-: Welcome to the Brightspace training.
This training facilitated by D2L,
which is the parent company to Brightspace
the Learning Management System we'll be transitioning to,
and this session will be recorded and published
to our Brightspace implementation website.
Someone will put the URL on the chat at some point,
and you can review at any time.
This session will be just a overview of Brightspace.
And I'll introduce Jackie,
who is a trainer with Brightspace,
and she's been working with education for over 15 years
and teaching in corporate training
and certified adult educator
with a degree in higher education management,
currently studying HR Management at McMaster University.
Welcome Jackie.
-: Hello everyone, and welcome.
Some of you, I recognize your names,
and some of you we saw in a previous session,
but thank you for joining us today.
For our session today, we will be recording.
So again, I just want to display
our legal disclaimer to you all.
We will share the recording with you.
We just ask that you do not share this out to the world.
As exciting as it is,
we will be sharing within your environment
and that is proprietary and confidential information.
For our session today, as Darrell mentioned,
this is the second part of the two part sequence.
So you may have been with this yesterday,
if not, that's okay, we can sort of acclimate you,
but we are going to look at some key features.
And again, it's a high level overview, as Darrell mentioned.
So we're gonna share with you a little bit
about announcements, the calendar tool,
discussions, assignments, and quizzes.
In future sessions, we will expand on some of these topics,
but we do want to just get you introduced
to some of the things that are available to you
in the environment to get you started.
Now, just to share a few details in PowerPoint.
We're gonna start with about two minutes in the PowerPoint,
and then we're all gonna jump into the environment.
So hopefully you do have access to the environment.
If not, please just feel free
to follow along with my screen.
And you can jump in at a later time.
With the Announcements tool,
this is one of the first things that a student will see
when they log into the main landing page
or institutional homepage, as we introduced yesterday.
And it will be the global announcements.
Once they jump into their course,
that they are the student of record for,
then they will see announcements
that you, the facilitators, have created.
At the course level, those announcements
are for course-specific information.
Now our Announcements tool is a one-way communication
for us to share information to the students.
With the Announcements tool
inside of your Brightspace course, we can add links,
we can add images, we can even record a video
personalizing that announcement to the students.
To personalize them,
we use something called replace strings,
and we will put this link available to you on your website.
But replace strings are unique to the Announcements tools
to really personalize the message
that we're sharing to the students.
Now, we also connect with our learners on a different level,
using something we call the Calendar tool.
So today I'll introduce you to the Calendar tool.
Not only can your students navigate
through course content and things like that,
but we can connect those materials to the calendar.
With that being said, students can check their calendar,
they can add their own tasks, and you too,
the facilitator and instructor, can add your own tasks
and utilize the calendar inside of Brightspace.
Another tool we want to introduce you to today
is called Discussions.
Now again, today will just give you a high level overview,
but Discussions is a different form of communication
in a course.
This will allow you, the facilitator or instructor,
to build a discussion where students can comment back.
Discussions can be used for several purposes,
but it is more of a two-way communication,
versus just that one-way communication for announcements.
Again, we'll introduce you to how Discussions work.
And in later sessions,
you'll learn a little bit more about Discussions,
but we wanted to get you started.
Now, the next thing we want to introduce you to
is the Assignments tool.
In Brightspace, assignments works very similarly
to other LMSs that we may have been exposed to,
such as Moodle or Canvas or Blackboard.
In Brightspace, you can create assignments
for multiple purposes.
Assignments can be used for just a journaling activity.
It can be used for a general assignment
that all students will have access to
and be able to submit to.
And once they submit,
students can submit just a text response,
a response to an instruction you've provided them.
They can submit a file, so upload a file
from their computer system or their laptops.
They can record a video
in response to the assignment instructions,
or they can add multimedia.
With the Assignments tool,
they can be graded at several different levels.
And again, we'll introduce you
to some of those things today.
Regardless of the type of assignment
that you build inside of Brightspace,
there are several ways to provide feedback to your students.
If the student has submitted a file,
such as a file submission,
they can submit different types of files,
such as a PDF, a Microsoft Word document,
and as we mentioned, even a video.
If they do submit a file such as Microsoft or PDF,
or even a PowerPoint,
we can annotate on that file that they've submitted
and share those annotation feedback tools with the student.
On top of which, we can also provide a student
with written feedback in text form.
We can give them a score value or a point value
towards that assignment.
And we can attach a rubric
that's built inside of Brightspace.
Now the rubric has connectivity to the Grade Book
and to the assignment's feedback feature.
So we can provide even more feedback
to the student in this manner.
With the assignments,
we can publish the feedback immediately,
and automatically the student would see that feedback,
whether it's through the rubric
or through a point system or through annotations.
Or we can save it as draft, and we can save it
so that we can mark all of our students at the same time
and publish all of the feedback at the same time.
So again, today we're just going
to introduce the tool to you, and in later sessions,
or as you start to jump into your sandboxes and practice,
you can practice these as well.
The final tool we want to introduce you to is the Quiz tool.
Now the Quiz tool, very similarly, again,
just like the Assignments tool to other LMS systems.
We can build quizzes for a variety of purposes.
Quizzes can be built as pop quizzes
or just formative or summative learning.
We can have quizzes that are midterm exams, final exams.
We can also use the Quiz tool
to create a survey or self-assessment
so that we can engage the students even more
inside of our courses.
Now I will introduce you to the Quiz tool,
but another tool that's attached to that
is something we call the Question Library.
So I'll show you what that is as well.
In considering building quizzes,
quizzes in Brightspace are auto-gradable,
which means once we build it
and tell the system what the correct answers are,
the system can auto-grade it immediately
once the student is complete.
We can also determine, are we sending the grade
that the student achieved for a quiz to the Grade Book
so we can give them immediate feedback, or are we not?
