-: And I have not seen the button come up.
Up, there we go, okay.
So we are recording now.
-: Yeah, don't worry.
I do the same thing with screen-sharing,
'cause as evidenced this morning,
Teams half the time doesn't like me,
so I try to screen-share and then it's just like,
no, I don't want you to screen share so.
I'm glad that it actually did it.
-: All right, I am gonna start.
We are at 2:16.
So good afternoon, everyone.
We are very glad that you could join us today.
This is Desire2Learn demonstration
of their learning management system called Brightspace.
My name is Wendy Verrei-Berenback.
I'm with the Center for Teaching and Learning
and co-chair of the LMS Coordinating Committee,
along with Alice Messenger
of Continuing and Distance Education.
On behalf on the entire committee,
many of whom are with us this afternoon,
Thank you for taking the time out on a Friday afternoon
to attend this session.
We're really glad that you're here
and we're thankful that you're staying engaged
in the process and hope that you continue to do so.
This session will be led by the Desire2Learn team
who will introduce themselves in just a minute.
But before we begin, I just wanted to quickly go over
the agenda for the afternoon.
We'll begin with an overview of
the Brightspace learning management system,
and then a bulk of the time,
the D2L team is going to respond
to use case scenarios,
and these use case scenarios were written by
the Coordinating Committee.
And when we were gathering information last spring
via a survey and faculty focus groups,
we identified certain functions of an LMS
that our faculty were particularly interested in
and used on a regular basis.
So these are functions of the LMS
that were of great importance and interest
to the folks that gave us feedback over time.
So the bulk of the time that
we're gonna go over these use case scenarios,
if you want to read them yourself,
they are posted on the LMS blog website.
And in a minute, we'll drop that URL in the chat
so you can access them and look at what is coming up.
And then we have a lot of time also dedicated
for questions and answers,
and those can be whatever are on your mind today,
or perhaps things that did not come up
when we were talking about the use case scenarios.
We're gonna ask that during the overview
and during the discussion of the use cases,
please use the chat to enter your questions.
The D2L team is monitoring the chat
and man, they're fast.
And we are-
They can handle a barrage of questions, so have at it.
But then when we get to the Q&A, of course,
you can just raise your hand
if you want to speak your question,
or you can continue using the chat,
whatever feels the most comfortable for you.
We are also gonna put in the chat the URL for a survey.
We are very interested in your feedback
about today's session,
and so we have a survey to capture that feedback,
and you can access that at any time.
Some folks find it easy to fill it out as they're listening,
and some folks just want to do it at the end.
And finally, you might have noticed
that we are recording the session,
so it will be available for you to review afterwards.
And if you know of folks, your colleagues
who have not been able to attend today's sessions,
if you please share the URL,
or let them know that if they go to the LMS blog,
that they will have access to the video.
And so with that,
I think I am just gonna hand it over to the D2L team
and you guys can take it from here.
Thank you.
-: Wonderful, thank you, Wendy.
Appreciate the introduction.
Let me just get this PowerPoint pulled up,
and first time it's gonna cooperate.
Yes, okay, we're better than this morning.
All right, so officially good morning.
Or not good morning.
Man, I'm still in morning mode.
Good afternoon, everyone.
Thanks so much to everyone here for taking the time today.
We're gonna be walking through, as Wendy mentioned,
a faculty focused presentation of the Brightspace platform.
So quick overview of the agenda
and what we're going to be going through.
We'll do some quick introductions of the D2L team here.
We'll give you a brief overview
about the Brightspace platform
and how it's different than what you might be used to
or what you might see within the LMS market.
We'll spend the majority of our time today
in doing technical demonstrations.
We'll focus most of our time actually within the platform.
But then of course, we'll set aside some designated time
for questions at the end,
at which time you are more than welcome
to come off mute, talk through any specific use cases
you might have, and our team will be
addressing those as we go.
But quick introduction of our team.
So my name is Greg Sixt.
I am one of our senior account executives here at D2L
supporting Vermont and some of the surrounding states.
Been with D2L for just shy of five years
and really excited to be with you this afternoon,
walking through the platform.
With me, I have two other colleagues, Danielle and Scott,
who are both part of our solutions engineering team.
Danielle's going to be walking you through the demo today,
and Scott is our designated question master,
and he was awesome this morning, as Wendy articulated.
But I will let Danielle and Scott
give some quick intros of themselves as well.
-: Thank you so much, Greg.
And hi everyone, good afternoon.
My name is Danielle Burt, and I'm a solution engineer
here at D2L.
I've been at D2L for about three years,
and the first half of that time here
was actually on our implementation team.
So I was working with teams like yourselves,
groups of faculty members to actually implement
Brightspace for their institution.
And so I'm happy to answer any and all questions.
And then my later half of my years at D2L
has been in solution engineering.
So we are ready for all of your questions.
I really love your use cases.
They really showcase the breadth of experience
that you folks have and where you want to take your LMS.
And with that, I'll toss it over to Scott.
-: These guys.
Nice to meet everyone.
As mentioned, my name is Scott.
I'm a senior solutions engineer on the team.
I appreciate all the shout outs for my great chat support.
As mentioned, I'll be running the chat today.
My fingers are well warmed up from this morning,
so I'll do my best to get back to everyone's responses,
and I think we'll even have a chance to
turn some things over to Danielle to present
if they're more thematic questions.
But throw anything you have at me
and I'll answer as best I can.
-: Wonderful, thank you both.
So just quick level set and overview on who D2L is.
Some of you may be familiar with us.
Some of you, it might be your first time
seeing the platform,
but we have been in the LMS industry
for just over 21 years now.
So back in the late 90s,
it's certainly been awhile,
in that time, though, we have grown to support
over 1500 academic institutions worldwide,
the vast majority of those being located
here in North America, so the United States and Canada,
and currently support over 30 million users worldwide.
So got a lot of experience in this industry
working with faculty like yourself,
supporting students and also administrators
of higher education.
But let's get right down to it and look at
what makes Brightspace special?
What's different about it in comparison
to what you might see in upcoming presentations
or what you've been used to so far?
So the first thing that we're gonna talk about
is that D2L is the leader in accessibility
in the platforms.
Other LMSs like a Blackboard,
what you're used to like Canvas and so on,
they have always kinda had accessibility
as a bit of an afterthought.
They incorporate the use of third party tools
and integrations to cover those accessibility standards
and make sure that students are supported in that way.
But you do have challenges with integrations.
It doesn't necessarily cover everything
within the platform natively.
Brightspace, you don't have that issue.
Everything was built and tested, designed
from our accessibility team from the ground up
right from product.
So anything as it relates to those WCAG 2.1 standards,
ADA, looking at students that have accommodation needs,
we've got you completely covered.
You're never gonna have to worry about that
as you're going through and teaching your class,
whether your students are able to
see their content correctly, as an example.
And then building off of that,
the real objective that we're trying to help you with
is to create experiences to engage your students.
Now, we'll talk a little bit more about the tools
and how we can empower you as faculty members
to be able to do that.
But at the end of the day, if your students are engaged,
if they are excited about the platform,
if they're paying attention,
that is what's going to make your life easier
as a faculty member.
We don't want students to be confused about the platform,
not know where to go and then come to you
as their primary point of contact and say,
"I don't know where to find my course material.
I don't know where to find my assessments.
Like where do I go for this material?"
The student experience is just as paramount
as your own personal experience
to make sure that we are saving you
as much time as possible
and making it as easy as possible for you
to teach on an LMS throughout the course of a semester.
Third point here is around tools
that are going to save you time.
So there's the common core tool
that you probably come to expect within an LMS.
That's like assignments, discussions,
quizzes and tests, content areas.
But how do we optimize that?
What does it look like between the different LMS providers
to really save you time on those common workflows?
So stuff like assessing and grading.
We know historically that has been
an incredibly time-consuming part of your day to day.
It takes a lot of effort and a lot of energy
to go through and grade within an LMS.
So our team has spent a long time looking at
how do we optimize this experience for you?
How do we make it easier?
How do we make it faster for you
to get meaningful feedback to your students
and not have you spend a ton of time
on grading and assessing?
So Danielle, as we go through the presentation,
is going to really showcase some of these items.
The fourth thing is around providing you actual data
and improving your student learning outcomes
and overall success.
So giving you as faculty members visibility
into how students are performing,
which students might be doing really well in your course,
and respectively, which ones are maybe at risk
of failing the course.
How much time have they spent in their content?
How can you engage with them to help bring up their grade
and ultimately get them over
that thresholding goal for them in the courses?
We provide you all of that data at your fingertips
so you can easily see what's going on at your course
at a granular level for each particular student
and provide opportunities to intervene, speak with them,
involve groups like academic advising and so on
to make sure that we're getting
every student as successful as possible.
And then the final point on here is being able to partner
with a community of learning experts.
So this just doesn't include the institutions
that we work with, and the community
is incredibly active on this front.
It includes the D2L team.
The D2L team is in large part made up of people
that have education experience.
A lot of folks here have been consultants
or teachers and faculty members themselves.
They know the position that you're in
and they're working every single day
directly with folks like you to make sure
that the course experience is as optimized as possible,
while continuing to develop and innovate the tool
to best serve you and your courses going forward.
And then the other thing that a lot of folks here
is gonna empathize with that ties in here
is around course migration.
So we talk a lot about LMS transitions
and how they can be really daunting.
You've probably got questions like,
"Am I going to have to recreate all of my course content?
How easy is it for me to be able to use the system?
What kind of training and support resources
am I going to have access to
throughout the course of the semester?"
Our community is incredibly robust on this.
We've got a ton of resources available for you
to make this as easy as possible.
And the D2L team is here to make sure
that all of that is taken care of for you,
whereas other LMS providers might not provide you
the same degree of support
as you're getting your courses transitioned and set up.
Now, one particular quote that I really like
to pull out as an example for this
is the University of Arizona.
So Mark Felix, who directs Institutional Support there,
I've got a good relationship with him.
He talks a lot about the LMS and he supports,
you know, over 50,000 students in a semester,
thousands of courses that are getting copied
and migrated semester to semester.
