Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

April 2022 Highlights

Posted by Donna Swanson | Start the discussion

D2L Brightspace updates for Thursday, April 2022 – This will be installed on Thursday, April 28th, 2022

This month’s updates for D2l Brightspace Include:

• Brightspace Editor – Advanced code editor visual update and accessibility improvements | Updated
• Group/Section Management – Asynchronous Group Creation | New
• Intelligent Agents – Create Agent page facilitates more flexible scheduling and frequency options | Updated

Brightspace Editor – Advanced code editor visual update and accessibility improvements | Updated

Minor visual updates made to the advanced code editor in Brightspace increase the readability of tags and text in the advanced code editor and place the Save and Cancel buttons in consistent locations. Improved compatibility with screen reader technology is also included in this feature.

Previously, certain screen readers in specific form settings were unable to access or read from the advanced code editor.

This feature makes no changes to the functionality or workflows associated with the advanced code editor.

Brightspace Editor – Advanced code editor visual update and accessibility improvements | Updated

This feature moves group creation and enrollment to background task, minimizing risk of timeouts when creating large numbers of groups requiring enrollments.

When instructors create and save a new group category, the Groups tool displays the category and prompts instructors that their group or groups are being created in the background; further, it indicates that the instructor will be notified once the groups are created. The instructor who created the group receives a subscription alert in the minibar that indicates that the groups for their courses have been created.

While this is in process, the Brightspace UI indicates that “Group creation is in progress”. While processing, users are unable to make changes to groups or enrollments.

To facilitate these changes, and the potential for allowing clients to make much larger numbers of groups in a category, this feature introduces pagination to the Groups tool, that limits each page to a maximum of 200 groups. In addition, the header row for the category has been moved to above the grid and the Delete and Email options are added to the Category dropdown menu.

Intelligent Agents – Create Agent page facilitates more flexible scheduling and frequency options | Updated

Building on the Intelligent Agents – Agent List page changes | Updated feature released in February 2022/20.22.2, this feature changes the Intelligent Agents Create Agent page to facilitate additional scheduling options and frequency options to allow for improved flexibility.

The changes to the Create Agent page include:

• A modernized user interface. This is a visual upgrade and does not impact functionality.
• Scheduling options have been moved to the top of the page.
• The ability to expand/collapse each section on the agent creation page (Scheduling, Criteria, Actions) to improve usability.
• Two new agent frequency options:
  • One-Time Run allows instructors to choose a single date and time to run.
  • Hourly allows instructors to choose a date and time to run between. If no dates are chosen, the Hourly agent runs every hour with the first time being “now” (that is once the agent is saved and enabled).
• The existing Daily, Weekly, Monthly and Annually options all now have a Scheduled Time option that users complete to determine what time that the agent will run on the dates scheduled for the agent to run.

The Subject line of the agents’ emails now supports up to 128 characters. This brings it inline with the Email tool. Previously, the character limit was 100 characters.