We can customize our quizzes very, very specifically,
all the way from availability, time limits,
flexibility of how long they can take to complete a quiz,
how many attempts they get on a quiz.
And we can also disable
Brightspace communication tools during the quiz
so that they will not receive any alerts
while they're taking their quiz itself.
Finally, we can customize how they see their results,
what they see, how much they see,
are we giving them the correct answers,
or are we just hiding that result from them?
So lots of flexibility with our Quiz tool.
As I mentioned,
we have something called a Question Library in Brightspace.
If you're familiar with Moodle or Blackboard,
you may be familiar with their question pool.
That is our equivalent in Brightspace of a Question Library.
Now, with the Question Library,
we can build all of our quiz questions for the entire course
in the Question Library, and use them over and over again.
The Question Library will then keep track
of the course questions that we've used
throughout the course material.
We also mentioned you can build a self-assessment,
and with the Quiz tool,
we have individual statistics built right in.
So you can look at
how are my students doing with these quiz questions?
Is there something I need to do
to make the quiz question a little easier
or maybe more difficult and challenging for my students?
With each quiz inside of your course,
you can look at the statistics and really see
how your students are engaging with that quiz.
So there's a lot of information
we want to share with you today.
What I'm gonna do is jump out into the environment,
and we're gonna start to build and work together.
Now, I know you're going to have a lot of questions.
We're throwing a lot of information to you
in a quick amount of time.
So please feel free to put your questions in the chat
and just let us know how it's going
or any questions you may have.
We will try and take some time
to answer those questions in our session today.
But any of those questions that we cannot answer,
we will certainly get those answers and send them to you.
So again, please feel free to ask questions in the chat
and we will do our best to answer them as soon as we can.
So with that being said, if someone could confirm
that you see the UVM Brightspace on your screens,
let me know.
Participant: Yep.
-: Okay, perfect, Wendy, I see your question.
And I want to answer that right up front before I forget.
You can import questions from another LMS into Brightspace.
There is a way to do that.
We may not get to answering that completely today,
but I certainly will make mention of that.
It's done through what we call a CSV file.
And again, we may not be able to share
how to do that yet with you,
but we will share the steps after our training,
but great question.
That is one of the most common questions
when we come to the Quiz tool.
So thank you for confirming
that you see the site on your screen.
Again, we are in the main landing page or institutional page
of your environment, and students will come in here.
This is the common space.
I did mention that we did have an announcement
on this institutional homepage.
This Announcements here is a global announcement.
So that means the administration at your organization
will create generalized announcements for all users to see.
We are going to pay attention to the Announcements feature
inside of a course.
So I'm gonna take us out
to a training sandbox that I've created
to share with you the tools and how they work.
Now that I'm in a sandbox, I'm at a course homepage.
And as you can see, I have my Announcements tool right here.
Announcements are very quick and easy to create,
it's just a matter of how many do you want?
How often do you want to have announcements?
When do you want your students to see them?
But announcements is just a one-way communication
as we mentioned, so it's a great space for you
to announce information to your students.
We can set reminders, we can add videos.
We can even record our own videos.
Now, once you're in your course in your sandbox
or your course level, if you will,
the announcements tool has a little chevron
beside the word Announcements.
Now we call this announcements area or box a widget.
You'll also notice that we have a content browser widget
and a calendar widget.
Widgets are only seen on the course homepage
or institutional homepage.
Once we jump into the content and things,
it looks a bit different.
For now, however, we're just gonna build an announcement.
Now, we can build an announcement
by clicking on that chevron, and we have a few options.
To get us started, we're gonna go to the Announcements tool,
which is the first option that I can select here.
We could click New Announcement
and start to build announcements,
but I do want to share with you the Announcements tool area.
So once we select Go to the Announcements Tool,
it brings us to what we call the announcements dashboard.
You may think I'm gonna build an announcement
every Sunday or Monday
so that my students are aware of what's coming up.
Or you may build announcements for a variety of purposes.
In this view, in the Announcements dashboard,
this gives you all of the announcements you've created.
Even if you have them as draft,
or you've just taken them away from your homepage,
you can keep them here
and recycle or reuse them at any time.
To create a new announcement,
I'm just gonna click the shiny blue button,
New Announcement.
Now with a new announcement,
we must give it a headline or title,
and that is to categorize them,
but also to draw attention to the student
to this announcement.
So in this box area, I'm just gonna click my mouse,
and type in, welcome to,
and I'm gonna use what we call a replace string.
A replace string personalizes the announcement.
Now, again, we will provide you
with a list of replace strings at the website, but again,
it just personalizes what the student sees
when they first see this announcement.
Now I'm gonna use a replace string called OrgUnit.
And what that will do,
is when the student logs into their account
and they come to this course,
they're going to see welcome to JNTRAIN001.
So OrgUnit replaces the name of the organizational unit,
or course the student is in.
I'm gonna add another replace string called FirstName.
And this replace string will actually replace FirstName
to the user's first name.
So it makes it very personal for the user
when they first see this headline.
Now, as I scroll down, I see this HTML editor here,
and it's got content with an asterisks.
That means this is the content
that I'm adding to my announcement.
Now there's lots of tools here in the HTML editor,
and we will explore these as we move through,
but this is what the content of the announcement will be.
So I may add a title or words here, so welcome to class.
And I may actually put in another replace string again,
to personalize the space.
Now you may notice I'm using a squiggly bracket or a banner,
and that is on your keyboard beside the P key.
Using my HTML editor,
I can highlight the text that I've typed in
and I can actually format it using my formatting tools here
so I can make it a headline,
or I can just turn it back to paragraph.
And I can use these tools here
at the top of my Brightspace editor to format it as well.
