New Features & Updates

Announcements 

• Instructors can now pin announcements and global announcements to the top of the Announcement Widget and Tool pages, allowing important information to remain visible to learners.
• Announcements so pinned are indicated to learners as such with the use of a new pinned icon that appears on the announcement.
• Please note that pinning or viewing pinned announcements is not currently supported in Slim Announcements.

Creator+

• Creator+ Layouts now supports inserting elements in a Layouts panel. Elements inserted into panels are responsive and follow the same behavior when displayed on smaller screens, like in mobile view.

Quizzes

• The New Creation Experience is no longer opt-in and is now the default view.
• Simplified and redesigned Timing & Display settings are implemented as follows:
  • The updated settings allow instructors to choose if they want to set a time limit by selecting the Set time limit checkbox, which is cleared by default. If Set time limit is selected, instructors can add a Time Limit and edit the Timer Settings.
  • The legacy Grace Period setting is no longer available.
• The Timer Settings offers the following options when the time limit expires:
  • Automatically submit the quiz attempt (default setting)
  • Flag as “exceeded time limit” and allow the learner to continue working
  • Do nothing: the time limit is not enforced
• Students have the option of hiding the timer that is displayed in the upper right portion of the screen during timed quiz attempts.

Assignments

• Assignment start and end date settings can be used to specify when a student can view assignments. There are three start and end date options:  Visible with access restricted, Visible with submission restricted and Hidden.

Import/Export/Copy

• Course groups can now be exported and imported. Exporting or importing a course group does not include user or group membership information. Groups with automatic enrollments cannot be imported or exported at this time. In addition, Gradebook calculation options can be imported and exported.    

Creator+

• Instructors can add hotspot elements to Content images such as maps and diagrams. Enabling students to select icon-based hotspots associated with a part of an image promotes interactive learning.

Quizzes 

• Instructors can now use the Load More button on the initial page load if a quiz has more than 200 questions. Also, instructors can now select multiple items and use drag and drop functionality to rearrange the question list.

Awards

• Instructors can now specify what a learner must do to achieve a certificate or badge through the new required Criteria field.

Brightspace Virtual Assistant

• Students, faculty and administrators can now receive persona-specific help information based on their assigned role in iLearn.

Creator+

• New carousel feature allows instructors to create a series of content slides consisting of images, text and labels that students can horizontally scroll through.

Discussions

• New experience defaults to ON (opt-in) with the option to opt out.

Creator+ 

• Insert Element option available for custom templates.

Discussions

• A new creation and editing experience will be made available as opt-in that is similar to the new assignment and quiz experience.

Quizzes

• The confirmation dialog for learners exiting a quiz has been updated. It will let them know if they will be able to return to the quiz after exiting with the time frame that it is allowed, if settings allow, or if they will not be able to return.

Calendar

• Prevents duplicate calendar events on copy/import.

Copy Course Components

• LTI links are checked to see if they are duplicates when copying courses. These links associate third party tools to the course. 

Media Library

• The ISF players is now responsive and adapts to match screen size.

Rubrics

• Printed rubrics now includes the TN Tech logo in the upper left corner. 

Intelligent Agents

• This feature allows users to copy, export, and import One-Time Run agents and their schedules. This allows users who utilize course shells which are copied to multiple courses to schedule One-Time Run agents to run as needed in all destination courses. Previously, agents that were configured with scheduling frequency One-Time Run would copy without a scheduling frequency.

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Quizzes

• Instructors can now add quiz availability dates to the Calendar tool in the Availability Dates & Conditions menu in the new quiz creation experience. Instructors can select the Add availability dates to Calendar checkbox when creating a quiz to add quiz availability dates to their Calendar. This feature provides instructors with more control over where Start Dates and End Dates appear to learners. Previously, only the Due Date was automatically added in the new quiz creation experience; and control over adding availability dates was limited to the Manage Dates tool. Instructors previously had to revert back to the legacy quiz creation experience to add quiz availability dates to their Calendar.
• Two new paging options are available in the Timing & Display menu in the new quiz creation experience. Instructors can choose to display 5 questions per page or 10 questions per page. The change optimizes instructors' options when building quizzes with page breaks.