He constantly tells me that he receives feedback
that rolls into his inbox every semester that says,
"Thank you, I can't believe it was so easy.
I didn't have to do anything.
I didn't have to email anyone.
My course was just there, ready to go.
I logged in, my students were there,
and I was able to teach."
And that's what we're trying to do here at D2L
to help you, so you don't have to stress
when you come back from the Christmas holidays
as an example about,
"Is my course gonna be set up?
Is it gonna be ready to go?"
We want to make sure we're taking care
of all of that for you
and making this as smooth as possible.
Now, as far as how the platform can be used,
you know, a lot of LMSs will talk about kinda usability,
ease of use and the flexibility of the tool
and what kind of robust features do you have available?
But the LMS market has historically done a very bad job
of riding this middle or providing flexibility
while providing ease of use.
As an example, you would have a current system like,
Blackboard, I'll take for an example,
where you probably got a lot of tools
and a lot of features that you're really familiar with.
But we hear from faculty a lot that sometimes
it can be difficult.
Sometimes it's challenging to figure out where to go,
or there are certain things that become really difficult
from a workflow perspective and waste a lot of time
when quite frankly, they should be easier.
On the other side of the spectrum,
you'll get LMSs like, something you might've heard of,
Canvas or had experience with Canvas.
The platform is designed to be
incredibly straightforward and simple to use,
but that's the key there is that it's simple.
When you want to push that threshold,
when you want to experiment with new pedagogical models,
when you really want to get beyond
just those absolute basics,
you can't do it or you struggle to do it,
and you run into the same kind of problems
about do I have to start looking for other tools
that can tie in?
Is it really gonna provide me a complete solution?
Can I just not do something that I would expect
an LMS to do outright?
Brightspace has spent the last six years
doing a ton of research,
talking to a ton of different faculty and institutions,
and has come up with a really nice user interface
that rides this beautifully
in terms of helping you as a faculty member
teach easily and understand the platform,
do your basics of day to day,
but also provide those advanced features,
that flexibility to support accommodations,
look at templates, look at outcomes
and competency-based education,
and really drive that student learning experience at UVM.
Now I talked a little bit earlier
about the community that we work with.
Here is just some examples of institutions
we work with across North America.
A lot of them are pretty close to you.
You've got a lot of opportunities for collaboration
and partnership.
Groups like the State University of New York.
All of their colleges and universities use the platform.
Groups like NYU, McGill,
you've got Southern New Hampshire just up the road as well.
You've got the University of Rhode Island,
University of Maine.
There's a very large community for you
to be able to draw on, experience and collaborate,
to ultimately create a better learning experience
for both yourselves but also the students
that are taking your courses.
With that, I'm going to pause.
Hopefully this provides a really good intro for you all
about who we are in D2L and what drives us every day.
I'm gonna pass it over to Danielle now
who is going to get into the Brightspace platform
and start working through those use cases.
Again, Scott and myself will be monitoring the chat.
Please put your questions in there as we go,
and we will pause and address them as needed.
Danielle, over to you.
-: Thank you so much, Greg.
And we have hit the ground running in the chat
and I'm loving Scott's ability to respond so quickly.
Donna, fantastic questions.
And I'll definitely showcase a lot of those in reality
that will go through Brightspace today.
So I'll do my usual,
if I could get a thumbs up that we can see Brightspace.
Fantastic, thank you so much, Alex.
So I will do my best to bring as much energy
on this Friday afternoon as I can,
so that we're engaged the entire time,
but I have to be honest,
I don't think I'll have to worry about that
since this team is so engaged and I'm loving it.
So as Wendy mentioned in her intro,
I will be going through our use cases today
that were presented,
but I really wanted to showcase
a bit of an overview of Brightspace,
so just in case you haven't seen it yet,
you have a better understanding
of how we're navigating through,
why I'm clicking the way I'm clicking
so that we can best support you in these workflows.
So I'll start my tour here to just talk through
where I've landed right now
on the top level organizational homepage.
So this is your campus-wide area.
And so we start with a three tier design
and I'll start with this top tier here
at the My Home button.
And so this is where we've dropped your logo here
for that consistency and branding,
but it's the ability for any user to click here
and navigate back to this homepage.
If I go over to my right here,
we'll click on our Course Selector,
or what I more commonly like to call the waffle icon.
And so you can search through your courses here
and even pin some courses for easy access in the future.
And then our global communication center,
and this is gonna aggregate all of the alerts
that you have as faculty members up to the top level
across all of the courses that you teach.
So a great way to stay in the know
and on top of all your updates.
And then I don't normally talk too much
about the My Profile area.
Pretty standard stuff for setting your profile information,
understanding your notification preferences.
But what I really want to showcase here
is this View As function.
So if any of you folks are the individuals in the platform
designing the course,
you might want to jump in or toggle
to this View As Student functionality.
And so it's one quick toggle to be able to understand
what your students are gonna see as you design that course,
so a really nice toggle with ease.
Then we move down to our second tier of our navigation
and this is our navigation bar.
And so this is your quick links area to different tools.
Most likely your LMS admins are gonna set this up
for what tools make sense for you as faculty members.
But this is configurable for what UVM needs
to have access to.
Maybe it's some library resources or an external help desk.
And then we move down below into our homepage area,
and Brightspace is a widget-based homepage.
And what's great is that your institution
has the flexibility to be able to pick
from a suite of over 25 widgets
to actually put on this homepage,
including custom widgets, if you so choose.
And I already did see a comment about using an iPad
or a device to actually grade.
So I will speak to our mobile story at a high level
in that we designed our platform
to be completely mobile responsive,
with the added benefit on top of that
of creating an app experience.
So we have both a mobile platform,
a mobile responsive platform
throughout our entire tool sets, including grading,
including this homepage experience
that is consistent through the platform.
But you can also access Brightspace from our Pulse app,
which is our free mobile app.
And I'll showcase that in real time here.
You'll see that I've shrunk my screen down here
and it's really nice in terms of how
that live responds in the moment.
I don't have to pinch and zoom,
and I can easily scroll through all of my functionality.
I'll head back into my full screen.
And I just want to scroll through
a couple of these widgets on our homepage
before I jump into the course experience for us today.
And the one I want to showcase is a bit of a teaser.
It's our Quick Eval tool,
and we designed this widget
to make your grading lives easier.
And so this is intending to be
all of the students' submissions
across all of the assessments,
across all of the courses you teach
in this one nice widget display.
And you see these actionable icons show you
how many students submissions have been submitted
for that assessment.
So you could jump right in and evaluate
in line as you see fit.
I'll head back up and I'm gonna jump into
our course experience through the My Courses widget,
which is this nice tiled approach here for our courses.
And what you'll notice as I jump
into the course experience
is we have a very consistent look and feel
from that homepage into a course homepage.
And so if you look up at our navigation bar,
we now have our course-based quick links available,
including our assessment suite,
information and tools about our students' grades
and their progress and performance.
And then we also have our course-based announcements,
and you'll notice it's actually calling me out by name here.
And what this is using is
our replace strings in Brightspace.
And that's leveraging our first name replace string.
And what that means is any user looking at this page
is going to see their first name leveraged here.
And that's a way you can personalize the learning platform,
but at a scale to all your students.
And it's really hard to ignore something
that's calling you out by name.
So I'm more likely to read it,
more likely to engage with that content,
and stay focused on my announcements.
I also understand that you folks
are a Microsoft Team institution,
so I did want to showcase that I've dropped
at the bottom here our Microsoft Teams widget,
which is allowing you a one single click
to be able to create a new Teams meeting.
When we jump into the course content
of how you actually create course materials,
course assessments all in one area,
you could also create a meeting link from there as well
to support a linear learning model.
I'll go into a bit more detail
of the MS Teams full integration capability
when we get to that use case in our list.
As I jump into content through our modules area,
we're gonna see a nice structure that we're met here
that really supports a linear learning model,
but supports some of the course components that we might see
are top of mind for both students and yourselves as faculty.
And we use our overview area most commonly
to house a course syllabus.
So students can keep an eye on the goals
and outcomes of the course.
And then we have our course schedule,
which is a nice extension of our calendar functionality.
It's gonna aggregate all of the course dates
associated with assessments and content
right into one place for our students.
And then we have our Table of Contents,
and you'll notice I've approached this
with a unit nomenclature,
but I could use week-based.
I could use modular-based.
I could use even competencies.
So if I wanted to outline this is the competency
you're hoping to accomplish
with this grouping of content.
So in order to tackle our first use case,
and I will disclaimer that it might be slightly out of order
from your blog access to the use cases,
so I was given a priority list
and I'm hoping we'll tackle all of them in our time today.
So I'll create a unit for us to tackle.
The first one, which is related to
course building and content creation.
And in order to do that, I'm gonna create a modular area
for us to work in together,
where we can build all of our course components
in one place.
In other LMSs, you might have to navigate around
to different areas, to different tool sets,
and actually then bring things together into a linear way
or in different folders as I commonly see in Blackboard,
which puts that navigation burden on students
to be able to navigate to the different folders,
that different areas in order to complete
all of their course tasks.
In Brightspace, we want you to be able to do that
all in a linear fashion.
So students are just simply navigating to the next page,
which will prompt them on content,
assessments, quizzes, even discussions, and more.
So to tackle the use cases
within content creation and course building,
I'm gonna just first use our UI here
and simply just drag and drop a few files into our content.
And with a few seconds, we actually will have
three pieces of content dropped right in there
so that we can start delivering this content to students.
Now, the three tasks that I saw
in content creation and course building
were really around the focus of an HTML editor.
And within Brightspace,
we're gonna use our Upload and Create button
to create any course components
specifically around an HTML file.
And we'll go through more of this suite here in this list,
including our assessment creations here as well.
So I'll jump into the Create A File,
and this is gonna open our Brightspace editor.
And I will call this out as we navigate through Brightspace,
but this is a consistent experience
in terms of the suite of features
within the Brightspace editor.
It's consistent through assignment creation,
quiz question creation, discussion creation.
We wanted to give you this tool set
consistently through the platform.
And that really speaks to that ease of use
and making your lives easier as faculty
to have these tools available at all times.