Now, uniquely, I can change the text color of this.
So if I highlight over the words, there's this tab here,
an A with a paint brush.
This will allow me to actually change the text color.
Because we're creating an announcement,
we want to make it bold and striking for our students.
So I'm gonna select on this A with this paint brush,
and what it'll allow me to do
is choose a text color to draw attention.
Now, with this Brightspace editor,
it has accessibility technology built inside of it,
which means as I'm building my announcement,
the system is going to ensure that all students
who require the use of assistive technology,
such as screen readers or closed captioning,
all things are already built into this announcement
so I don't have to worry,
all of my students will be able to see this.
Now to that end,
because I want to choose a different text color,
I could just choose a color here.
And what the popup will show me
is that I have these two red Xs.
In this popup, those two red Xs indicate
if a student is using small text or large text,
even though I've chosen the green teal color,
the screen readers and the assistive technology
will not be able to pick this up.
So what I want to do is to darken the color,
and I can do that by using this scale
in the center of this popup
and sort of increase the text of this color
to a darker color.
Now that I've done that,
you'll notice those red Xs turned into green check marks,
which now indicates to me that this will now be seen
by any of my users with small text, large text,
or assistive technology features such as a screen reader.
So I'm gonna click Save.
And when I click off of this area,
you'll notice it is now a green teal shade.
Now I can bold, italicize, underline,
all of the same features you would find
in an email or Microsoft Word document,
but I can feel confident that they'll see this,
it's personalized,
and it has a different color to draw attention.
Now, another feature that I can do
inside of this announcement
is I can go to this tab called Insert Stuff.
Anytime you see a Brightspace editor, which you will see
in several different places in Brightspace,
what I'm sharing with you, you can utilize in that editor.
So this time I'm gonna click Insert Stuff,
and I'm gonna go to something called Add Video Note.
This will allow me to record
a personalized video from my webcam into this announcement
up to 30 minutes in length.
So when I click Add Video Note, welcome to our class,
it will record from my webcam.
Now I just did two seconds,
but you could do up to 30 minutes,
introducing yourself, introducing the topic matter,
or whatever the announcement is pertaining to.
When I create my announcement, I would give it a title.
So I may say welcome message.
Now, again, moving along with our assistive technology,
we need to describe
what this video is conveying to our students.
And that is for any student who may not have the bandwidth
to open the video,
or may have assistive technology that they need.
So describing this is
describing what the video is conveying.
So I'm just gonna type in message to new students.
Now, whenever we record a video note,
we will also have the option to allow closed captioning.
Again, closed captioning is utilized
with our assisted technology
already built in our Brightspace editor features,
also for students who may have a language barrier.
When I'm building my audio note, I can choose the language
that I want the closed captioning to be in
and select automatically generate closed captioning.
When the student opens up this audio message,
they'll see the closed captioning
across the bottom of the screen.
But when I'm ready, I'm gonna click Next.
Now it will take a moment to render this video,
but that's okay.
I can keep building my announcement and move forward.
Now that I've built my announcement, I've added a headline,
I've added a little bit of text, I've added a video.
I can then come down
and set the settings for my announcement.
Now, in terms of settings,
announcements can have a start date,
and we do have the availability to show the start date.
In showing the start date,
it timelines this announcement for the students,
but it's not necessary.
You can always uncheck this
so that it does not show when this announcement started.
You can also schedule your announcements,
which means you can create
a number of announcements ahead of time
and schedule them to be placed
on the homepage of your course.
Now, with that being said,
you can also have announcements removed
at specific timeframes.
So if you are in fact scheduling them ahead of time,
you can create them and schedule them
when to start, and when to end.
This way on a Sunday, you're not panicked thinking,
did I create my announcement to be displayed on Monday?
It'll do that for you.
And again, you can remove this announcement
from the homepage on a specific time and date.
Now with the announcements,
not only can you use your Brightspace editor
to create that communication, you can also add attachments.
Now this would appear to the student as an attachment,
such as an attachment to an email.
But you can also, if you don't want to record an audio,
you can record or sorry, a video, you can record an audio.
And again, it is something that will record from your system
and it records up to 30 minutes.
So you can have the choice, an audio,
or a video, or nothing at all.
Now, finally, with our announcements,
we also have something called a Release Condition.
A Release Condition is a criteria that you set
on this particular activity in Brightspace.
And what it requires
is that the student must meet the criteria that you set
before they can see this announcement.
Now we will get into Release Conditions in later topics.
But if you want to, you could create a Release Condition
that students do not see this particular announcement
unless they've completed something else in their course.
So now that we've created an announcement,
we can save it as draft, or we can publish right away.
I'm gonna click Publish.
And in my dashboard, we'll now see our announcement.
From this area, at any time you can edit, view,
dismiss, delete, or copy.
We're gonna go to Home and see our announcement.
Oh, I need to change, one moment, please.
Here's the editing feature.
So I'm just gonna come back to my Edit.
It's going to bring me back here,
and I'm just gonna adjust my replace string,
my apologies, and click Update.
So now when I go back to my announcement on my homepage,
ooh, clicked the wrong thing,
I should see that it is adjusted, there we go.
So welcome to my sandbox, Jackie.
Here's my video.
That's not a good look for me, but I can play it.
With this player I also have settings
directly inside the video that I've created,
where students can turn captions off,
play back the speed, or download.
So that's the Announcements tool.
Another form of communication
to get information to your students
or to connect information to your students
is using the Calendar tool.
Now the calendar is another widget
that we see on the course home page.
The Calendar tool, again,
if you click on the dropdown beside calendar,
allows you to go to the calendar itself.
Now with the calendar, you can schedule events,
but the calendar also connects
to events that you've scheduled inside of the course.