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Rubrics

• When an instructor makes a change to a previously assessed rubric, it is updated with a blue highlight and the text Edited in the lower right corner. When the user saves and closes the rubric, the edit indications no longer appear.

Brightspace Pulse App

• Building upon the Brightspace Pulse – Access links and images in module descriptions when you’re on-the-go feature originally released in October 2022/20.22.10. This feature improves the experience of learners using Pulse to review course topics by making full HTML topic descriptions available.
• Previously, learners could access Content in Pulse, but could not see information included in topic descriptions that were visible in the Brightspace web application.

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HTML Editor

• To improve consistency in Brightspace Editor, this release updates the Editor so that it renders all equations during editing or creation in the same MathJax format as when published.  This helps with correct formatting and spacing of equations, which makes it easier to review work prior to publishing.

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Insights Dashboards

• All dashboards in the Insights Portal now have multiple improved interface and user experience updates. The new experience allows for better visibility of dashboard and chart data and creates consistency across the Insights Portal dashboards.
  The updated Dashboard provides the following features:
  • Linking and mirroring zoom for all Dashboard charts.
  • Help tooltip to show users how to zoom in and out of charts.
  • Ability to perform a fullscreen zoom on charts.
  • Addition of a Showing only bar to provide visibility into highlighted and muted chart data.

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Learning Outcomes

• A Clear All button is now available to remove all Learning Outcomes aligned to an assessment activity. When you click the Clear All button, a verification message appears to ensure that you do not mistakenly remove all aligned outcomes from an activity.

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Release Conditions

• This release alters the existing release conditions for Discussions by adding a new Replies Only option to the Posts authored in topic and No post authored in topic condition types drop-down menus. This helps instructors release material, or not release material, based solely on replies.
• Previously the only options were New Threads Only and Threads and Replies.

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Rubrics

• The Rubric evaluation workflow provides an autosave feature to streamline the evaluation process; however, if an instructor exited the partial evaluation, the automatically saved parts of the assessment were committed to the rubric and visible to the learner. To provide a better experience in Consistent Evaluation (inline and pop-out views), the instructor has the option to Publish the current evaluation, or to Save as Draft. If the instructor chooses to Save as Draft, the working copy of an evaluation is saved to a temporary file until the instructor clicks Publish, and then commits the assessment to the Rubric. If an instructor clicks the new Cancel button, the working copy is deleted. If an instructor edits a previously published evaluation and then decides to cancel before updating, all the changes in the evaluation, including the rubric evaluation changes, are discarded.
• The Rubrics Statistics icon is available when the rubric tile is collapsed and expanded. When the rubric tile is collapsed, the icon appears at the bottom of the rubric tile. When the rubric is expanded, the icon now appears inside the grading task. This change provides expanded horizontal space for evaluators to complete the grading tasks.

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Supported Browsers

• This release updates the list of retro or legacy browsers (specific older versions of supported browsers). If you are using a browser below the latest updates, the "Your browser is looking a little retro" warning message appears. The browsers include:
  • Chrome 107+ (released October 2022)
  • Android Chrome 107+ (released October 2022)
  • macOS Safari 16+ (released September 2022)
  • iOS Safari 16+ (released September 2022)
  • Firefox 106+ (released October 2022)

Assignments

• 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.

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Quicklinks Filters for Media Library

• Additional filters have been added when creating a Quicklink associated with the Media Library that is linking to a video or audio file that has been uploaded directly into D2L. This is not for videos uploaded into YuJa. That is done throughout the Quicklinks - Add YuJa Media option.

Assignments

• Expand or collapse the list of aligned outcomes. Learning Outcomes are currently being piloted. If you are interested, feel free to contact us.

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Awards

• Learners can now share their awards with a public URL directly from the Awards tool using the new Awards Sharing option.

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Brightspace Pulse App

• Builds on the Personalize push notifications feature release in October 2022. With this release, users will be able to choose which email or SMS notifications they want to receive by accessing the settings directly in the Pulse App.

