Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

June 2019 highlights

Posted by Donna Swanson

D2L Brightspace 20.19.06 updates for June 2019

The updates are scheduled to be installed on June 27th.  This month’s updates/changes are:

• Discussions – Save feedback in draft state when using rubrics
• Rubric Scores – Consistent assessment experience
• User Progress  – Consistent tracking of student process across Brightspace

Discussions – Save feedback in draft state when using rubrics:

This feature provides instructors the option to save feedback as a draft on discussions associated with rubrics before publishing it to learners. Now, when instructors add feedback for discussions with rubrics, the Save Draft and Publish buttons display. This feature extends existing Save Draft and Publish options available in other assessment tools to discussions that are only associated with a rubric.

Note that if a discussion topic is associated with more than one rubric, then both the rubrics are now visible in the same pop-up dialogue. Previously, the rubrics had to be opened individually to complete evaluation.

Rubric Scores – Consistent assessment experience:

When you use the updated rubrics grading experience with Discussions, the following workflows present the same assessment experience:

• if a rubric is attached to a discussion that is not associated with a grade item
• if a rubric is attached to a discussion and associated with a grade item, but you will click on the rubric name to assess instead of topic score

In these workflows, the same assessment screen displays, with the details, score, feedback, post information, and all rubrics available to grade.

User Progress  – Consistent tracking of student process across Brightspace:

In the past, different tools and features within Brightspace Learning Environment used different logic for determining user progress through Content topics. Now, the logic has been updated/c so that it is calculated in the same way across the platform.

Content must meet three criteria to be included in the user progress:

• The learner must have access to the content
• The content must be marked with a completion method of Required Automatic or Required Manual
• The content is not exempt

When content does not meet these conditions, the topics are not included in the calculation of the learner’s progress.

These changes affect the following areas of the Brightspace Platform:

• Class Progress has a new Content Completed graph to represent completed content. The current content-related column is being renamed from Content to Content Visited.
• The Content sections of the User Progress tool have several changes:

• • In the Content section of the Summary page and in the Content detail page, the Visits graph is being replaced by the Content Completed graph.
  • The progress on a module now reflects the number of completed and required topics in all levels below the module. Previously, the module progress reflected the number of completed topics immediately inside the module and the number of completed sub-modules. The new progress percentage and number is an actual reflection of how far the learner has progressed through the module.
  • The Topics Visited statistics on the left side of the page now include a denominator. The data represents the number of unique topics that the user visited. The denominator indicates the total number of topics that the student can access. In addition, the #Visits column is now renamed to Total Visits.