A good example of that is if I created an assignment
and gave it a start date or an end date or a due date,
once I've allotted those dates to that assignment,
it automatically connects to the student's calendar.
If I'm not using dates, I can create an event
in the calendar by clicking Create Event.
When students first come in the calendar,
they can look at an agenda view,
by day, by week, by month, or by list.
Students can see calendars
throughout their Brightspace environment.
And as you can see my mouse is here
at this All Calendars tab.
This will connect to any other courses
within their environment that they've been assigned
the student of record for.
So they can quickly and easily flip
between their course calendars.
With the calendar, students can also
subscribe to the calendar by clicking on Subscribe,
and they can subscribe to one or all of the calendars
assigned to their account.
They can also, as well as you,
can copy and paste the URL listed here
and add it to an external calendar application.
When students subscribe to a calendar,
it automatically updates in their update alert
that we talked about yesterday.
So if a calendar event is coming up,
and they have subscribed to the calendar,
they will also get an alert in their alerts update
to let them know
that something is happening within their course.
Now, with the Calendar tool,
I don't have anything scheduled yet, but when I do,
it'll start to list, depending on the view that I look at.
Over here on the right hand side of the screen,
you'll see the calendar view.
And if I have events, students will see a blue dot
just below the date where an event is placed.
They can click into that,
and it'll like open up that calendar event
and they can go to that event within their course
and start to do their work.
Now, again, it is interconnected.
So as I'm creating things in Brightspace
and assigning dates,
it'll automatically connect to their calendar.
Anyone who has access to their calendar
can also add tasks for themselves.
So if I click into this task area, I can say,
type in something that I need to complete,
spell it correctly.
Once I put that task in there,
and I click with my mouse off of that area,
it gives me that task.
Further to that, I can click this arrow,
which will allow me
to give myself a due date and add a note.
When I've done the task, I can check it off on my task list
and it then goes to what we call a completed task list.
So I can go back and refer to that completion
at a later time.
Now the calendar event, the Calendar tools,
to create an event, very simple to do.
You could click Create Event, and anyone within this class
will have the availability to see this event.
Very similar to how we built an announcement,
we would give this a title.
You'll notice I have a Brightspace editor here,
so I could add a description.
I could click this plus sign,
and even record a video using Insert Stuff.
If needed, I could quick link something
to the calendar event,
which allows for the student to click in the calendar event
versus clicking out, going to content,
or wherever I want to insert a link.
So I could type in some instructions,
feel free to follow this link, click that plus sign,
click Insert Quick Link.
And I could actually link this to a quiz
I've already created within my course.
Again, the student would open up their calendar event,
be able to quickly click this link,
and it takes them directly to this quiz.
With the calendar events,
if you're doing a monthly or weekly meeting,
you could have a recurrence,
and you could add some restrictions to this.
Restrictions are very much like the Release Conditions.
If a student doesn't complete something,
they won't be able to see this.
And I could say, Create,
and I should have my calendar event created.
So briefly, that is the Calendar tool.
It is a really great tool for you and your students to use.
Now, the next form of communication,
we've talked about our announcements,
a one-way communication.
We've really shared the Calendar tool quickly
to share information that happens during your course
and throughout the course timeline.
Another form of communication
is what we call the Discussions tool.
Now I can get to my discussions
by going to this Activities dropdown from my nav bar,
and just select Discussions.
Discussions are a two-way communication,
but they can be used for one-way communication.
It is a form within Brightspace where students can comment
or ask questions or introduce themselves,
or even have debates within their class,
depending on the topic that you're going to use.
Now, Discussions is a really great tool.
It takes a little bit of work to set it up, no lies there,
but once you get your Discussion set up,
your students will be able to communicate to you
and with you within the course.
With Discussions, they're built on what we call
a hierarchical structure.
And this hierarchical structure is just a way
for our facilitators and instructors
to be able to categorize and organize
how the discussions are displayed to the student.
When we first come into Discussions,
again, clicking on Activities
and going directly to the Discussion tool,
we need to create something called a form.
A form is not something we grade.
It's really just a folder
to categorize the topics within our discussions.
So to get us started, we would create this new form.
So I would click New, and click New Form.
Now a form again is just a folder.
This is where we can house
and give instructions to our students
about the topics that they will be working within.
So for this form, I may just call this general questions.
Now, again, I don't necessarily need
to add a description here, it is a folder,
and no work will be done here by the students,
but again, it's for me to categorize.
So I won't add a description at this moment.
I'm just gonna click Save and Close.
You'll notice on my screen,
I have this general questions form.
So now I want to go ahead and add topic to it.
The topic again is within that hierarchical structure
and it allows the students to do the work.
So I'm gonna click New again, and New Topic.
This is now where I'm going to put in a topic
where students can respond to.
because I need to put this topic
and connect it to a category or form,
It allows me to click this dropdown and put this topic
inside of that general questions folder or form.
Now I'm going to add a title.
So I'm just gonna say, introduce yourselves.
Now it's just a title.
in this case, because it's the topic
where the students will do the work,
I need to provide some instructions.
So for this example, I'm just gonna copy and paste something
I've already created to save us some time.
This is where you want to put those descriptions
or instructions for the students
to be able to respond back to you
and to others in the class.
So you also will notice we have our Brightspace editor here.
And as we mentioned, you can use
the same Brightspace editor tools in your discussion area,
as you did in the announcements, and the calendar tool.
Now I've just copied and pasted some instructions here.
And for the discussion description, I'm just saying,
please take a moment to share a few things about yourselves.
I've given some of the things
I'm hoping the students will reply to,
and then at the bottom here in my description,
I've given them some instructions
on how the Discussion tool works.
We often recommend this at the beginning of the course,
so that students are familiar
with how to work within the Discussion tool.