So we're gonna create a file together.
We'll create maybe a welcome message here,
and we'll actually see our replace strings live in action.
So welcome to, we're in unit four,
and we'll use that first name replace string.
Okay, I just like capitals, so we'll do that.
Okay, and just to call out the first tool set
that I want to highlight in our HTML editor
is this dropdown.
And this is an important feature
that we wanted to give you access to
in speaking to that breadth of what
an LMS can give you in terms of complexity,
achieving the first time user to the power user of the LMS.
And this was designed by our instructional design team
to give you beautifully designed,
intentionally designed HTML pages
that you can simply drop in with one click.
So if you wanted that consistent look and feel
across your content, we wanted to give you that dropdown,
that suite of options there.
And this is a simple point and replace here
to get your formatting to match that HTML template.
I will also highlight within our HTML editor
that we have our accessibility checker.
And Greg mentioned this, that we are a leader in this
from our differentiators at the beginning,
the Brightspace difference.
And this was intentional that we built this functionality
throughout our HTML editor.
And so with one simple click,
we're prompted with the issues or warnings
that we can repair within our content
to make it as accessible as we can for our students.
We want them to be able to access
all of the learning we're providing
in the most accessible way we can.
If we maybe wanted to add some multimedia options here,
so video content,
I'm gonna shut off my own a webcam here
so we can leverage the one in Brightspace
that's going to be through our Insert Stuff button,
and it's aptly named in that it inserts
a lot of different stuff, including YouTube,
including multimedia options that are
integrated through third party softwares.
But we're gonna use our Video Note tool today,
and this is gonna open our webcam.
There we go.
And I can say hello to my students.
I can welcome them to this new course
and let them know maybe the learning outcomes
they can achieve if they complete this module.
And continuing on that accessibility story,
we can automatically caption this video for our users.
So with one click, we automatically generate captions
as we enter this video into our content.
Again, speaking to that accessible content delivery
to our learners.
I hit Next and it's gonna drop that
right into our content piece.
A few more things, I did take a glance across to our chat.
I did see a prompt about an equation editor.
So we do have a full suite of equation editor options.
And once again, this is leveraged throughout the platform
in assignment creation, in quiz creation and the et cetera.
I'll say hello again via video.
A few more things to call out here.
I did see a question in your use cases
around copying and pasting.
And so you will get to see that
if you have it configured this way,
the system, and I'll use your own document
of use cases to do this,
is we will simply copy from a Word doc and paste it,
and it's gonna allow you to remove formatting
or keep that formatting.
So if I remove it here, it's gonna drop that content
right into your HTML page
and match the formatting of that HTML template.
So a great way to keep that consistency.
I did also see a prompt there
for understanding source code,
and so we do have this HTML button
that you could jump in,
more of that power user use case,
and understand your HTML code or code directly from here
if you are that power user.
I'm just gonna toggle over to your use cases
and make sure I didn't miss anything.
And so the last one I just saw was have access
to a robust text editor in all areas.
That's that message I keep driving home
that this is consistent throughout the platform,
and don't worry, I'll call it out every time we see it.
So if we save and close this,
it's gonna plop unit four into
our linear learning pathway of unit four.
And you'll notice my video is rendered in the content,
so we have this welcome message for our students.
We can use our breadcrumb trail
to get back to that unit four
or open our tray and jump to
a different content piece if we wanted,
just to speak to that navigation ease of use.
So I'll head back to unit four here,
and we can see that that welcome message
is right where we were working.
And so I can simply drag that up as a welcome message.
I might want that up at the top here,
so that we're welcoming our students
right away in the course.
So from here, I did see a prompt in our next use case
our brown student engagement,
but before I go to that next use case,
Scott, I'll do a little pause
and see if there's anything we need to demo
with respect to content creation.
-: I don't think so.
I think we covered it all.
There was a few questions earlier on
about things like the course schedule and the homepage,
so I just wanted to reinforce that,
you know, we have full flexibility
over what that course homepage looks like,
if you'd rather have more list-based views,
we have our own 40 widgets that we've built
that you can incorporate.
And, you know, just because they're widgets
doesn't mean that they need to be overly,
you know, visual or complex,
they can be just a simple course navigator
with links to all the materials.
We can also even bypass that and have students
land right here at the content tool.
And then there was another question about-
I just want to make sure I got this.
Oh, the scheduling.
Really, really important in Brightspace.
Whenever you add a date to anything,
whether it be content or an assignment,
a discussion, anything,
that date propagates everywhere in the platform.
So in the calendar, in the course schedule,
in the student's notifications, in their Pulse app.
So it doesn't have to be just assignments.
You can actually date everything in Brightspace
to give them that really holistic view
of all of the upcoming activities and work
that they have over the next few weeks and days.
-: Great, thank you so much, Scott.
I appreciate that.
And Donna, your prompt about loving to see
the screen-share functionality through
the tool set that we have for that,
which is called Virtual Classrooms,
where it allows for that screen-share,
I'm happy to showcase just a screenshot
of what that looks like, so we can see it,
but I'll save that one.
Greg, if you don't mind reminding me on Donna's question,
I'm happy to drag that over and showcase that experience.
-: Yeah, absolutely.
And maybe the one thing that I'll mention there
is that there is a breadth of options here.
This morning, we talked a lot about Microsoft Teams
and how a number of faculty
really liked to use Teams for that.
You're absolutely able to use Teams
as a screen-sharing tool.
You can use Zoom very easily as a screen-sharing tool.
There there's a few different ways
that we can incorporate that within to the platform.
So whatever you are most comfortable with
or whatever method or methods that the university supports,
we're more than happy to accommodate.
-: Yeah, we don't need to reinvent the wheel
if you already have a process that works.
We integrate with all of those
web conferencing capabilities.
-: Yeah, and I'll just reiterate to,
again, sorry to add on to this,
but Donna's question about copyright.
You know, we don't hold any rights
to your content in Brightspace.
It's all protected under your agreement with D2L.
So whether it be video-based content,
documents, anything that you load is UVM property.
We hold no rights to that and it's all protected
under those copyright rules.
-: Thanks, Scott.
So the next use case on our list
was around student engagement.
So it reads, as an instructor,
I want my students to be able to participate
with their peers and myself
so that they meaningfully engage using text
and/or multimedia.
And the second one is as an instructor,
I want to easily create multiple groups
and provide each group with the same discussion prompts.
So I'm gonna showcase just how you would create
a discussion within this linear learning path
within our Modules area,
where you wouldn't have to navigate anywhere else to do so,
but then I'll show you some fully made discussion threads
so you can see how the more complex workflows look.
So I'll again use my Upload and Create button here,
and I'll just grab a new discussion.
And from here, we're going to create a new discussion topic.
And so we'll say UVM Discussion.
And then from here, we can associate it
with a forum that exists.
I think of forums like a folder within a Brightspace
to house groups of topics, topic discussions,
or I can create a new one here as well.
So we can say, yeah.
And then you'll notice this familiar Brightspace editor here
allows you to add multimedia options,
that same Insert Stuff functionality
as well as the equation editor and accessibility checker.
So lots of capabilities that are consistent here
with that discussion creation.
If I hit Save, it's going to then prompt me
that I can start a new thread within that topic
and simply edit the options below.
So if you wanted users to post
that they can't post anonymously
or that there's an approval process
to gate or moderate that discussion thread,
or if you wanted users to only see other threads,
ones they've posted themselves,
and finally, a rating scheme can be applied,
both a star rating scheme
or an upvote, downvote type of model.
So lots of functionality here that you can add
onto your discussion thread,
and simply starting a new thread is gonna open
that same HTML editor here.
So that multimedia is consistent
throughout all of our assessment tools,
so that suite of features.
If I head into our Discussions tool itself,
we can see some already created discussion threads
in our system.
So we have one dedicated to peer evaluation,
where users can post their poems and then evaluate
via a reply to that read
and evaluate their students' and peers' responses.
I've also highlighted that if I had
my course divided into sections or groups
that I could simply create with one button click,
a graded discussion or a discussion thread
for each of the sections or groups.
And so within the Groups and Sections,
I'm able to click that I want to automatically create
restricted topics to maybe a group or a section
that is created in Brightspace.
So one simple click and I have that management in place.
I will pause there to see if there's any questions
before I toggle into the testing use cases here.
-: There was one question I thought we could answer live,
which is really important,
which is the integration of third-party tools
such as Yellowdig for discussions.
So really important to note about Brightspace,
and I think we'll cover this again in more detail,
but Brightspace is and open standards platform.
And what that means is you can integrate
any third-party tool that follows those same standards.
So Yellowdig, as an example, publisher content,
things like Respondus LockDown Browser, plagiarism tools.
Because of the openness of Brightspace,
it's really easy to bring those tools
into the Brightspace ecosystem
and have them all exist within the course path
so that students don't have to remember passwords
and go to external sites.
It all just flows through the same pathway
that we've looked at with creating discussions
and content and all the other tools.
So let us know in the chat
if there's other tools you're thinking about,
but again, you know, any third-party tool
that is out there on the marketplace we can integrate with.
Last year, we launched something like 2,500
unique, different tools across our client base.
So very, very easy to integrate and bring those systems in.
-: And I'm gonna deviate slightly from my shift into testing
because I love Dawn's questions so much.
So Dawn's asking about-
Oh, sorry, Victoria.
Oh, there's too many comments coming in.
But Victoria, sorry to give your credit away to Dawn
for adaptive release in the question.
So the question is, for example,
release modules after a certain date
and/or release modules after a student scores
acts on a self assessment quiz,
and that truly is Brightspace's specialty.
We are a leader in the market
as far as how many release conditions
or adaptive release criteria you can allow
for content pieces, for assessments,
for learning objectives, awards
consistently through our platform.
So before I had into our grade book,
I did just want to toggle back to our Modules area.
That unit four, we were working in,
and I'll showcase wherever this shows up,
but if we simply click on Dates and Restrictions,
we have the ability to create a release condition,
an adaptive release.
And when I say Brightspace is the leader here,
I truly mean it in that we have over 36 release conditions,
so the most of any LMS in the market.
