Brightspace Learning Environment

Assignments – Consolidate availability dates | Updated

This feature updates the assignment availability dates to be consistent with the new availability date model, which was previously added to Discussions. Instructors can now include availability dates in the Calendar and have greater control over the behavior of availability dates for their learners. As a result, instructors can:

• Stop late submissions.

• Let learners view assignment information and submissions after it ends.

• Schedule the visibility of an assignment.

• Allow learners to view an assignment while preventing them from attempting it.

• Post the start and end of an assignment to the Calendar.

For more details about changes to Assignments, refer to: New Assignments Date Feature - Updated Date Availability, Visibility, and Access Options.

The Assignment list page for both instructors and learners now contain all activity dates and date settings, including:

• Access restricted

• Submission restricted

• Hidden

Instructors can choose the default settings for availability dates for any new assignment. The settings are available on the Availability Date Defaults page, which can be found under Course Admin.

Figure: The Availability Date Defaults page, the Assignment page with activity dates and date settings.

Previously, most Brightspace tools restricted access to assignments outside of availability dates with a manually managed visibility toggle (except the New Content Experiences, which will continue to hide both access restricted and hidden assignments).

This feature implements the following PIE items: D6797, D8173, D8004 (partial), D7195, D4958, D7273, D4900, D4217, D3670, D3153, D2536, D1746, D1672 (partial), D1396, D3398.

Technical Details

Impact:

• Slight impact to administrators due to the ability to enable the new availability date settings.
• Moderate impact to instructors due to the ability to set the new availability date settings.
• Slight impact to learners due to the ability to get more information about assignment availability dates.

Availability:

• This feature is available to all clients.

To enable:

• By default, the config variable d2l.Tools.Dropbox.ConsistentDatesEnabled (OrgUnit) is OFF.
• To use the new availability date settings, the d2l.Tools.Dropbox.ConsistentDatesEnabled (OrgUnit) config variable must be set to ON.

Brightspace Administrative Tools and Configs – Additional control over message alerts now allows hiding of mail and instant messages from message alert | Updated

This feature introduces the new configuration variable d2l.Settings.Navbar.HideMessageAlerts to Brightspace, which allows administrators to either show or hide email message alerts and instant message alerts in the minibar. This can be done separately; for example, users can set the configuration variable to hide email alerts while still showing instant message alerts.

Previously, the configuration variable d2l.Settings.Navbar.HideAlertsForMessages was used to either show all message alerts or hide all message alerts. This configuration variable is removed as part of this release. Administrators who already have this configuration variable turned on will automatically have the replacement configuration variable set to disable both types of alerts to minimize impact.

Figure: An example of the Message Alerts area. Email alerts have been hidden while instant messages are still visible.

Technical Details

Impact:

• Slight impact to administrators due to the change to the configuration variable governing hiding message alerts.

Availability:

• This feature is available to all clients.

To enable:

• This functionality is automatically enabled for all users.

Brightspace Extended Administration – Manage training and engaging learning experiences with decentralized workflows | New

The Brightspace Extended Administration solution is an add-on integration that enables corporate clients to use decentralized workflows to leverage shared resources and create new assets that meet the varied needs of distinct business units that are managed in isolation, such as customer training, associations, distributed internal training across regions, franchises, and other structures with distinct administrators and users, including:

• Deliver and manage learning based on unique needs, branding, and identity.
• Benefit from the improved quality of decentralized learners, course content, and course completion.
• Access to more relevant personalized experiences and learning paths.
• Ability to build and share standardized training and learning paths across all affiliated organizations or within specific affiliated organizations
• Additional decentralization within each affiliated organization in a way that makes sense for their corporate training and learning goals.

Decentralized workflows include:

• Affiliated Org User Management, Org Course Management, and Org Enrollment Management
• Affiliated Org Portals
• Course Catalogs
• Learning Paths
• Self-Registration
• E-commerce
• Reporting

For more information, refer to:

• Learners – The Genius SIS Help Knowledge Base
• Administrators – The Genius SIS Help Knowledge Base
• Reference Guide – The Genius SIS Help Knowledge Base
• Release Notes – The Genius SIS Help Knowledge Base
• API and Data Dictionary – The Genius SIS Help Knowledge Base

Technical Details

Impact:

• Slight impact to administrators due to the ability to create decentralized workflows for business units in their enterprise.

Availability:

• This feature is an add-on integration available to Corporate Core Brightspace clients who have purchased Brightspace Extended Administration.
• Brightspace Extended Administration is only available in American English (en-US), Spanish (es-MX), and Portuguese (br-PT).

To enable:

• Contact your D2L Client Sales executive to purchase Brightspace Extended Administration solution.