Now that I've given a description
and instructions to my topic,
I can now choose some other options.
With these options, with the Discussion topic forms,
you can allow students to respond anonymously.
This is not something we would use on a regular basis,
but it is an option.
If you do choose to allow your students
to have anonymous posts or responses back,
just be very mindful that all students within the course
can see those posts or replies to this topic.
So you may want to consider this other option
where you want to allow a moderator
who monitors these anonymous posts.
Another option you have is users must start a new thread
before they can reply to other threads.
What this means is students must do their own reply
before they can reply to others in the class.
When you choose your options,
you would simply click Save and Close,
and your discussion topic is ready.
Now with this, when the student logs in
and goes to their discussion activity,
they would simply click on the topic here in blue,
and they would respond to this particular topic.
Once they do that, they'll see the instructions
and they'll come down to click Start a New Thread,
and they have their own Brightspace editor here
where they can add their topic line and their material
in response to the topic we've asked them to reply to.
They too will have the full use of the Brightspace editor.
So in this area, they could record a video in response.
They could add a document if needed.
They can just say, my name is, it's nice to meet you,
or whatever the topic is.
Now you will notice there is a word count.
So if this is something you are monitoring
or grading the student on,
in terms of how many words you want them to reply to,
this will help you.
So as I'm typing, it does provide that word count for me,
so I can see.
And when I'm ready, I can just come down and post,
and I've replied, ooh, I didn't give a topic,
replied to that discussion.
So now I'm going to post, and it's going to post.
Now, uniquely, you will also see of the topics,
students can reply to the original topic,
and then they can reply to other students
or to other comments.
You will also notice with the discussions,
you will be able to monitor how many of the topics
and replies have been read or unread,
how many replies this particular topic
or thread has received, and how many times it's been viewed.
This can be very important for you to monitor
that social interactivity or connectivity
with your discussions in a class.
Just like the Calendar tools,
students can also subscribe to individual topics.
And that way, every time someone responds
to that topic or that thread,
they will get an indication here in this update alert
to let them know that someone has replied
or there's activity happening within that discussion.
Again, it is a two-way communication,
and discussions can allow for group discussions,
overall class discussions,
and even single user discussions.
Single user discussions is very similar
to journaling or anecdotal or peer review work,
where only that single journal
is shared with the individual student and the faculty.
Again, you can also assign groups to discussions
where you can have different groups
having different conversations
or discussion topics within the group itself.
So it is a very versatile two-way communication
that you can utilize inside of your course.
Again, that was just a high level overview.
There's many other features
that we could share with you in later sessions,
but we did want to just introduce you to the tool.
The next area we want to share with you is Assignments.
Again, clicking on that dropdown in your navigation bar.
You can go directly into the Assignments tool.
As we saw with the announcements,
we are in what we call the Assignments dashboard.
Now in Assignments, you will notice
that I have some assignments pre-created
just to give you an idea of what it looks like
to have some assignments already in my course.
Now to create a new assignment, it's a very simple process.
Just like we've seen before,
all I need to do is click New Assignment.
Now, Assignments as mentioned when we shared the PowerPoints
can be a number of different kinds of assignments
that you want to receive back from your students.
And very similarly, almost identical
to what we saw in Announcements, even Discussions,
is we need to give this assignment a name.
You will have the flexibility to give any name you so choose
for your assignments, whether it's by topic matter,
whether it's by week, whether it's by unit,
whether it's by module, whatever you so choose,
or how it fits within your course material.
Now for this, I might call this Assignment 4,
if I could spell it correctly,
just to follow along with what I've already created.
But again, you do have that flexibility
to give Assignments whatever name you see fit.
When we're building an assignment, we would consider,
do we want this assignment to be directly connected
to our Grade Book within our course,
or we can do this at a later time,
or we can just have this assignment
that's not necessarily graded.
Now we see this Grade Out Of area,
and when I click into that,
I can allot this assignment a point value.
It could be as many points or as little points as I need to,
or I can choose again that this assignment
will not be connected to the Grade Book.
Once I click into this box,
and allot a specific point value to this assignment,
it's automatically going to go to the Grade Book.
I can adjust it here or in the Grade Book
at a later time if I need to,
or I can come to this tab here that says In Grade Book,
click the dropdown and I can decide,
well, maybe not in the Grade Book at this time.
Now, because I'm adding this to the Grade Book,
I can then further decide,
do I want to give this particular assignment a category?
Do I want to give it a special scheme
that I want to grade it towards, such as,
although it's in a point value here,
it's going to convert to a pass/fail, a complete incomplete,
a percentage value.
I can do that by going into edit or link to existing.
From here, I can click that little blue sign.
I'm gonna try that again.
So I'm gonna go Edit or Existing,
to another assignment or Grade Book,
and click this blue tab.
From here, I can determine,
although it's a point value when I'm creating it,
how do I want it to convert in my Grade Book.
I can choose the scheme.
And then when I'm ready, I can click, Okay.
Now we will be going in depth in the Grade Book tool
and connecting these activities to the Grade Book
at a later time.
But just to share with you, you can decide at this point,
do you want it to add to the grades
or do that at a later time.
Now with assignments, we have options in terms of dates.
For Assignment 4, it may determine
that I want to give this assignment what we call a due date.
Now a due date in Brightspace is what we call a soft date,
which means I can make Assignment 4
due on the 23rd of September at 11:59 am.
Because it's a soft date,
the students will still have access to this assignment
after the 23rd of September.
It will appear in their calendar as overdue,
but they still have access and still can submit.
Now, you'll notice I can add my instructions
for my assignment here.
And I do have full access to the Brightspace editor.
So I could add a video, I could link something,
I can add a document, whatever I so choose.
I can also add or upload a file from here.
