Brightspace Learning Environment

Discussions – Introducing the new creation and editing experience | Updated

The new discussion creation experience brings create and edit consistency changes from Assignments and Quizzes to Discussions, making it familiar and easy to learn. This first release is at full parity with classic discussions and brings refreshed workflows and improvements to restricting group topics and threads, associating topics to forums, and wording changes to a few settings that you may be familiar with.

Figure: The new Discussions creation and editing experience.

The primary panel on the left contains the same frequently-used fields as Assignments and Quizzes. These fields are most relevant to learners and are core to discussion topic creation. The right-hand panel provides advanced options such as start and end dates and release conditions. These options follow the same logical groupings as found in Assignments and Quizzes. Other topic-specific settings can be found in the right-hand panel.

See the Introducing the New Discussion Creation Experience knowledge article for an in-depth look at all the feature and capability changes with this update.

Important: The default state for the new Discussions experience is OFF. To enable the new Discussions experience, change the value of the configuration variable d2l.Tools.Discuss.CreateExperienceOptIn to ON or Opt-In (Recommended). The Opt-In value allows users to better transition to the new Discussions experience and lets administrators opt in their organization or specific areas. The ON value is recommended if a user is new and starting to use Brightspace.

Technical Details

Impact:

• Slight impact to administrators who can now opt in to the new Discussions experience.

• Large impact to instructors due to a new create and edit discussion experience that they can opt into or out of within a specific course at any given time if enabled by administrators.

Availability:

• This feature is available to all clients.

To enable:

• Change the configuration variable d2l.Tools.Discuss.CreateExperienceOptIn to ON or Opt-In (Recommended). The configuration variable can be enabled at all org unit levels or at the individual org unit level if desired.

Note: The configuration variable default is OFF.

LTI – Improved filtering and troubleshooting functionalities for LTI 1.3 | Updated

To improve administrators’ experience in finding and troubleshooting failed migrations, the filtering functionality is updated on the LTI Advantage page.

This new feature includes the following:

• The new Registration name filter on the LTI Advantage tab and Type filter on the Links page (LTI Advantage > LTI Tool > View Links).

• The updated filter for Status on the Migration Log tab.

The new filter on the LTI Advantage tab helps users with large numbers of deployments, as administrators can select a registration and filter the results by their Registration Names.

Figure: The new filtering option on the LTI Advantage tab.

The Links page now has a consistent filtering interface. With this release, administrators can filter links by Type as well as by Status and Name.

Figure: The new Filter by Type option on the Links page.

To further speed up troubleshooting, the Migration Details section includes shortcuts and the new View Developments link, which helps to find matching deployments. This link takes users straight to the deployments page, filtered by registration.

Figure: The Migration Details section of the Migration Log tab, with shortcuts to the tool deployment page.

Previously, administrators had to copy the deployment name and navigate to the LTI Advantage tab to search for the deployment when troubleshooting.

Technical Details

Impact:

• Slight impact to administrators due to the ability to use the new filtering and troubleshooting options.

Availability:

• This feature is available to all clients.

To enable:

• This functionality is automatically enabled for all users.

Quizzes – Confirmation dialog for learners exiting a quiz | Updated

This feature introduces a confirmation dialog box to learners closing in-progress quizzes. The dialog box is context-based, providing additional information about the impact of exiting the quiz (such as whether a learner will be able to return to their quiz after exiting).

Previously there was no dialog or warning to learners who exited a quiz accidentally or on purpose.

Note: The dialog only appears when the learner selects the X [Close this Quiz] for the quiz. Closing the browser window or tab does not display the confirmation dialog.

This feature implements the following PIE item D7289:

• D7289 (Close/Exit Quiz errors correction)

Figure: The X (Close this Quiz) button appears to a learner attempting a quiz.

The message shown when a student tries to exit a quiz depends on the time limit and end date settings for the quiz.

Figure: The Exit Quiz confirmation dialog for quizzes with no time limit, no end date, or a time limit that expires before the end date.

Figure: The Exit Quiz confirmation dialog for quizzes with a time limit and no end date.

Figure: The Exit Quiz confirmation dialog for quizzes with an end date, no time limit, or an end date that will arrive before the time limit expires.

Figure: The Exit Quiz confirmation dialog for quizzes that have an end date in the past.

Technical Details

Impact:

• Slight impact to learners due to the additional step required to leave a quiz.

Availability:

• This feature is available to all clients.

To enable:

• This functionality is automatically enabled for all users.