But we have it consistently through our tool sets.
So not just in certain areas of the platform.
We have it consistently throughout
that you have this expansive list
of release condition criteria to really create
or elevate your pedagogical approach
or learning path within the system.
So maybe you want to send communications to students
who haven't visited content topics
or encourage students who haven't posted yet
in their discussion thread to do so before the due date.
Potentially adaptively release content
if they scored a low score on a quiz.
The possibilities are truly endless
for how you can pair these criteria with that learning path.
So I will go into an example of this
within another use case,
but I wanted to just call that out, Victoria,
since you asked that.
And thanks, Scott for tackling Dawn's question in the chat.
Didn't want to leave Dawn hanging.
All right, so our next use case in here is around testing.
So as an instructor, I want to be able to give tests
in a way that limit academic dishonesty
and as an instructor, I want to be able to provide
formative assessment to students
so they can get automated feedback.
So I'm gonna highlight a few features
within our tool suite of quizzes,
and we could simply,
if we were creating a quiz from scratch,
just add it into this linear learning path
as we've been doing so far.
But I'm gonna jump into an existing quiz,
'cause I actually have a knowledge check set up
that is going to really compliment
that formative assessment workflow.
So we open our quiz editing experience,
and if I toggle into Assessments here,
it's going to showcase that I don't have to
link this quiz with a grade book item.
And just to back up a little bit
in terms of our philosophy around grading,
we want that flexibility that any of our assessments
can or cannot be tied to a grade item.
So you really have that flexibility
if you want to do a knowledge check,
a formative assessment,
without affecting a student's final grade,
giving them an opportunity to have feedback
prior to that summative assessment,
you can do so with this flexibility.
I'll highlight the academic dishonesty component
of that use case that I saw,
and to do that, I'll jump into our Restrictions tab.
I know Scott did mention in the chat and verbally
that we do integrate with a lot
of third-party proctoring solutions,
if that was of interest,
but just in our tool suite out of the box,
we do have a few functionalities that will help
limit academic dishonesty,
one being setting up a password for the quiz,
restricting the IP range,
maybe making it a very limiting time
associated with how long on average it should take
versus an expansive amount of time to complete the quiz.
A few of these options to actually limit
the overall quiz management.
And then in order to talk through
that automated feedback component,
I'm gonna jump into the actual quiz question creation,
that's a tongue-twister,
and talk through some of the features
that we have available.
So we're gonna add a new question here.
I'll note that you could add from a question pool
in this quiz interface or import quizzes as you see fit.
But I'll jump into a multiple choice question set.
And like I said, you can toggle between
the question types here.
But you'll notice that we have that same suite of features
with the Brightspace editor within this nice condensed view
that you could expand into that full screen,
but including Insert Stuff,
so you could add that multimedia suite in here
as well as the equation editors.
And so it's great to have this full suite
within the quiz question creation experience.
You have that similar functionality within the answers,
and this nice drag-and-drop to reorder the answers.
To speak to that feedback option,
we do have the option to add feedback
within the quiz structure.
So if it's a common feedback phrase
you want to give to your students,
or even a hint as they complete the quiz, you could do so.
To support that academic dishonesty component,
we do have the ability to randomize the answer order.
And my final thing that I'll highlight that is important
or valuable in terms of quiz creation,
if we wanted to do something like a written response,
we could allow students to also respond
with the full HTML editor that I've been highlighting.
So that consistent experience could be applied
to a student response as well.
Before I leave this a quiz question creation experience,
is there anything I wanted to highlight there, Scott,
from the questions in the chat?
Scott: Yeah, there was a really good question from Lubin
about setting accommodations.
So this is a really important component of Brightspace,
and as Greg talked to the accessibility story
of Brightspace and how it's integral
into everything that we do in the platform.
Things like accommodations and extra time
or extra submissions is really easy to configure,
and that can actually be configured
at the quiz by quiz basis.
So you could do it just a one-off
for one individual assignment or quiz.
But Danielle will be showing a little bit later,
you can actually set that at a global level
across an entire course.
So if you know accessibility requirements
for a student should be applied to all quizzes,
you can actually set it on their profile in your course
so that you don't have to worry about doing it quiz by quiz.
It'll apply those settings to all quizzes in one step.
-: That's a great call-out, Scott,
and I think as I'm navigating to our grade book,
I'm actually gonna do a quick stop
on our Classlist, which is where you would do that
accommodations at the class level
for all the quizzes for that student.
So if I jump into the Classlist,
which is showing my course roster,
I can highlight over here to see this icon
highlighting that Michael has accommodations
or special access set across his quizzes.
But if I wanted to edit accommodations for a specific user,
I can simply with this dropdown access
that time limit editing experience
where I can do it as a multiplier
or add extra time in terms of minutes.
So that capability then applies to all quizzes
for Marcus moving forward.
Great call-out.
Okay, so I said this was a stop of my tour
to the grade book,
which is our next area within our use cases,
so I'll just pop up in the use cases again.
So we have a few different items in this use case.
As an instructor, I want maximum flexibility.
I love that phrasing.
Maximum flexibility in how I can figure my grade center.
As well, I want to be able to incorporate
extra credit opportunities
that not all students will complete,
or provide final grades to students
that represent weighted percentages
or turn off automatic summation of columns
to avoid confusion regarding actual
course grade and total summation.
That last phrasing there, as an instructor,
I want to accept multiple file types,
annotate, grade student assignments within the browser
and ability to download, annotate and upload again,
I'll save as a pause for after I go through the grade book,
'cause I'll tackle just those bullet points first.
But when I said I love the phrasing maximum flexibility,
we really in Brightspace wanted to deliver
a grades tool that accomplished just that.
'Cause that was an ask we were constantly hearing,
especially from a users coming over from Blackboard,
is it was so tough to edit, manage
and adapt the structure of the grade book
once it had been set or once it had been copied
over from term over term.
And we just didn't want that to happen,
so we give full granularity in this grade book,
and I'll go through a few of those features soon.
So if we scroll down, we'll see this full grade book here
and you'll see I have color coding for grade ranges
within my environment.
And we can even see that we have multiple schemes in here.
So I have a pass/fail, I have a percentage,
and you could do as many schemes as you would like
within the grade items.
We also have these actionable icons here
that even show you alerts for a new post
within that submission versus one we've already reviewed.
And so we wanted you to be able, from here,
from that grading experience, jump into the submission
if you need that as a reference.
Wherever we leverage data in Brightspace,
we really wanted to showcase that actionable story
to take that data into your conversations.
And so if I highlight here,
I can simply email my classlists in bulk
or one-off students if I see
that I need to talk to CJ, for example.
Although CJ's doing pretty well, so I probably won't.
I will also highlight, since we talked about
sections and groups that we do have this nice View By
that if we want it to view by a group or a section,
it's a really easy toggle in the interface,
so you can tackle your grading by group
or section with ease.
I'll jump into what we call
the Spreadsheet View in Brightspace,
and this is really powerful in terms of grade entry
in an easy user interface.
So it's the exact same grade book,
but provided in that spreadsheet view
so I can quickly toggle in those grades
and continue on my course delivery.
Outside of that, I want to highlight our managed grades.
So we talked about the student workflows,
jumping into the assessments,
jumping into emailing them directly
or entering their grades.
But I want to talk about actually managing
the structure of Brightspace.
And in order to do that, I'll toggle over to Manage Grades.
And something that is just revolutionary
in terms of the grade book
is to be able to bulk edit.
And so I jumped into this experience
and I have the ability at a whole bird's eye view level
to actually edit my entire grade book,
including adding a bonus,
or adding a bonus setting an assessment
or to a grade item,
so that if students needed that extra credit
or even setting it that it can exceed that total
again for that extra credit workflow.
I can toggle really easily
through different grade schemes that I've set up,
including custom ones or formula-based ones
so that I have the flexibility
to have multiple grading schemes in one single grade book.
I'll head out of here.
And this talks through the actual fully made
grade book from here,
but if we're starting out from scratch
the first time that we want to design
just a beautiful grade book right out the gate,
I'm just gonna highlight and click through
our Setup Wizard.
And we designed our Setup Wizard to be six simple questions
so that you can have a fully customizable
grade book launched as a result of your entries
to these questions.
And so I'll start the wizard here so we can just see
how easy it is to click through.
The first step is actually
choosing that underlining grading system.
So whether we have it as weighted points
or a formula-based structure, we can set it here.
And I will caveat that none of this is set in stone,
so you can come back and edit or toggle these
as you see fit.
We can talk through that final grade component,
so whether we want it to be calculated or adjusted,
'cause you want that manual intervention
before it gets released to students.
As I continue on to step three,
we're gonna talk through grade calculations.
Do we want to drop ungraded items
so students don't see them?
Or do we want to treat them as zero?
So we have that flexibility here
and to affect that final grade ongoing.
Our step four is gonna talk through
the actual default grading scheme,
but like I mentioned in Manage Grades,
you have that flexibility to toggle between
the grading schemes per grade unit.
And then we'll stop at step five to talk through
just a simple decimal display for your own benefit.
And then the last screen is actually setting
what students will see.
So you have the flexibility as faculty members
to set what information you want your students to see
on their view of their own grade book.
On our final page it's gonna summarize
all of those decisions you just made
and launch that grade book by clicking Finish.
So with an easy six step entry,
you have a fully baked grade book
that you can then start assessing your students.
I'll pause there, as we just rounded out
our grade book flexibility use case.
Is there anything that we need
to highlight there in the chat, Scott?
Scott: There is one from Jen and I posted the response,
but it's something that may need
a little bit more explanation verbally.
But to Jen's question about having
grad and undergrad students in the same course
that possibly have different assignments,
Danielle talked about the really robust set
of release conditions, and what you can do is
configure assignments that maybe
are only for those grad students,
apply release conditions to that so that they only see it,
but then in the grade book,
students only see assignments that are available to them.
So if the undergrad students
don't have that extra assignment,
they'll never see in the grade book that it exists.
And then you would just do a calculation
in the grade book formula to say, you know,
take all of these assignments and exclude
if they're not visible.
So absolutely, there's ways to do it.