So when I click that little icon,
I can grab something from my computer.
I can add something from a locker.
I can quick link this to a web link, if I want to,
I can record a 30 minute audio describing my instructions,
or a 30 minute video.
All of which I can add to my instructions.
So we gave our assignment a name.
We gave it 25 points for the Grade Book.
We gave it a soft date, or due date.
We added our instructions.
Over here on the right hand side, we can then determine,
does it have a start date and an end date?
A start date is the very first day
that the student will have access to this assignment.
So when I click on start date, I can say,
today is the first day
that the students will have access to Assignment 4.
An end date is the very last day
that they'll be able to see and submit this assignment.
None of these dates are required, but they are options.
You can have a due date without a start date or end date.
You can have an end date, you can have a start date.
You can use these in combination or use none.
It's really up to you.
But please note an end date means
this is the very last day that the student will have access
and be able to submit to this assignment.
Now with the assignments,
we can also use something we call Release Conditions.
And again, Release Conditions
are a specific set of criteria that you've set.
So if I say Release Condition and Create New,
I can choose a condition that I want my students to meet
before they can actually complete or access Assignment 4.
So for example, I may suggest that students must complete
some content in their course,
complete a discussion within their course,
or get a score on a quiz
before they can access and complete Assignment 4.
Now Release Conditions are a really great tool.
And again we will expand on these features in a later time,
but they will allow you
to release certain things within your course,
based on how a student is doing them.
With the Assignment feature,
we also have something called Manage Special Access,
and this will allow you to choose extra time or dates
for students who require a little bit more time.
Now Managing Special Access,
you can choose individual users who will have extra time,
or you can choose a group of students who require extra time
or extra time frames for this assignment.
So you can choose a different due date, start date,
or end date, and then come down and choose the user
that that particular special access will pertain to.
Now, finally, you can determine
what type of assignment is this?
For this assignment, is it a file submission?
Then that means students have to upload a file
into this assignment to get it submitted.
We can have a text submission
where they just type their responses
in their own HTML editor.
We can do an on paper or observed in person.
With a file submission, you can choose
the type of file you want to receive or not at all.
And it could be an image versus a PDF
or versus a Microsoft document or a PowerPoint.
And you can choose custom file types.
So several options in terms of what type of assignment it is
and what you want to receive for that assignment.
Now, when we're ready, you'll notice at the very bottom,
this defaults to be hidden,
which means students will not be able to see it
despite all of the dates or Release Conditions,
because we haven't published it yet.
Once we click on that visibility toggle at the bottom,
and I click Save and Close,
it will now be visible to the students
based on the dates or Release Conditions.
So I'm just gonna Save and Close.
And now we have Assignment 4.
At any time I can click the dropdown in this assignment
and I can actually edit it,
view any submissions I may have received,
delete it, or copy it.
Now, finally, we just want to quickly
introduce you to the Quiz tool.
Again, coming back to the Activities area
and clicking on Quizzes,
it brings us to, you guessed it, the Quiz dashboard.
Now again, I have a couple of quizzes in here
just to display,
but with a new quiz, it's a very simple process.
We just need to click New Quizzes.
Now I will say, we do recommend
when you are building quizzes,
to build them in what we call the Question Library.
The Question Library is a great space
for you to build all of your quiz questions.
And in that form, we can import them
into our individual quizzes for our course.
If you are familiar with Blackboard or Moodle,
it was referred to as a question pool in those LMSs.
In Brightspace, it works very similar,
but we call it the Question Library.
Now, when you build questions,
you can build them by section, as you can see on my screen.
You can build them by type, and you can just start to build.
For the Quiz tool itself, it's very simple to build a quiz.
So you would go New Quiz.
There are four basic steps to building a quiz,
and just like we've seen before, we would give it a name.
I'm just gonna call this Quiz 4.
And from here, we can add or edit questions.
Now, if I click Add or Edit Questions,
I'll just want to show you how it works
with the Question Library.
We can import.
So from this Import tab,
I can import or browse my Question Library.
And to the question we had earlier from Wendy,
we can upload a file from an existing outside source.
So when I click Upload File,
it's going to give me a template called a CSV.
I download this template, and I fill it out
with the questions from an outside source.
I save that file, and then I can upload it into this area
and it will read those questions from the CSV
and import them into my quiz.
We do recommend that you do this
at the Question Library level versus in an individual quiz,
because that way you can use the file
in the Question Library
and use those questions throughout your course material.
Now, in terms of the Question Library,
you can also browse that Question Library.
So if you've gone ahead and created questions
in your Question Library,
I can select on Browse Question Library,
and go to the sections or areas
where I've built those quiz questions.
I can quickly select some questions,
and quickly import them into Quiz 4,
which is what I was building.
Now at any time, you can click Preview
at the top right of your screen,
and that will allow you to see
what the quiz looks like for the students.
In terms of building from scratch,
you would simply click this Add and Edit Questions,
and you could choose the type of question you wanted to add.
So I could choose true/false, multiple choice,
multiple select, and several different other ones.
And they are all built very similarly.
When I click into the question I want to add,
you'll notice it says true/false,
and I can quickly click into this question text box.
Now you will notice
the old familiar Brightspace editor is here.
So in my question text, I could even add or record a video,
add a media file, add a document.
I could even add an equation, a table, or a quick link,
even an image, and an emoji.
If I just want to go with very simple stuff,
I could just type in text, the question.
Now, because it's auto-gradable,
I want to give Brightspace the correct answer.
I could give it a point value.
And when I'm ready, I can Save.
At any time you can click into each question,
and you can add things such as options.
Meaning I'm gonna add feedback to my quiz.
I may add a hint for my students,
a short description to my quiz question,
and enumeration, such as A, B, C, D,
Roman numeral or capital letters.