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Insights Dashboards*

• This release introduces the following usability improvements to the specified Insights dashboards:
  • More information included in tooltips (all Insights dashboards).
    • Previously, when a user hovered over a point on an area chart, a tooltip appeared with data for that category and date. Now, when a user hovers over a point on an area chart, a tooltip appears with data from all categories for that date. This removes the need for users to hover over separate data points to compare them or zoom in to read values of different series.
  • Updated chart and legend interactions (Learner Engagement Dashboard).
    • When a user hovers over a category in a chart or a legend, all the other categories become dimmer in the chart and on the legend. When a user clicks on a category in a chart or a legend, all the other categories become dimmer in all charts and on the legend, and a Showing Only tag appears at the top of the dashboard to summarize the scope of the highlights.
  • "No data" state (all Insights dashboards).
    • Previously, if the user's filter selections retrieved no data, the graph axes appeared blank. Now, each card displays a message that there is no data retrieved.
  • Alert messages (all Insights dashboards).
    • When there is too much data for the dashboard to display properly, the user sees an alert message prompting them to use filters to narrow their search results. This release updates the alert messages for better readability.

*Insights Dashboards will be released in the near future.

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Groups

• Descriptions are now available for self-enrollment groups.
• Improved clarity when performing deletions of associated activities by implementing a dialog box with a count of how many assignments or discussions the user is deleting that are associated with a group or category of groups.

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Rubrics

• Instructors can now edit an assessed rubric, but only to update spelling errors, clarify wording and other minor changes that do not impact the academic integrity of the rubric. Instructors can't make structural changes to an assessed rubric, such as adding evaluation levels or criteria, point values or outcome alignments.

Brightspace Pulse App

• Users can now view module descriptions in a web view that displays images and preserves links.

Grades

• When copying a course the Copy Grade Items will only copy the in-use grade schemes.

Assignments

• Copy individual assignments to other courses from the assignment tool.

Classlist

• View groups and sections for specific users.

Google File Picker

• Improved search capabilities and users can now select multiple files to add (link) or upload to Brightspace.

LTI/External Learning Tools/Copying Courses

• During course copy, the system will attempt to migrate links that were legacy links (1.1) to LTI Advantage (1.3).

Quizzes

• Align quiz questions to Learning Outcomes in the new quiz creation experience.
• Instructors can now create quizzes with "No Time Limit".

Release Conditions

• Can now create a release condition based on first enrollment date or last enrollment date. This can also be used to create Intelligent Agents.

Full release notes for September 2022

Assignments

• New shortcut icons to Undo and Redo PDF annotations when evaluating and assignment.
• The default filter now defaults to Show Everyone instead of Users with Submissions.

MS Teams Connector Widget

The following functionality is available as of August 11, 2022:

• Exclude user roles from sync - Some course shells are created by administrative staff (e.g. librarians), who are then automatically added as members of the course. They only need access to the Brightspace course but do not need access to the corresponding team in Microsoft Teams.
• Hide learners can create new private channels option - Some Office 365 Teams policies do not allow learners to create new private channels, rendering this option meaningless. To reduce confusion, this option no longer appears in the homepage widget.
• Delete Teams site once course is no longer active - Similar functionality exists to archive Teams sites. This functionality provides the option to delete the Teams site rather than archive it.
• Wait until course start to create team - Course shells can be created far in advance of use. Waiting until the course starts to create the course Teams site reduces clutter and confusion.
• Hide Team from Global Address List - The Global Address List (GAL) is a list of all public addresses in an Exchange Mail system. With this option enabled, the team’s underlying group email addresses are not populated in the GAL. The intent is to reduce clutter. Hiding the address does not block it from use.
• Hide Teams Calendar App - Both Brightspace and Teams offer calendars. These calendars are not synchronized, and learners may confuse these two calendars. This option hides the Teams calendar from view.
• Hide Teams Assignment App - Both Brightspace and Teams offer assignment applications. These assignments are not synchronized, and learners may confuse these two. This option hides the Teams assignment application from view.
• Add prefix to archived team names - As a best practice, we want to rename archived teams, perhaps by adding a prefix to their names. This is helpful to prevent conflicts if course or section names are reused in future academic sessions. For example, just before the end of a session, an organization could set this field to Spring2022_ to rename Astrology101_Team Spring2022_Astrology101_Team when the course is archived.
• Create a team for each sectionspan style="color: #333333; font-family: Lato; font-size: 13.8px; font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #ffffff; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial; display: inline !important; float: none;"> - Instructors can now create separate Microsoft Teams per course section. This feature is in the homepage widget. It facilitates course organization and instructors will be members of each Microsoft Team.
• Automatically add instructors to all channels - This option in the homepage widget ensures that instructors have access to all channels to facilitate moderated spaces for learners to communicate in.