Release conditions will be the backbone
of being able to deliver separate grading schemes
for different groups of students within the same course.
And while I'm off mute, I'll just mention it,
Erica, yes, you can drop the lowest.
So when you're configuring categories
like Danielle has here,
like assignments and quizzes and discussions,
you group those together,
you can just drop X number of assignments
from that calculation.
Do you just want me to keep going Daniel?
-: I was happy to take Susan Marie's question,
because I did see contract grading in the use cases.
And so I'll talk through the flexibility of that mastery
or competency-based education model in Brightspace.
But then I would love to hear from Susan Marie
or your colleagues around what you would define
as contract grading so we can talk through
how we would specifically support that.
But competency management within Brightspace
is really something that we have been doing for many years,
because we knew it was going to be
an important part of delivery,
educational delivery for the future.
And so understanding that students can learn
from a competency-based structure,
rather than more of a traditional learning model.
And so we can associate learning objectives
at the institution level, at the program level,
at the course level and tie that
to learning activities throughout the system.
So we can associate it with a rubric,
with an assignment, a quiz question
at its most granular level.
Even a grade item, if you hit a certain threshold,
could launch the mastery of that competency
or learning objective in the system.
And so we can even tie that to awards
if you really wanted to add that gamification
or that evidence-based learning
towards their lifelong learning.
And we do have that flexibility as well.
And definitely not too in the weeds.
I love talking about competency-based education,
so I loved the question,
but you said you have people using specs grading
where students earn a semester grade
by doing different numbers
of different types of assessments.
Fantastic.
So if it's manually granted whether the student
in terms of you as the faculty member
are granting whether they are getting
their final pass of the course,
based on how you're seeing their progressing
or performing in those different assessments,
you can absolutely do that grade book structure
where you would manually trigger that learning outcome
to actually be achieved for that student
based on that visual representation of the grade book
summarizing all of their assessments.
And within the assessment or learning path,
let's say you wanted to start with assignments,
and if they perform fantastically, they get that pass,
but if they don't perform fantastic,
you want to actually release a quiz to them
as an alternate method of that assessment for that topic,
you could absolutely use our release conditions to do so.
Assignments are pass/fail,
semester grade depends on number of completed
in different categories.
Absolutely, so you could set up different categories
related to the outcomes that you are hoping
the students are to accomplish,
and then have the assignments tied to a grade item
that is leveraging a pass/fail scheme.
Absolutely possible.
Okay.
So I did mention I was going to pause the last use case
in our grading section.
As an instructor, I want to accept multiple file types,
annotate and grade student assignments.
And I did tease this from the widget,
but the Quick Eval widget that I showcased
at the very beginning
highlighting those students' submissions,
that has a full tool suite that I'm gonna jump into
in a couple of minutes.
But I did just want to speak through
that our Assignment tool within the course experience,
you can download all the students' submissions,
annotate within MS Word or Microsoft Word, for example,
and then re upload them,
maintaining that annotated feedback.
So students could download that attachment
and see that annotated feedback.
So just to give a little check mark to that use case,
I wanted to say that before we leave the course experience.
And then one more item before we leave
that course experience,
I am gonna skip ahead to our keeping track of students.
So as an instructor, I want to be able
to track my student's performance
and clearly see who's at risk of failing.
Specifically, I want to see
when students logged into the course,
what pages they viewed per session
and how long they stayed on each page.
And in order to do that, I'm gonna showcase a tool
that we designed specifically with that feedback in mind.
So that was becoming a theme from our client base,
asking for a tool that displayed that with ease.
And so we designed our Class Progress tool to do just that.
And so this was a bird's-eye view-
We'll let my screen load for a second.
It's thinking on a Friday.
This is a bird's-eye view dashboard
of your students' performance across course metrics
that make sense to display based on our client feedback.
We do have a suite of 10 different metrics
that you can choose to display in this column set,
but I've chosen Content Completed, Objectives,
Quizzing and Grades.
And the power of this is to actually use this dashboard
to then go from the bird's-eye view
to at a quick glance, see who's struggling.
So we can see Michael's not performing too well.
So we can jump into Michael's specific user performance
and get a better idea of how he's progressing
through our content and through our objectives
of the course.
And so if I jump into content
to speak to that specific use case of time spent,
we can see at a glance how much time Michael has spent
in the entirety of the course,
how many topics he's visited,
and even scroll down to see the areas
he hasn't even checked into.
And so if Michael, for instance,
comes into my office hours and says,
"I don't understand why I'm not getting good grades.
I've read all of your content, it's just not working."
I can say, "Well, actually let's tackle a plan,
because I can see that unit three didn't resonate with you.
So let's jump into it."
And so in order to have that educated conversation,
we wanted to give you access to your course data,
but as well, that actionable workflow.
You can hover over his name and send him an email
or instant message directly from here.
So that workflow of going from the bird's eye view
into his granular performance,
and then being able to communicate with him
to actually set up a call or a message
that will better support the remainder
of his learning program.
And this is talking about having a good insight
into your student performance at a glance.
But if we wanted to have certain methods in place
to support that early alert system
or alerting us of students who maybe
aren't performing well out the gate of the content,
I'm gonna use a tool that we call a Intelligent Agents.
And I like to think of Intelligent Agents
as secret agents behind the scenes helping you teach.
And so they're set up as an automated workflow
that you can personalize at scale
that's gonna help you teach
and deliver this learning program
in a way that engages with students
and keeps their performance top of mind.
And so you can see some examples of ones that I've set up.
Maybe we want to have a flag around academic risk.
Maybe we want to understand if the grade goes below 80%,
maybe we want to even congratulate a student
on a good job on a quiz.
But the one I'm gonna jump into today
is actually the low score on a quiz.
And Intelligent Agents need two things in order to work.
They need criteria.
When should I run?
And then they need an action.
What should I do when that criteria is met?
And so you may have guessed it,
but the criteria that you have available to you,
a few different options, but you may have guessed it,
you do have that full suite of release conditions available.
So that extensive 36 item list that you can have
as adoptively or adaptive release,
you can set those conditions on Intelligent Agents.
So the one we've used today for this example
is less than or equal to 60% on a poetry terms quiz.
So this is a quiz I've set up in the course.
I've manually set this threshold
as the one I want to monitor.
And then if any students meet that criteria,
they get less than or equal to 60%,
the action that this agent is gonna take
is to send them an email.
And so you get to personalize this email
using our replace strings for initiating user.
It's gonna put that student's name in that field
and in this hi template.
And so you get to structure that email
in whatever you want, however you want,
including adding quick links to different content pieces,
maybe supplemental resources
that you've adaptively released,
or maybe offering a second shot on that quiz.
And this is really speaking to that student success story
that Greg mentioned at the beginning,
that we wanted to give you a tool set that was scalable,
but still contributed to that overall student success.
It has the ability to engage with students
if they're struggling in certain areas of the course
based on those release conditions.
To take it one step further,
just to highlight one more feature of Intelligent Agents,
we do have a replace string that is used for
what we call auditor,
but what we more commonly see called
as the advisor relationship.
So if you have that set up in the system,
you include this replace string.
This copy of this email is going to go to the advisor
of the initiating student.
So it's a way, again, to connect that success story
to the advisor relationship,
and hopefully manage that student's performance
for the remainder of their course.
So that speaks to that,
that keeping track of students use case.
It's something we've seen our clients
do some pretty powerful things
with this Intelligent Agents tool,
including change their enrollment
to enroll them in a new course.
So if they perform very poorly in this English course,
I'd toggle them over to be enrolled in an English workshop
to help them improve their writing skills and try again.
So the power of what you can do with this tool set
is truly endless.
So I'll pause there and see if there's any questions
we need to tackle related to tracking
and engaging with students
-: There aren't, it's quiet in the chat.
I think you've sufficiently blown everyone's minds.
-: Yeah, the quiet shock that everybody has
at the power of Intelligent Agents.
I love it.
All right, so I wanna move to the next one,
which is transitioning to a new LMS.
And this one I'll talk to a little bit more verbally.
I don't have a course package handy from UVM
to really showcase this,
but I want to talk to course migration
as a philosophy at Brightspace.
Greg mentioned in his intro about our partnered approach
to implementation,
and from my experience in implementation,
it really isn't just words that we say.
It's truly a partnered approach,
and in terms of course migration,
we come together jointly in a workshop
to get a sample set of courses that make sense for UVM
and transition them through our bulk tools
to then review together to see how they come across.
And that course migration tool set
that we're bringing the bulk of the courses in through
is proprietarily designed to intake
specific components of Blackboard
and transition them to Brightspace tools.
So you don't lose all of your hard work,
and you're able to hit the ground running
to Donna's question at the very beginning
where you're just rearranging some stuff,
but you don't lose that core suite of course components
that you've worked so hard to build.
And so if anything doesn't come across as expected
in that review session,
we actually go back to our product management team
to improve those course migration tools,
because we want to transition those courses
as best we can from your current LMS.
We hear that that's the biggest anxiety
over change management is that course migration,
so it was a real crucial component
for our implementation teams to support you through.
I will just highlight that if you do have a one-off course,
that you do have the ability within the UI
to import a course package directly here.
We don't limit you for the amount of courses
you can migrate in both through our bulk tools
or through the import course UI.
So I'll pause there just to see if there's any concerns
we want to air around course migration,
or if that speaks to mitigating
some anxieties around course migration.
-: Danielle, were you planning on talking about
the date offsetting in this section, or is that coming up?
-: I can absolutely jump into date setting
if that makes sense.
-: Well, I'll give you a break here and hey,
you've been talking by yourself.
But let me take a little bit and you grab some water.
But for everyone on the call,
one of the questions that we got this morning
and quite often see from faculty
is when you're thinking about
your course in the fall semester
and taking it over to the next semester,
how does the LMS handle dates?
Do I have to manually change all of the dates
on all of my assessments going from semester to semester?
The answer is no.
Brightspace takes care and can bulk offset
all of these dates for you based on the semester schedule,
so you don't have to go in and manually change them all.
Now you do have the ability to, of course,
bulk change them if you would like,
but as a default, the system will do that
automatically for you.