Data Hub – Added columns to Brightspace Data Sets for Assignments | Updated

This release adds new columns to the Assignment Summary and Assignment Special Access Brightspace Data Sets. The following columns are now included in both data sets:

• StartDateAvailabilityType: determines whether learners can view or access the assignment before its start date.

• EndDateAvailabilityType: determines whether learners can view or access the assignment after its end date.

Regarding historical data, the new columns in Assignment Summary have a default value of 0 (meaning 'access restricted') for all assignments with availability dates created before December 2022. There is no historical data available for Assignment Special Access. Users who wish to identify the date type for special access dates can pull that data from the parent assignment.

The Learner Usage Advanced Data Set respects the new date settings on assignments when calculating the Content Required and Content Completed column values.

Technical Details

Impact:

• Moderate impact to administrators due to the addition of a new column to an existing Brightspace Data Set.

Availability:

• This feature is available to all clients.

To enable:

• Ensure the Can Access Brightspace Data Sets permission is granted to administrators at the org level. Ensure the d2l.Tools.BrightspaceDataSets.Version configuration variable is set to version 7. New and changed data sets appear the first time the data set runs after the version update.

Discussions – Improved discussion topic creation and edit workflows in the New Content Experience | Updated

Instructors working with the New Content Experience (Lessons) can use an improved create and edit experience for topics in Discussions. Instructors have an updated create and edit page where they can edit additional information for discussion topics. This update aligns the process more closely to how users edit other activities in Content.

During the creation or editing of a discussion topic in the New Content Experience, users can modify the:

• Topic association to a forum

• Title

• Description

• Grade Out Of

• Start Date

• End Date

• Release Conditions

• Visibility

Figure: Before and after comparison of creating a new Discussions topic in the New Content Experience (Lessons).

Figure: Before and after comparison of editing an existing Discussions topic in the New Content Experience (Lessons).

Technical Details

Impact:

• Slight impact to instructors as there is an updated interface with new options available to them.

Availability:

• This feature is available to all clients using the New Content Experience (Lessons).

To enable:

• Instructors must have the New Content Experience enabled. To enable the new Discussions create and edit experience, the config variable d2l.Tools.Content.LessonsCreateExperienceOptIn must be set to ON or ON (OPT-IN).

Discussions – Reach every learner with the introduction of ReadSpeaker text-to-speech technology | New

To extend the text-to-speech support in Brightspace, ReadSpeaker is now available in Discussions.

Figure: The ReadSpeaker player is integrated into the Discussions Tool.

Technical Details

Impact:

• Slight impact to users who can now use ReadSpeaker in Discussions.

Availability:

• This feature is available to all clients who have already purchased ReadSpeaker as an add-on tool and have set it up in their Brightspace environment.

To enable:

• This functionality is automatically enabled for all ReadSpeaker users. For more information, see Turn on and configure the ReadSpeaker HTML content integration in Brightspace Learning Environment.

Intelligent Agents – Improved consistency with the removal of legacy scheduling options | Removed

Building on the Intelligent Agents – Create Agent page facilitates more flexible scheduling and frequency options | Updated feature released in April 2022 / Version 20.22.4, this feature cleans up the Intelligent Agent scheduling interface by removing the unused Scheduled Agents Run Time area from the Intelligent Agents Settings page. This also entails the removal of the unused d2l.Tools.IntelligentAgents.PreferredRunHour configuration variable.

If a client has a course export package containing Intelligent Agents that was created prior to the 20.22.4 release, those agents are now imported without a schedule. Previously, these agents' schedules were supported based on the PreferredRunHour configuration.

Technical Details

Impact:

• Slight impact to administrators and instructors due to the removal of the Schedule Agent Run Time option.

Availability:

• This feature is available to all clients.

To enable:

• This functionality is automatically enabled for all users.

Lessons – The new create and edit experience for activities is now the default in New Content Experience (Lessons) | Updated

The new experience for creating and editing content topics and modules with the New Content Experience (Lessons) is now the default for all instructors. The option for instructors to opt out of the new create and edit experience for activities is removed and any instructor who previously opted out will now see the new experience.

Optionally, the config variable d2l.Tools.Content.LessonsCreateExperienceOptIn can be overridden with this update if users do not want to adopt this experience or wish for instructors to have the option to opt out.

Technical Details

Impact:

• Slight impact to administrators due to the default changing for the config variable d2l.Tools.Content.LessonsCreateExperienceOptIn to ON.
• Moderate impact to instructors who may not have yet used the new create and edit experience for topics and modules.

Availability:

• This feature is available to all clients using the New Content Experience (Lessons).

To enable:

• This functionality is automatically enabled for all users. Optionally, the config variable d2l.Tools.Content.LessonsCreateExperienceOptIn can be changed to OFF if users do not want to adopt the experience or to ON (OPT-IN) if users wish for instructors to opt out of the new experience.