HTML Editor

• There is a new option in Brightspace HTML Editor that allows instructors to directly insert a code snippet into their content. This is done by selecting the Other Insert Options menu from the Editor toolbar, and then selecting the new Insert Code option. From there, instructors select their programming language from a list of available choices and add their code into the interface to format before inserting it into the Editor.
• Media Library is now available as an option within Insert Stuff. This allows users to embed any audio or video files added via Content and any existing Audio Notes and Video Notes into any supported Brightspace Editor field.
• When you are in the Brightspace Editor and you upload a file using Insert Stuff, a message appears indicating that the files uploaded using Insert Stuff are saved in the Manage Files area.

Google File Picker

• The old file picker is retired with this update and is being replaced with the new, updated file picker to integrate Google Workspace.

Intelligent Agents

• On the New Agent page, in the Criteria section, all selections under Take Action on Activity are now optional. This means users can now create a new Intelligent Agent that applies to certain roles and doesn't require any other criteria. Users are still required to select one of the options under Role in Classlist.

Quizzes

• As of this release, the Disable Right Click option in quizzes is removed from Quizzes in Brightspace Learning Environment. The option is no longer available in Quiz Setup, and existing quizzes with the setting no longer enforce the limitation on learners.
• Restore deleted quizzes - This option appears in the More Actions menu in the Quizzes tool. Instructors using this option are provided with a list of deleted quizzes that indicates when they were deleted and by whom, along with a button to restore a selected quiz.

Full release notes for August 2022

Brightspace Pulse

• Better support for text-to-speech assistive technology

Grades

• Copy grade items only copies unique or in-use grade schemes

Assignments

• Turnitin integration
  
  • The Turnitin integration options layout and feature names are changed with this release. The option changes can be viewed on the Turnitin Integrations options page.

    GradeMark is now Online Grading and Originality Check is now Similarity Report. Instructors can enable features for Online Grading and Similarity Report separately within the Turnitin Integration options page.

  • Instructors can now restrict file types to those supported by Turnitin. If an invalid type is submitted, an error is reported with no other side effect.
  • The column titled Turnitin Similarity is now Turnitin® Similarity Report. The column titled Turnitin® GradeMark® is changed to Turnitin Online Grading.
    

Full release notes for July 2022

Assignments

• Instructors teaching several classes have the new Copy to Other Courses option. Take a look at the Release Notes for more information about what is and is not copied.

Brightspace Pulse App

• The app is now only supported on the following operating systems:
  • Android 6 and above
  • iOS 13 and above

Classlist

• Pronouns can now be visible in the Classlist as long as someone has set them in their profile and allowed others to see them.

Quizzes

• A new quiz creation experience will be enabled as Opt-In. It is a similar look and feel as the current Assignments creation experience. Learn more about the New Quiz Creation Experience.

Rubrics

• Archived rubrics will now appear with an archived tag at the top of the rubric to help instructors and designers recognize rubrics that have previously been aligned to an activity.

Full release notes for June 2022

Audio/Video

• Manual transcoding option to optimize video files.
• Adds a Language option to the Captions area.

Awards

• The Awards task was being evaluated against “All Enrollments”, which returns a list of all users enrolled in a course, regardless of roles or permissions. This list included users with the role setting “Display this role in the classlist” disabled.