So it is a huge time-saver as you're going
from one semester to the next.
-: Thank you, Greg.
I appreciate that little breather break as well,
but I'll just showcase that tool suite
in our course admin in Manage Dates.
And I would encourage you to ask
your other presentations next week
to really showcase a lot of these workflows
that are important to you,
so you can see it live in the system
and you can see that Brightspace has this granularity
to filter by specific tools that have dates associated
or even bulk offset them or bulk edit.
So you have that full capability,
both at the specific tool level
or bulk in that aggregate way.
Great call-out, Greg.
All right.
So I've been teasing the Quick Eval tool this entire time.
I know we're all sitting on the edge of our seat
waiting to see it.
So I'm gonna head back to our top level homepage
and actually showcase that tool suite.
And this was again, a tool that was designed
with client feedback in mind.
And the ask consistently through our expansive community
of current clients was make my grading and workflows easier.
So we designed the Quick Eval tool to aggregate
all assignments across all of the courses you teach,
all assessment stories,
so inclusive of discussions and quizzes, into one area,
so that repeatable grading can be quite easy for you.
But that might be a daunting list,
so we put these filters in place
so that you can actually tackle a specific course,
maybe a date range or specific activity.
So we'll use our sample course
that we've been editing in so far,
and we'll actually jump into somebody's
actual assignment submission so we can see it in real time.
And so this is gonna bring us
into the evaluation experience.
And this was an intentional design
for our evaluation experience,
because we wanted to put you submersive
in the actual assessment and give you
a full suite of annotation tools,
while tucking the evaluation and grading components
on this right area.
This is also mobile responsive.
So if I shrink this down again,
you'll notice my rubric and grading components
are in this nice tray here,
but I can simply minimize and annotate from my iPad
and even phone if you really wanted to squint a little bit.
So we'll go back out into our tray here
to see those grading workflows
in real time and our desktop view.
And so we gave a full suite of annotation tools here
where we can highlight the text, for example.
Even add in a post-it note.
We'll do an X, awkward paragraph.
If we can spell today.
Tell Marcus to improve his wording.
We can even put in arrows here directly into the document,
lots of flexibility to annotate inline.
And the power of this is the student
is going to see this inline to their feedback.
So they don't have to download it
or see it in an external software.
They can actually see this inline feedback
in their assignment submission area.
And so to speak to the grading
a little bit here on the right,
so we do have a rubric associated with this assignment
and I can simply drop it down,
and it's a simple point and click
to actually see the different scores available
for this rubric.
And you'll notice as I click through,
that the criteria and feedback is actually going to
adapt as we click through.
And this is a way for you in the rubric creation experience
to template feedback.
So you're not consistently copying and pasting
for that feedback based on that score.
And so you have to simply click
and it's going to adapt as you see it.
We also have the overall grade area
that is going to live populate from that rubric scoring
down to the overall grade.
And we have the ability to add some text feedback overall.
That video note tool that I was highlighting
from the content creation,
we also have that tool suite within here
to record audio or video feedback.
I heard of a professor who exclusively
gave video feedback to his students.
He did not write any text in that feedback,
which I found really interesting.
If you had OneDrive documents or Google Drive documents
that you wanted to add in here as well,
you could absolutely do so.
In terms of that repeatable grading model,
if you wanted to save as draft for the student
and simply progress to the next student,
you absolutely could.
And then you could publish them all in bulk.
So you could do it with one click that I'll showcase.
But if you wanted to give Marcus his feedback right away,
you can absolutely publish it from here.
-: Sorry, Danielle, I just want to come in.
So Louis had a question as well, as I believe.
This was something that Donna mentioned right off the top
was around grading with a stylus.
And I do wanna highlight this,
because this is a really important call-out
in comparison to other LMS platforms.
When Danielle showed you and shrunk the screen down
to that mobile experience,
that is not to be understated here.
LMSs can be sometimes be quote, unquote
mobily responsive, or certain pages can be,
but when you get to that evaluation experience, it's not.
Because Brightspace is, it allows you to do that annotation
straight on an iPad with a stylus.
I've done this before.
I've tested it myself multiple times.
It absolutely works full functionality with a stylus.
So you have that capability there.
You would not run into problems with using a stylus
on a tablet with Brightspace.
-: Great call-out.
Yeah, mobile grading can be truly mobile in that case.
Scott: Sorry, I just wanted to add on to that
because it is such a great component.
Yeah, so Surface absolutely.
Apple Pen, Surface Pen, they'll all work.
Any stylus is fine.
But to talk about that grading experience on mobile,
we've actually recently updated our interface
as of a few months ago,
to improve the mobile experience when grading.
And so actually the screen that Danielle showed you before,
the rubric and things like that
actually go into a really nice system tray
at the bottom on your phone
so you get full access to student's document,
or you can mark it up and highlight and everything.
And then if you want to get to the rubric,
it's one click, it's out of your way,
but really easy to access.
So you can click through the rubric, all thumb navigation.
You can record video, type in comments,
and you have that full interface,
but optimized for mobile experience.
-: Absolutely.
So before I leave my Quick Eval tool,
I just wanted to finish that story
about being able to publish all the feedback in bulk.
So if I've saved multiple assignments as draft,
with one click here from my Activities view,
I can publish all of those evaluations.
And so this is just a different view
to showcase in a more dashboard approach
of all of your assessments within all of your courses.
And so this tool was specifically designed
with client feedback in mind,
we made that consistent experience
in discussions as well as quizzes,
so you can jump into that evaluation experience
directly from Quick Eval.
-: And the one other thing that'll call out
just about this tool that really does make it unique
and stand out is, in other LMS platforms,
you will see tools that are similar to this,
but the difference is whereas this aggregates
all courses and all assessments
and allows you to filter straight from the tool,
in other platforms, it is tool-specific.
So you need to go into your course,
you need to go into the specific assessment
and then get to this tool.
So it's a lot of jumping back and forth,
it's a lot of extra clicks and can be time-consuming,
especially when you start to consider the fact
of like, when you're teaching multiple sections
and you've got to go into each individual section
to do this grading.
With this tool being right at the top,
you've got everything right here one-stop shop.
You're not having to jump around,
which saves a ton of time
when you're doing these assessments at midterms or finals.
-: Great call-out, Greg.
Appreciate that.
And I'm really reinforcing the message behind this tool set.
So that does bring me to the end of my primary use cases.
The team had separated it into a list
of secondary resource or secondary use cases
that if we have time permitting, we would show.
I know that we are still within our time,
so I'm happy to open questions first
and then toggle into those secondary use cases.
We did have an option this morning, or sorry,
a question this morning asking about
the student view and the student experience,
so I'm happy to showcase that as well
if that's a priority for folks.
So I'll pause there.
-: I do have something from the chat
that actually fits into the secondary priorities,
and that's things like multi-section courses
and managing multiple different groups of students.
And actually this is driven from one of Lubin's questions
about having two separate labs in the same course
and structuring different due dates.
And so within Brightspace,
it's actually really core to our tool set
to be able to allow you to manage
multiple groups of students,
multiple sections of students,
and teach all from the same course.
So if we, you know, use Lubin's example as one option,
you can actually define different groups of students
within that course, use the same course,
use the same assignments
and just structure different due dates
for the separate groups.
And that holds true for sections as well.
So if you were teaching three or four sections
all from the same course,
you can centrally manage your content
and your assignments and everything,
but using those really robust release conditions,
you can deliver different due dates for each section
or even completely separate assignments
for different sections.
You can have unique announcements
go out to different sections in groups.
So whenever we're looking at sub rosters of students,
the release conditions in Brightspace really help you
take that course to the next level
and provide really unique experiences,
but manage it all from one central location.
I did touch a little bit on the secondary priority,
but also I think I'll speak a little bit to
one of the questions in the chat.
-: No, I love it.
We got lots of questions this morning around sections,
so I think it's a valuable call-out as well.
And I love Jane's enthusiasm around the student experience,
so I definitely will toggle in to that.
I did actually notice that I lied to you folks
and didn't finish my use cases there.
I had one more on MS Teams
that we didn't fully articulate there.
So I highlighted the widget on the course experience
to launch a Teams meeting,
but we do have a bit more of a robust connection
with our MS Teams integration.
And that's a little bit more of a feature suite
around the course experience and creating a Teams space.
So not just a Teams meeting,
but I'll toggle over into this clickable path here.
This is gonna showcase a widget
on an example of a course here,
and I'm only using this 'cause I don't have access
to your actual Teams space,
but I can create a course team,
even set whether learners can create a private channel.
And it's going to allow me to open a team space.
And so right from within the course,
and even from within a section or group,
I could create these specialized Teams areas
that would include an access
back to that Brightspace course.
So a really powerful way to integrate
both of these platforms
and showcase a platform that you folks
are comfortable using
and how it can be seamlessly integrated into your LMS.
All right.
I did just see-
Oh, Alex Wild, what a great question
that's topical to teams.
So wherever you are creating this team space,
it's going to collect all of the classlists in that area.
So if you wanted to do it from the section or group level
or make it visible to those, you absolutely could,
or you could do it at the full classlist
if you had one single roster.
And then before I toggle into the student experience,
I just saw Lubin's question about
creating some exam questions
to show the type of questions available.
So before I toggle over into impersonating a student,
I'm happy to showcase that quiz example.
So you don't have to remind me, Scott.
I beat you to it.
-: (laughs) Thanks.
I'll take it off my list.
-: Perfect, okay, so I'm gonna jump into
an existing quiz here so we can add
or edit existing questions.
And so from here in that add or edit area,
I can add a new question,
including this full suite of question types.
And so this is where we call it the Quizzes tool,
but you could rename it as the Exam tool
if you see that more applicable.
We have very flexible language management
within the system.
And Lubin, if there's any particular like,
particular question type that you were curious about,
happy to showcase that.
-: While we're waiting, if there's anything from the chat,
the one thing I'll note is this morning,
we had some questions around being able to attach a file
or have a user be able to attach a file
and kind of like an essay style response question.
When you see that written response,
which I believe is fourth from the top,
that allows you to leverage not only the HTML editor
that we've shown throughout the platform,
but also allows users to attach documents there
that they can then upload as part of their response.
