Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Quarterly updates for Summer 2024

Posted by Andy Freed

D2L Brightspace

Navbar

On June 17th, Online Learning will roll out the new standardized navigation bar (navbar) in D2L Brightspace! We are very excited because this new navbar is the result of over a year of research, prototyping, user testing, and collecting feedback from both faculty and students. For more details, see our Navbar 2024 project updates page.

Primary Needs:

• Students: Consistent navigation between courses.
• Faculty: Ability to provide links to course-specific resources.

Rollout Plan

On June 17th, we will be replacing the current default navbars used in the majority of courses with the new navbar. This will not require any action from most instructors. We will not lock the navbar until fall term so you have time to collect links and update any documents you have with custom instructions.

1. Courses with custom navigation will also be updated to the new navbar for fall term.
2. For those with custom navigation bars, you will need to:
   • Add your custom links to the Links tool.
   • Optional: Turn off the tools you don’t use

To provide feedback, you can use the “Send corrections or feedback” link in the Help menu from the navbar.

Assignment Annotations update

The assignment annotation tool has been updated with several minor interface updates and should address a number of minor defects. One note is that it will not work with older versions of Safari (15.4 and earlier).

Grades & Feedback

Feedback files are now available in Grades for Assignments, Quizzes, and Discussions! If you attach a file with feedback for your students, it will be available in the Grades area. This makes it even easier for students to see/access your feedback.

Manage Dates includes Intelligent Agents

Intelligent Agents can now be updated as part of your term to term Manage Dates workflow. For power users, this is an excellent update. If you haven’t used Intelligent Agents, check out our intro documentation.

Zoom

Quarterly Minimum Version Enforcement

Zoom will be enforcing a new minimum version of the client software by August 1st, 2024. We will notify users who are using a legacy version prior to the update. Computers managed by PCC will be automatically updated well in advance. You can download the newest version now at https://portlandcc.zoom.us/download.

Zoom Workspace aka v6.x

Zoom has made a fairly major update to the client software. It allows some customization of the interface for your preferences. One new feature that has taken some adjustment is that the menu options collapse as you shrink the Zoom meeting window:

AI Companion

Zoom’s AI companion feature is still under review. We want to ensure adequate security and privacy measures for our students and faculty/staff.

New Tools & Previews

Ally to Panorama

Ally, the accessibility reporting and mitigation tool we’ve had for the last several years is being replaced with Panorama. The software is provided through a consortium license paid for by the Oregon Community College Distance Learning Association. The changes for users should be fairly minimal.

Rollout plan

We will be switching from Ally to Panorama on June 28th to ensure students have access to alternate formats during the first week. Documentation for the tool for students and faculty is available.

Annoto

Annoto is now fully available for users and out of pilot stage! This tool integrates with D2L Brightspace and Kaltura, so you can allow students to comment on videos in your class! You can have students submit videos in Assignments and you can respond in-context to the student using text, audio, or video.

Learn more about Annoto.

Kahoot!

Kahoot! has moved out of pilot stage and is widely available to PCC users! This tool serves as a polling tool with Zoom sessions for your remote courses.
Learn more about Kahoot!.

Voicethread

An updated interface in VoiceThread is available and will be the default starting June 17th. The new interface should improve the overall use experience with VoiceThread and not really create any challenges. The new interface has been available to faculty for several months and we’ve not heard of any complaints.

Learn more from Voicethread.

 

Website updates

The Online Learning website is about to get a face lift thanks to our BIG-funded web designer position. The website will better present Online Learning support based on roles (student, faculty, dean/fdc) and the technical content will be moving over to the Instructional Support site.