Over here on the right hand side,
as you're building that quiz question,
you can see how it will appear to the students.
So that's basically step one.
Step two, you can choose,
are you adding a number of questions to each page
that will be presented to your student?
So for example, if this is a midterm exam,
and you have 60 questions, you want to use six pages,
So 10 questions per page.
You would simply type that here in the Apply section.
In step two, you can also limit
which students can go backwards,
so you can prevent them from moving to other questions
that they've already completed.
You can also shuffle questions.
So if you give students multiple attempts for one quiz,
you can shuffle.
So every time they start a new attempt, it has a different,
what am I trying to say?
It shows differently with each quiz question
every time they have a new attempt.
So it doesn't look like the exact same quiz,
the second or third time.
Now we can also add restrictions to our quizzes.
So step three is adding some restrictions.
Due date, start date, or end date.
Here, you can see that once we add our dates,
we can display this quiz in the Calendar tool.
We can also use those Release Conditions
or set some criteria.
So for example, you could say, they cannot see Quiz 4,
unless they get a 60% in Quiz 3.
So you could create a new Release Condition.
You can come down and say, okay,
I would like them to get a specific score on Quiz 1.
It may be less than or equal to 60%.
And until they achieve that amount,
they cannot start Quiz 4.
Now in step three, we can also set timing.
And Brightspace has a recommended time limit,
which just allows the students to take the quiz
as long as they need to, or we can enforce a time limit.
We can also choose special access.
So are there students who may need a little bit more time,
a little bit more due date and start date?
So we have some of those options.
As mentioned, we can also set a password to the quizzes.
So by monitoring the IP address,
the student is logging into in Brightspace,
we can set a password specific to that IP address.
The final step is the Assessment and Submission step.
And here is where we can determine
how do we want the student to see their grade on this quiz
and what do we want them to see?
So as soon as they complete,
do we want to publish the grade to their Grade Book?
Do we want to keep that back a little bit,
and publish it at a later date
and synchronize it with the Grade Book itself?
How many attempts do we want the student to take
for this exam or this quiz?
Once we give an attempt allotment, we can then determine
what is the minimum and maximum I want to receive
per attempt to let them move forward.
Finally, you can choose to allow students
to retake multiple attempts,
but only take the one questions,
or several questions they got incorrect.
So lots of components,
lots of things to think about with the quiz.
Again today, we just wanted to introduce you
to a high level overview of some of the tools.
We only have a couple of minutes left,
so hopefully we'll get a chance
to answer some of those questions that you had.
But I'm just gonna open it back up to you
to see how we're doing.
Lots of questions, great stuff.
Feel free to come off mute.
I know we do have quite a few questions,
so I'm gonna try and get back to the top
and work my way down.
But Darrell or Justin, any questions that really stand out?
Darrell: Yeah, I believe one of the questions was,
"Can we make videos downloadable or lectures downloadable
to students that we upload to Brightspace?"
Jackie: That's a great question.
And depending on the configurations, yes.
So if your administration team decides download is okay,
yes, we can make everything downloadable to them or not.
Again, depending on what administration chooses,
it's called something like a configuration that we can set.
So that could include a PowerPoint, a PDF, a video,
a media file, whatever you choose.
Great question.
I just see one very quickly, several actually.
-: There are a lot. -: Yes, you can.
Yeah, let's see.
I want to answer them all.
Yes, you can have a quiz not account to a grade
Announcements can be stacked, it just depends on,
do you want to add Release Conditions,
do you want to add dates, or do you just want
them all to be available on the main landing page?
As you create them, if you're not restricting them
to dates or timeframes or Release Conditions,
they'll just continue to load,
and students will be able to see them
listed on this home course page.
You, as the instructor can reorder them.
You can also set notifications to be sent to a student.
Also, with the announcements, you can republish them out.
So when you go to an announcement and click Edit,
if you make an edit or a change,
or even if you just want to push this notification
back out to them, you'll notice in the edit screen,
there is this tab called Major Edit.
Once you select that and click Update,
it automatically pushes it back to all of the students,
regardless whether there's an edit,
or whether it's just something you want to reinvent,
but they can be managed by the instructor as well.
-: The question I had on that is if a student dismisses,
so I've been playing around
and had a bunch of announcements,
if they click out the X, it goes away.
And it's a little hard to find that announcement.
And I just worry, my students will X them out too quickly.
Is there a way to force them to stay?
Jackie: There's not a way to force them to stay.
However, you, as the faculty
can see that it's been dismissed.
So you could go in maybe once a week, maybe once a day,
come back to each announcement that you want,
do that major edit,
and it will force it back on their homepage.
The reason we have that dismissed
is so that students can dismiss the announcement
once they've completed the task.
And again, I don't know,
there might be a configuration that we can turn off,
so they don't have that ability,
but that's something we'll have to check into.
But you're right, they can dismiss it,
and we can force it right back.
Keith: Joe, do you wanna ask
about your question importing,
'cause that seems like kind of a big deal.
-: Yeah, I'll ask that as well.
I mean, I'm sure we'll see this with later help,
but, so I actually took a course that I had in Blackboard
and fully uploaded it into Brightspace
to see what it looked like.
And I was surprised at how much actually came in
pretty nicely, one of my colleagues, Zach Ballard,
had encouraged me to try this.
But one thing I noticed is all of my test questions,
I mean, literally hundreds of them,
I teach in the math and stat department,
so very quantitative questions, moved from,
in Blackboard it's called calculated numeric.
I can give a numeric answer and actually I can give a,
if you want margin of error on it,
it switched all of those to free response.
It looks like text-based questions.
And I'm just concerned that, will I have to go back
and recode hundreds of questions.
I mean, that's weeks of work.