So you do have that quiz type there,
even though the naming convention
is probably a little different than
what you're used to in Blackboard.
-: Thanks, Greg.
And I'm just answering Jane's question
to showcase that import menu
where you could upload a file of questions,
browse the question library
that you have permission to access,
or even import from our learning repository,
which can be set up to be a shared area of resources
that is searchable.
So a few different functionalities there
for pulling in quiz questions.
All right, so we're gonna head into the student experience.
To do so, I'm gonna leverage
our impersonation functionality,
which allows you to jump into a specific student session.
And so I could toggle into View As,
but if we wanted to see student data in real time,
I want to actually leverage an existing student.
So I'm gonna jump into impersonating Amy's experience.
So I'm now participating in Brightspace via Amy,
and what you'll notice, it's very consistent
to that instructor view that I was in previously.
And so we wanted to make sure the UI
and the look and feel of Brightspace
was consistent across roles,
with the added benefit of adding permissions to each role
to guide that experience through Brightspace.
So if I head into Modules here as Amy,
we can see that Amy was just leaving off
on unit one in her learning,
so it's gonna bring her back to that same place
she was working in.
If I wanted to actually see some content pieces
that are in unit one, I can jump into Poetry Terms.
I can see this as an interactive HTML page here
that has been designed.
I can progress to the next page in my content,
use my breadcrumbs trail to get back,
or even that tray here if I wanted to navigate
around the course.
If I keep progressing on to the next content piece,
we'll note that we have a PowerPoint leveraged in line here
so I don't have to download it anywhere,
and I can continue on.
Now I have a PDF document and I want to click through
until we get to an assessment here.
I know there's one in this unit one.
And what this is gonna showcase is that
linear learning model.
So I've just clicked through some content pieces,
and now I have the option to start a quiz.
And so that linear learning model
is gonna support that student navigation
of easy navigation through the path,
that means they take in all of the course components
you've designed them to take in.
Where they don't miss things,
there's no chance they have to click around
to different places in order to get it all.
It's one single and seamless click through.
-: And this is unique to Brightspace in particular.
So how many times have you as a faculty member,
like I know my faculty members used to do this all the time
when I was in university,
where they would go in and they'd say,
"Okay, you've got this assignment due this week
or this quiz that's due for this particular unit."
And they actually have to put an announcement out
and link that particular assessment in the announcement
so that the student knows where to find it,
because if they don't click into the Quizzing tool
or the Assignment tool specifically,
it's not within this content area specifically,
and they get lost.
With this linear learning path as Danielle just showcased,
it eliminates that.
Students are not missing it because all of the assessments,
as well as all of the content are right within
that one module for them.
So it's really, really easy for them to navigate,
and it talks back to that student experience.
You not having to worry and do as much work,
and the student's not asking you as many questions
about what might be upcoming
or what do I need to be doing for this particular class?
-: Great call-out and great summary, Greg.
We did have a question in our morning session
around what does the grade book look like to students?
And I want to showcase two tools
that really highlight data access to the student.
So we want to give students autonomy
over their own performance to be able to check in.
So the first stop is I'll highlight
the Class Progress tool has a User Progress view,
which I showcased.
We jumped into Michael's performance.
But Amy can jump into her own performance
and understand how she's progressing
and performing across the course.
And so she can see all of the summary in detail here.
If this was at the top level, the organizational level,
Amy would see all of her courses listed
and could click through them
to see the individual performance of each of her courses.
I'll then jump into the actual grade book
so we can see how that looks as a whole here.
And so I now have this grade book,
including the ability to view that inline annotated feedback
from our Quick Eval experience,
or a graded rubric that I can simply click
and it will pop out that rubric.
So I can see the evaluated criteria
as well as the feedback that's been dropped in there.
A really nice view.
Again, you have the flexibility as faculty
to decide what you want to give students access to
in terms of their grade book view,
but I wanted to showcase one that has
quite a few items in here
that showcases that more robust grade book.
I'm going to show one more thing
from the student perspective.
It's another widget that we designed
as a specific ask to student needs in the industry,
as well as our current client base.
And that was at that top level.
The ask was give me one area that I can see
all of my to-do's across all of my courses.
Now Amy is very on top of her work,
so she only has one item to do in her one course.
But if she was enrolled in 20 different courses,
had assessments in all of them,
they would all be listed here for that date range
of the next week.
If there was overdue items,
they would be highlighted as well in their own section
so she can keep track of what's overdue.
We could leverage this as the front and center
widget for students.
As they log into the environment,
they would quickly be able to tackle their items to do,
so they're more likely to stay on top
of all that they have to do across all of their courses
in one simple view.
All right, I'll pause there and see
if there's any comments or questions
around the student experience in Brightspace.
All right, so I'm gonna open the floor
to an open set of questions.
The welcome center-
Great question, Alex, before I open the floor.
The welcome center is launching a bit of a prompt tutorial
around how to navigate through Brightspace.
This is just an example of a content piece
you could drop here.
This is part of a widget,
our learning creative services team designed.
But if you wanted to leverage something
that makes sense for UVM's welcome
or introductory materials to your users in Brightspace,
you could simply drop that into
where this widget stores content
and have it leveraged for those users.
So it's a good first initial view
for students navigating Brightspace
that will also say that you have the ability
to set whether it gets prompted
as that pop-up for students when they first log in,
or if you don't want to use it at all.
It's an optional tool.
-: I think it speaks though to the customization
that you can do with those widgets.
So if you're thinking about the fall semester as an example,
and maybe student orientation,
and there needing to be a component of that within the LMS
just to get them familiar and kind of oriented
with how to get around the system
or where they should be going first day,
that could be a really good area to engage those students
and just kind of get them all headed in the right direction
before the first week kicks off.
-: And to tackle Justin's question there.
So we do have instant message within the platform
as a tool suite,
but in terms of more that like real time communication,
I've seen clients and you can see in my environment,
I've leveraged announcements.
You can also reference discussions
and link it to an announcement as a way
to communicate with your learners,
as well as those Intelligent Agents,
who are gonna send those personalized emails
out to students,
complimenting your ability to manually email your classlist
or individual students.
With that Office 365 integration,
if that is the tool suite that your campus at UVM uses
and Outlook, for example,
is your main method of communication for email,
we would integrate that and make that
your primary email method within Brightspace.
Scott: Danielle, I wonder if it would be worth
showing maybe like in class progress again,
or in the evaluation tools,
how to quickly get into email and instant message?
And then there was a question, I apologize,
we had missed this before about
showing off the help resources
and maybe Greg could speak a little bit
to some of those components as well.
-: Oh, I'm still impersonating Amy.
She can't email or instant message herself.
(laughs)
Okay, we'll jump into Michael's experience here.
And so from here I could email or instant message
just to show that a launching off point
from student data to communication.
-: It can also eat-
Sorry, go ahead, Scott.
Scott: No, no, go ahead.
So within the Grades tool,
you could also email in bulk as well,
and there's a few other areas within the classlists
that you can leverage that email functionality.
So wherever we put that student information for you,
we've added that benefit in the UI
of prompting you to be able to communicate
with your students via email.
-: Okay, on help resources.
So Danielle, if you wouldn't mind,
just like opening up that dropdown menu,
just don't click on anything just yet.
Okay, so within help resources,
there are kind of a few different avenues
that we can look at.
Probably the most common one that I'll see
and that you will have access to is video tutorials.
So not only are there open videos
that you can access on YouTube,
and you could go and search those today if you'd like
and learn about the platform,
but there is something that our training team
gives you access to as soon as the implementation kicks off
called guided training.
And what guided training is,
is it's a containing folder of self-paced resources
that walk you through all of the common tool sets
that you use as faculty members.
Start at the basics, and then gradually
just build from there.
They're resources that you can go in
as part of our community and reference them at any point.
And as part of this kind of evaluation and review process,
if it makes sense, we're more than happy
to kind of showcase a little bit more
of what that looks like,
but I will leave it to the UVM procurement office
and administrative team for that information
if it's desired.
Beyond that, of course,
what you also have access to is the community,
which is a series of kind of forums
and collaborative efforts across institutions,
as well as D2L staff members,
that you can go in, search particular topics,
read about stuff, get helpful resources
from either other institutions or the D2L team here.
And then following that in terms of technical support,
of course you have access to
your own internal IT departments
and support networks at UVM,
but they also have access to the D2L support team
that can help with ticketing escalations
and making sure that if there's anything going on
with the course, we're on it,
we're gonna work with you and the UVM team
to make sure that those are taken care of.
Does that help kind of answer questions about support
and what that looks like and what resources are available?
Okay, great.
-: Fantastic.
So I did see Eric has a question about annotations,
so that is best leveraged within that Quick Eval tool
to actually jump into the Annotation tool
within assignments.
So I'll just pop that on the screen one more time
so we can see that experience.
If that third-party software that you mentioned,
Perusall, I like that name.
If it is LTI based, once again,
we are a standards-based platform,
so then we could have that integrated.
If that integration does support annotations
within Brightspace, we could support it.
Oh, and Scott already answered that.
I apologize, I did not see that.
-: That's okay.
It's a little bit different
than annotating on an assignment.
It's more about like collaborative learning environments
for students where they can go in and read
and make comments and posts to each other.
And I shared a link to our integration with that.
So obviously you could use Perusall
for that type of environment.
And we have seen Teams used in that same type of space
or even OneDrive where students can post files
and make comments and share threads and things like that
on their material.
So lots of different integration points
to be able to build that kind of community
of learning for students.
-: Alex, that's a really good question
that I don't actually know the answer to.
Scott: The answer is not yet.
(laughs)
Our support team is working on
contextual help alerts all across the platform.
So right now, it's kind of driven by course
and you know, by menu that you're looking at.
We can customize each layer of the menus,
but the support team is currently in development
of getting more of that contextual
inline support right in the platform.
-: Great.
Any other questions as we're in the open question period?
Scott: Sorry, I should also mention (laughs)
with that contextual support,
when you're building out tools, creating assignments,
things like that,
you may have noticed throughout the demo
there's little question marks all over the place,
and those are little contextual support.
