categories

Grade categories are used to group related items in your gradebook and to weight grades. If you are weighting grades, make sure they add up to 100%. See Brightspace Resources for video tutorials on creating grade categories to organize your gradebook and assign weights.

Changing the Course Start Date

The start date for all courses is set to the first day of the term. To open your class earlier than that, go to Tools > Course Admin> Select Course Offering Information. Modify the start date and save.

Learner View

Learners have permission to see some links and not others. For instance, learners cannot see the Course Admin link. They also cannot see the Class List unless you allow it. To see what learners see click on your name at the top, right corner of the screen and click View as Student. If you have never done this before, click Change and select Learner from the list. When you are done, click the X to exit out of the Learner view.

Course Management Request Form

Use the Course Management Request from found on CETLA's Brightspace Resource page to request parent/child courses, deleting courses, or the creation of course content containers for building your content.

August 2023

Tips for Finding Your Courses

Use the My Courses Widget on the Home Page. The most recent courses are on the All tab. Select other tabs to find courses by term. Use the waffle icon to search for courses. To search for a course, type a portion of the course code such as ece 1000 fa 23. Pin a course to keep it at the top of your course list.

Cool Tools

See Brightspace Resources for newly added links on how to use the following tools:

Itemize Assignments using Checklists
Attendance Tool
Replacement Strings to personalize your announcements and other content pages.
You can monitor student progress in your courses in the very cool Class Progress tool. See Class Progress for Instructors to customize the tool.
Quick Eval is another Cool Tool you can use to quickly get access grade student submissions for all your courses from one location. Choose the Quick Eval link on the Brightspace Home page.

Backtracking on Test Questions

Q: I am not able to disallow backtracking on test questions imported from Blackboard. What do I do?

A: You must first clear the mandatory setting. Edit the quiz, select all mandatory questions, and use the action item menu to clear the setting.

September 2023

Communication Tools

Intelligent Agents are a great way to automate communications with students. For example, create an intelligent agent to automatically email students who have not accessed your course in the last 5 days or who do not have a passing grade.
Email Users Without Submissions by going to an Assignment, and choosing the button to Email Users Without Submissions.

Email announcements to the entire class by going to your Classlist, Email Classlist, and using the Insert Quick Link button>Announcements to choose the announcement you want to send.

Grading

Be sure to check your Gradebook settings and learn to Enter Grades Part 1 and Part 2.

Respondus LockDownBrowser

Direct students to the Respondus page on the Student Help Desk website to help them prepare for taking tests using Respondus LockDown Browser and Monitor. Recently students have reported problems using Chromebooks resolved by updating them to the latest version and allowing for pop-ups for the Brightspace URL.

Grade book issues

We are getting many grade book questions. Make an appointment with Dawn or Mary in CETLA to go over your gradebook settings and other Brightspace questions. See Evaluation of Student Learning on the CETLA's Brightspace Resources Page for video tutorials on how to set up and troubleshoot your gradebook.

Set Quiz Feedback to Display after Due Date

Edit the quiz
Under Edit and feedback select “Customize Quiz Results Displays”
Select Additional View
Set the display date and additional settings

October 2023

Use the Midterm checkup to make sure your grade book is set up correctly and that grades are displaying correctly to students.

To learn to copy content to your Spring course from another course, watch Import, Export, and Copy Content

Submitting a Quiz for a Student

Follow these instructions if you need to submit a quiz attempt for a student.

Finding and Publishing Rubrics

If the rubrics you had associated with assignments in Blackboard are not available within the assignment option, look for them in the Rubrics area under Course Admin tools. They should be there, but you will have to publish them.

December 2023

Course Availability Dates

Courses are available to students until the term end date. The default end date is 1/29/2024. To change that end date go to Course Admin, Course Offering Information, and scroll down to the end date.

Students with Incompletes

If you have students who need to access your course after the course end date, contact CETLA@IVCC.edu and provide the student's name and the class. We can enroll them in a role that gives them rights to access the course after it has closed.

New Features

Below are new features in the November release:

Announcements: A single announcement can now be copied to multiple course offerings. Copy announcements from the Announcements tool or the Announcements widget from the context menu of an announcement by selecting Copy to Other Courses. In the Copy Announcement window, there is a check box option labeled Publish Announcement on Copy. When this box is selected, the announcement is directly published in the chosen destination course or courses. If the check box is not selected, the announcement copies as a draft into the destination course or courses.
Calendar View: Both quiz start and end dates appear as events.

Turnitin

Turnitin is the Plagiarism Detection tool available in Brightspace. See Turnitin Resources for Faculty for instructions on how to enable Turnitin in your assignments, access a Turnitin Similarity Report, use the AI writing Detection tool, and assess assignments with the Turnitin annotation tools.

Turnitin Draft Coach is available in Microsoft Word Online for students to do similarity checks, citation checks, and grammar checks before they turn in their papers. They simply need to select Turnitin in the menu bar and select Draft Coach from that menu.