Jackie: Yeah, I don't have an immediate answer for that.
We would work with our implementation team
because they have workarounds for some of that.
And we do have tools that might be of assistance to you.
They may be third party or built within,
but I don't have a lot of expertise with the calculations
and reconfiguring and scripting,
but we do have people that can certainly help you.
Wendy: And hi, this is Wendy here
from on the implementation team.
Joe, can you please jot me an email,
and then we'll follow up directly with you
because we're gathering all those issues
that might be more labor intensive
for course migration process,
and we wanna identify them as quickly as possible.
That would be helpful, thank you.
Jackie: I know we're two minutes over time,
but I do see quite a lot of questions.
And thank you, Wendy, for that.
There's one about students.
They cannot create their own discussion topics,
but they can respond to topics.
So you could leave a free form topic
where they can reply to a thread and reply.
So we minimize the amount of topics that they can build.
We just leave it to threads and replies.
There are other ways for them to communicate
and create stuff.
So due dates, for the assignments,
if someone comes to you beyond the due date,
and says, you know, Jackie, I didn't get it in,
how can I resubmit?
With the assignments, we talked about that special access.
So if a student comes to you and says,
I have to submit beyond to that date,
you can utilize special access
and change the date just for that one student,
instead of changing your dates for everybody.
So you could go into Special Access after that date
and assign a new date to that one student who's late.
Again, preventing you from having to go through
and adjust the end date for all.
So hopefully that answers your question.
For the assignments on the calendar,
once you assign a due date,
it automatically connects to the Calendar tool.
So start date, end date.
Once it's here, it then automatically
connects to the calendar.
So if I were to say, this is due on the 22nd,
if I went to my Calendar tool, I should be able to see
this assignment on the 22nd in my calendar, so.
Wendy: And Jackie, this is Wendy again.
Can you please clarify the difference
between due date and end date?
Jackie: Due date is a soft date,
which means students will still have access to
and still be able to submit to.
The due date will turn red for a student after that date.
An end date is truly as it sounds.
It is the very last day
that the students will have access to that activity.
It is the end.
So let me know if that was okay.
Wendy: Deborah, did that clarify?
Deborah: Yes, it did.
I was wondering, while you're on the topic,
is there any way to set the system
so that there's, say, a 10% automatic, 10% penalty
in the grade per day, so you don't have an end date
and they can continue to submit,
but there's a late penalty which is incremental?
Jackie: That would be a lot of work in the Grade Book.
But when you do an assignment, per se,
the instructor will manually enter the assignment grade.
So it is up to the instructor
to take away those percentage values.
So for example, if I'm an instructor,
and I'm grading an assignment,
I don't have any submissions
to share with you at this moment, but when you grade it,
you can give it that grade.
And once you allot the grade to the assignment,
it automatically connects to the Grade Book
with what you've allotted.
So I don't know if that answers your question exactly,
before the.
Deborah: Yeah, that's what we do now.
I was just wondering if Brightspace
had any different functionality, thank you.
And there are rubrics that you can set up, which would,
you could sort of fill out
and that would automatically assign the grade?
Jackie: Yes, so rubrics can be built
inside of the Rubrics tool.
You could go to Course Admin and find Rubrics.
Rubrics can also be built at the assignment level,
but with the rubrics, you can have different criteria
based on how the students are completing.
Rubrics is a really great thing to build.
It does automatically connect,
so if you add this to an assignment, and you're grading it,
once I click Level 4 in my assignment grading,
it will give me that point value automatically.
So it is a really neat tool, and we build it in Brightspace
so that it's connected to the Grade Book
and to the activity.
We have three different types of rubrics
that you can choose from
depending on what the rubric purpose is.
So lots to share with you.
Great question.
Wendy: Jackie, I know that one question
has not been addressed, and I'm trying to figure out
which ones haven't been addressed.
Laura Olmsted asked,
"Is there a way to show students the answer for questions
when they finish a quiz without showing the grade?"
Jackie: Yes, so you can show
correct and incorrect answers.
You can show point value that they've received
for question, one or all.
So for example, with the Quiz tool,
there's a couple of different ways that you can do that.
In this example, I'll use Module 1,
and I'm gonna click in Edit.
One way to show the students different views
is using something we call a Submission View.
When we select a Submission View area,
we can create different Submission Views
for different results.
So for example, if you had attempt one, two and three,
you could create a Submission View
for each of those attempts.
Now with a Submission View, this is where you can determine
what do I want my students to see?
So once they click submit, do I want them to see
the question answered incorrectly or answered correctly,
or show the responses that they had
versus the correct or incorrect.
Do I want to show the score?
Do I want to show the class average?
Do I want to show the score distribution?
So you can create individual Submission Views
by quiz topic, by attempt,
by score value that the student has achieved,
and each Submission View you can then attach to the quiz.
So that you can layer out exactly
what and when they'll see the results,
and what those results are.
So I know that was high level overview,
but it is extremely specific
as to what the students will see,
and you have all the choices.
So, Laura, I hope that answers your question.
Laura: Yes, thank you.
Jackie: All right, I know we're over,
but are there any other outstanding questions
that I can help with?
Wendy: And I will add that Jackie is joining us next week
for a series of three other workshops.
I know that there were some problems with the HTML page
that lived off the Brightspace implementation website,
but to register for these three events,
if you go directly to UVM ctl/events,
and just scroll down our events calendar
to the three Brightspace workshops next week,
you'll be able to register there.
So just the typical way
that one would register for all CTL events,
just go to our calendar that lives off of the CTL website.
Jackie: All right,
so we will take note of these questions.
We will, of course,
try and answer them in our best possible way.
I know we are 10 minutes overdue,
but it's been a pleasure to work with you today.
And I do look forward to more questions
and more sessions soon.