So it kind of comes from our FAQ's of,
you know, what is adjusted grade
versus calculated final grade?
Or, you know, what does it mean
to set up a weighted grade book?
So those little alerts and those little question marks
do help with some of that contextual support.
-: And to answer your question Lubin, absolutely.
So you can export your grades and then reimport them
as you see fit.
Scott: Yeah, and you can download the whole grade center
or just an individual column if you'd like,
and then whenever you upload, we'll just basically say,
"What are you uploading?
And do you want to enact these changes on your grade book?
Or do you want to skip anything here?"
-: I knew I didn't have to worry about
engagement with this group.
This has been fantastic so far.
Feel free to keep them coming.
-: Yeah, we do have what?
Give or take about 20 minutes left here,
so anything and everything,
we're more than happy to take.
-: I will, to give you some typing time,
I will also comment in the secondary priorities,
there was a question or a use case
around co-instructors or TAs.
So we don't limit in Brightspace
the amount of roles possible.
You can absolutely create a TA role.
We actually have one as a template out of the box,
and then we have over 500 granular permissions
that your admins typically would associate
with those different roles
and then be added to your course roster.
And so an example I've seen is a specific TA
or a co-instructor might have only one section
that they're responsible for.
So if we explicitly enroll them into that section,
they would only see their roster of students,
even when they toggle into the grade book
or any grading workflows,
they would only have access to those students
in that section.
So really powerful in terms of that granularity
for roles, permissions associated with them
and view of the student information.
Great, I love that feedback, Donna.
That's fantastic.
We love to hear it, 'cause we're so passionate
about how we've designed the system to meet those needs,
to be flexible, but still have that
consistent clean interface.
So I'm glad that resonated.
The only other workflow that I did see
in our secondary use cases that we haven't talked through.
We talked through section management
and I just mentioned that co-instructors and TAs,
but there was a section on sample pedagogical strategies,
and the primary use cases in that area were around
group and peer collaboration.
So within our tool set, you could leverage,
like we've been consistently saying,
if you have that workflow already established in Teams,
you could have that collaboration live within that
interface that I was showcasing where it's a team space
within your roster of students.
But if I jump into our content again,
we do have the flexibility to add in discussions
for peer review.
I did showcase that create a discussion thread
for peer feedback,
but we also do have a tool that is core to our platform
that is called Video Assignments.
And this offers the flexibility to create
an assessment that is video submission-based,
but has the option for peer review.
So it allows you to set up an assignment
that is video-based and have students,
their peers, actually respond inline
where it adds those inline comments throughout the video
and allows you to add that overall feedback
for that assignment.
That's great.
You know, I appreciate that feedback as well.
Course Progress is a huge hit with our institutions
to be able to see all of that
performance information in one area.
-: Lisa, that's an excellent question.
So I mean, as part of the pandemic, and I think,
you know, Scott and Danielle
probably have their own unique perspectives about this,
but the one thing that I really noticed was
there was a greater emphasis on
what the student experience
and student success look like within the LMS,
because there was a lot of added stressors,
and this wasn't just unique to students.
This was specific to faculty as well
that had not learned or taught very much
within a learning management system.
So what some of the tools that really got developed
and looked at and enhanced were
little ways that you might see in social media platforms
or other ways to drive student engagement.
So it might sound simple,
or it might be like little small details,
but stuff like @ notifications within discussions
so you can tag users.
Stuff like emojis and being able to incorporate those
in like virtual classrooms,
being able to incorporate those to show
some sort of expression within announcements
and anywhere where you could really post content.
That is probably in my, I think one of the biggest things
that we really saw was those little tweaks to help
bring a little bit of kind of that
human side to technology,
or showcase a little bit more emotion
rather than it just being a blank screen.
Danielle, Scott, did you kind of have anything to add
or different thoughts?
-: Yeah, I was actually, at the beginning of the pandemic,
still on our implementation side,
and I really saw our current clients
and the ones that were interested in Brightspace
really gravitate towards us
because of our social learning tools.
And that becoming so much more
of a priority in the learning,
where you couldn't just rely on static documents
and the grade book as your main functionality.
You wanted to add social learning in the core tool suite.
And so Brightspace has been doing that even pre-pandemic.
Because our philosophy is to transform
the way the world learns,
we don't want to just offer your standard suite of tools.
We want to give you that,
but be able to take it to the next level
with that social learning.
So incorporating video-based engagement,
incorporating some of those social-based tools
like Greg mentioned, the @ mentions in discussion
and emojis, adding more of that interaction on the widgets
to actually have conversations happen on homepages.
Whereas socially interaction,
socially interacting between instructors, peers,
it was just so much more of an emphasis there.
I actually saw an institution
host conferences within Brightspace,
where it was a fully virtual conference
within our Brightspace platform.
So you can do some pretty powerful things,
even offer clubs and services
within our self-registration area,
where I've actually set it up for you folks,
I was showcasing it to the student workflows,
where if I jump into Discover,
it's going to showcase just some examples
of how you could tie in that social student life component
of campus that you miss when you go virtual,
but actually compliment that in Brightspace.
So you can have information, social tools,
video-based content all within the context
of a club or association.
Great question.
I think that was, was that Lisa?
Great question.
-: I did want to touch on Victoria's question really quickly,
'cause it is such an important one
and a really strong component of Brightspace,
and that's standardization and templating
in course design and course delivery.
So what we allow you to do in Brightspace
is build as many unique templates as you need
for department-specific requirements
and different programs,
even different, you know,
different deliveries of courses like online and hybrid
and things like that.
So you can build all of these templates
that include common elements for really easy navigation
and standardization of student workflows,
but then allow faculty to put their own voice into it
as far as the actual content delivery goes
or the assignments.
But you can also standardize and template
right down to that content and assignment level
so that you could give an adjunct or part-time faculty,
a prebuilt course in a box
with everything they need to teach the course
without them having to know all of these different tools
of how to build things and load in those assessments.
They're ready to go day one.
And I'll add one final component to that,
and that is we've actually built some templates for you
that you can use as an institution.
So part of our instructional design team
work the last little while is helping us build out
these really nice templates
for kind of like basic course usage
to kind of a standard course delivery
and online right to like a more advanced course application.
And we can give you these templates as a starting place.
So you could customize them with your own branding
and change things around based on what we've given you,
and then you can push that template out to everybody.
Because, yeah, Victoria, that is such an important piece.
Students are often frustrated about
every course looking different.
I don't know where to find my things.
I don't know where to get to my resources.
So templating has become so much more important
over the last 18 months,
and again, really core to what we do in our system.
Danielle, there was a question.
I'm not sure, you're still on mute,
just in case you're coming off.
There was a question about recording your screen,
so I'm not sure if we wanted to quickly cover
Virtual Classrooms.
-: Yes, so I'm just gonna toggle over a screenshot
of what that virtual classroom looks like,
just so we can see what it would look like
with students and instructors in it.
But you would have this same interface
if you launched a virtual classroom session.
Right within the tool set in Brightspace,
you can have some webcams on a screen-share,
your similar capabilities of muting and unmuting
with camera and audio,
and then you'd have a chat as well.
So some of those core workflows that we're used to
in a lot of the web conferencing tools.
We do have this out of the box tool set
if you wanted to leverage that.
But we can also, like we've mentioned,
integrate with a lot of those
third-party web conferencing tools as well.
-: Yeah, and I think this really speaks to
Lisa's question about the evolution of Brightspace
during the pandemic.
Tools being used in ways we never thought of,
and the Virtual Classroom tool, as mentioned,
is a core function to the system.
It's not an add-on service.
But what it allows or what we've seen faculty doing
is using this for both synchronous
and asynchronous course delivery.
So as you can see here, with the ability
to share your desktop or share a presentation,
and you can whiteboard on all of this.
What we saw a lot of faculty doing
was using these as sessions with just themselves.
So putting up their PowerPoints or their screen,
doing a lecture capture and recording their voice
as they're going through the presentation,
using the whiteboarding tools to mark that up
and then sharing that recording with students.
So when you're done these sessions,
it's shared as a link within the course,
and you can even download that as an MP4 to upload,
but this tool is really allowing you
to take those virtual lectures
and leverage that right within the platform,
as I mentioned live, or as a prerecorded element
to share with students after.
-: Fantastic.
Any other questions?
Well, I will commend the teams here,
the organization of this committee,
and the folks who were engaged in this call.
It truly was fantastic to see this level of engagement.
It really speaks to how much you care
about your learning delivery.
That was really cool, Scott, to see your applause there.
So I really just have to echo what I said this morning,
that this was fantastic to talk to you folks
and hear all your questions.
-: Thank you so much for your time.
I'm hesitant to leave early,
but it looks like things are quiet.
I know it's Friday
and it is four-
Oh, a new message.
Is it a question?
No, it's a thank you, all right.
I think we can take the cue from our participants
that we are indeed at the end of the presentation.
So again, I just want to thank you folks
for showing up this this afternoon.
It was really wonderful to see the range of questions
and you're really thinking hard about this,
and we do appreciate it.
If you could please just take another
either five minutes right now,
or sometime in the near future and fill out that survey
that's on our blog site, we would appreciate it.
Alex, would you mind putting that in the chat?
Thank you.
And to the D2L team, thank you so much for your patience
with all our questions and answering them so elegantly.
And so thank you for your time.
-: Yeah, absolutely.
And Wendy, Alex, the UVM body and all,
thanks so much for organizing this week.
I know it was probably a lot of work to put together,
but the questions and everything that was asked,
all sessions were great.
We were so happy to be here and we really look forward
to continuing the conversation as the coming weeks follow.
-: Right.
-: Yes, thank you all so much.
-: Have a wonderful weekend, everyone.
And then Greg, you will be sending it back
to Deb Harvey, the list of questions
that you're doing a little bit of additional research,
is that right?
-: Yes, absolutely.
So we'll compile the questions for both the morning
and afternoon session,
and we'll send those over to Deb with our responses, okay?
-: Great.
Thank you so much.
-: All right.
-: Thanks everyone.
Have a great weekend. -: Take care.
-: Thank you.