LTI Migration – Enable or disable LTI Advantage migration using Auto Migrate Links toggle | Updated

A new Auto Migrate Links toggle is available on the LTI Deployment page which administrators can use to control which legacy LTI tool links automatically migrate to LTI Advantage. This allows administrators to have both legacy LTI and LTI Advantage links in the same course and to copy that course without migrating the legacy LTI links.

The toggle is OFF by default for new and existing deployments. This allows administrators to set up and fully test LTI Advantage tool deployments before migrating them. When an administrator switches the toggle to ON, legacy LTI tool links available to a course automatically attempt to migrate to LTI Advantage when the administrator copies that course using Import/Export/Copy Components (course copy migration) or clicks Migrate on the External Learning Tools page (button migration).

Previously, the only way to prevent a deployed LTI tool from being migrated was to not share the tool with any courses, or by disabling the deployment.

For more information about D2L's migration plan, refer to Brightspace Legacy LTI to LTI Advantage Migration Plan.

Figure: Auto Migrate Links toggle on the LTI Deployment page.

Technical Details

Impact:

• Large impact to administrators due to the ability to opt in to automatic migration.

Availability:

• This feature is available to all clients.

To enable:

• Users must have the External Learning Tools > Manage LTI Migrations permissions to use this functionality.

Quicklinks – Easily find audio-video content with improved Quicklink filters | New

To help users more easily find Media Library content, users can now use improved Brightspace Editor Insert Quicklink filters to better locate content available in Media Library. These new filters include:

• Ownership: Filter by the owner of the audio-video (AV) content (administrator only).
  
  Note: The owner of AV content is the person who initially uploaded or added the content.
   

• Content Type: Filter by either audio or video content type.

• Source: Filter by where content was added from. Multiple filters can be selected:

  • Content: Filter by AV content uploaded from the Content tool and Lessons.

  • Media Library: Filter by AV content uploaded or created in Media Library.

  • Audio or Video Note: Filter by content created using Audio and Video Note.

  • Capture App: Filter by content created and published using the Capture App.
    
    Note: The Capture App is accessible when using Create Presentation in Media Library and is only available as part of Creator+.
     

  • Imported: Filter by content added from course imports.

  • Other: Filter by content added prior to the addition of source tracking.

• Date Modified: Filter by date modified. This changes to Date Deleted on the Recycle Bin screen.

• Date Created

Previously, the Insert Quicklink feature included in Brightspace Editor did not provide the ability to filter Medial Library content.

Figure: The new filter options included with the Insert Quicklink feature of Brightspace Editor.

Technical Details

Impact:

• Slight impact to users due to the ability to locate and insert Media Library content Quicklinks using Brightspace Editor more easily.

Availability:

• This feature is available to all clients.

To enable:

• Users must have the following Media Library permissions granted:

  • Content Service > Can Access Media Library Management Tool

  • Content Service > Can Manage Objects (instructors) or Content Service > Can Manage All Objects (administrators)

Quizzes – New create and edit experience is set to On (Opt-in) | Updated

To encourage adoption of the new quiz creation experience introduced in the June 2022 / Version 20.22.6 release, the new quiz creation experience is set to ON (opt-in) for all users who currently have the experience set to OFF. Administrators can override this setting and set the d2l.Tools.Quizzes.CreateExperienceOptIn configuration variable to OFF as needed.

Previously, d2l.Tools.Quizzes.CreateExperienceOptIn was set to OFF by default.

Note: The display in calendar functionality for availability dates remains temporarily absent from the new quiz creation experience. Availability (Start/End) Dates does not appear in the calendar by default but can be added to the calendar by using the Manage Dates tool.

Technical Details

Impact:

• Slight impact to all users currently using the classic quiz creation experience due to the change of the configuration status.

Availability:

• This feature is available to all clients.

To enable:

• This functionality is automatically enabled for all users.

Rubrics – Removal of legacy Rubric assessment type for learning objectives associated with quizzes | Updated

When you create a new quiz that has an associated learning objective, the Assessment Type drop-down menu no longer includes the Rubrics assessment type. Using the quiz assessment in this manner previously caused an error because it is not a supported workflow. This change ensures that users creating quiz assessments with learning objectives can no longer mistakenly use that worklflow. The Numeric assessment type continues to function normally.

Figure: The previous Assessment Type menu, with Numeric and Rubric options.

Figure: The new Manage Quizzes page, without the Rubric assessment type option.

Technical Details

Impact:

• Slight impact due to the removal of the legacy assessment type.

Availability:

• This feature is available to all clients using Learning Outcomes to assess quizzes.

To enable:

• This functionality is automatically enabled for all users.