Brightspace Pulse App

• Updates and subscriptions now align with all update and subscription alerts in Brightspace

HTML Editor

• Improved context link menu supports previewing of quicklinks in Brightspace Editor - This feature implements a new and improved context link menu in Brightspace Editor. The new menu has the same functionality as before – enabling users to highlight text and create a link, edit the link, remove the link, and preview the link – but now also enables support for the previewing of quicklinks that contain replace strings while editing their HTML. The new formatting context menu continues to allow users to highlight text within the editor and apply formatting or create links.

Learning Environment

• Updated default font and color stylings for improved accessibility. This feature introduces a color change to fonts and icons in Brightspace Learning Environment to meet WCAG guidelines.

Manage Files

• Improved error message when invalid files are uploaded. This feature adds an improved error message to the File Upload dialogue. When a user attempts to upload a file containing one or more illegal characters in the file name, this message explains to the user the reason why the upload failed.
• Shared Files renamed to Public Files

SCORM

• Improved completion messaging to avoid confusion in SCORM embedded experience. Upon completion of SCORM content a “This activity is complete” message displays. This change has been implemented to avoid confusion in the SCORM embedded experience as the old message was only relevant to content rendered in a pop-up window and did not account for other SCORM experiences.
• Legacy SCORM Player no longer renders advanced HTML elements within the SCORM player sidebar, they now render as plain text.

Insights - Assessment Quality Dashboard Updates

• A new search input in the Quiz Details area where users can enter the name of a quiz to filter the dashboard results. Filtering the dashboard to quizzes with the same name allows users to compare multiple occurrences of the same quiz to see how the statistics vary.
• Hover text added to the "!" icons to provide context to users about when to act on flagged quizzes and questions.

Groups

• 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.

HTML Editor

• Advanced code editor visual update and accessibility improvements - 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.

Intelligent Agents

• This feature changes the Intelligent Agents Create Agent page to facilitate additional scheduling options and frequency options to allow for improved flexibility.

Announcements

• Create new announcements quickly with the new Copy option.

Content

• If you are using the Video Note option or upload videos directly into iLearn and want to link the video in Content, you can now find them in the add Existing Activities in the Media Library.

Updated Visual Branding

• Over the next several releases, the visual brand will be updated to new default logos and icons.

Content

• The Print and Download buttons are now available when viewing a topic in fullscreen.

Brightspace HTML Editor

• This feature adds a new tab to the existing Attributes menu of Brightspace Editor, allowing users to enter page attributes for language and/or title when viewed. This new menu only appears in legacy Content, Lessons, and Custom Widgets. 

Intelligent Agents

• This feature adds the following new functionality to the Agent List page, where users manage the Intelligent Agents they have created:
  • The ability to create, assign, and manage categories; and
  • A new Bulk Edit for some agent details: title, category, and active/inactive state.

This feature also updates the icons denoting the active/inactive state of each agent.

Audio/Video

• Improved editing features for videos directly uploaded into iLearn. Videos can be edited from course content or by using the Edit > Advanced Editing option in the Admin Tools menu. 
• Multi-bitrate streaming allows high-definition videos to be played at standard definition to reduce the bandwidth necessary for users to watch videos.
• The new search functionality allows users to locate key words in video captions and quickly navigate to those sections.

Brightspace Pulse

• With this release, subscription notifications in Brightspace Pulse are now consistent with subscription notifications in Brightspace Learning Environment. From the Notifications > Subscriptions tab in Brightspace Pulse, learners now receive all replies to discussions they are subscribed to.

Date and Time Selection

• The Set to Today button is renamed to Today. The Today button continues to set the date and the time based on the context. For example, choosing Today for an End Date sets the current date and sets the time to 11:59 PM.
• Added a Now button that sets the current date and time. The Today and Now buttons only appear when a date and time are required. When only a date is required, only the Today button appears and functions the same as the Now button.
• The Today, Now, and Clear buttons are center-aligned in the date and time picker.
  

Discussions

• The new discussion experience is now the default view and no longer an opt-in option.
• To make the Discussion evaluation consistent with the Assignments evaluation, this feature adds the Grading Rubric drop-down to the sidebar menu. This allows the instructor to choose a grading rubric when evaluating a discussion.