March 2024

General Announcements

SMS Notifications – SMS (Short Message Service) notifications will no longer be supported or available starting in the July 2024/20.24.7 release. This change is in response to the deprecation of this service by mobile providers. Users can receive mobile push notifications in Brightspace Pulse, and can subscribe to email notifications in place of SMS notifications. For more information, refer to Intent to EOL SMS Notifications.

The Office 365 Widget is now available to add to your course homepage.  We will add the Office 365 Widget to the Avenue to Learn system homepage in early May 2024.

To add the widget to your course homepage, refer to the Avenue Homepages and Widgets Workshop. The Office 365 widget can be found in the ‘system’ widgets, when you are editing your homepage:

 

image of a list of system widgets including the office 365 widget

 

Twitter Field

  • With this release, the Twitter field in the User Profile tool now reflects the current name of X. This also updates the example shown on the page.

As of this release, inserting a link into the editor opens the Add Link dialog which allows users to determine if their links open in a new window (set as the default) or in the current window. The text box in the Add Link dialog also allows users to add text to their link. This provides users with a consistent workflow and control over how links respond in their content.

The Add Link dialog opens when inserting links with the context menu or with keyboard shortcuts (for example, ctrl+K or command+K).

Additionally, the dialog includes a new Insert Quicklink option, allowing users to easily insert a quicklink. When using Insert Stuff > Insert Link or Insert Quicklink > Link, the same Link, Text, and Open In options are displayed ensuring consistent link creation.

Finally, this feature updates the icons shown in Insert Quicklink to ensure all icons use the new style.

Previously, adding links throughout the editor resulted in different workflows, different fields, and different behaviors in the way that links would open. The previous Whole Window option is removed, as it was being treated as the current window and thus cause inconsistent behavior. Several options have been renamed from the previous version to improve consistency:

  • The option to have links open in the current window was previously called same frame.
  • Link was previously named URL.

The Add Link dialog box showing the Link and text fields, the Insert Quicklink option, and the Open in radio buttons.

Figure: You can access the new Add Link dialog using the context menu, or with keyboard shortcuts.

The previous style of icons displayed in Insert Quicklink were a mix of line art and coloured icons.

Figure: The Insert Quicklink menu with the previous icon style.

The current style of icons displayed in Insert Quicklink are a consistent style.

Figure: The Insert Quicklink menu with the updated icon style.

This feature implements the following PIE items:

  • D9265, D7107, and D10615 (Ability to set links to “open in new window” when inserting a link via the context menu)
  • D8186 (Link target is not available except from the Quicklinks menu)
  • D8051 and D8279 (Enhancements and better hyperlink options in HTML Editor)
  • D10602 (Consistent process for adding URL)
  • D10475 (Making Insert Quicklinks smoother and faster)

 

Quizzes – Improved experience for generating quiz reports | Updated

This release introduces a better experience for instructors when running and exporting quiz reports with large amounts of data. To avoid time-out failures and screen freezing, the following report types now run asynchronously:

  • Attempt Details
  • Question Statistics
  • Question Details
  • User Statistics
  • User Attempts

When reports are ready for downloading, Avenue to Learn generates a notification that instructors can access from the bell icon in the navbar.

The User Stats tab with the Export to CSV and Export to Excel buttons. After clicking on the Export to Excel button, a pop-up notification box opens. It reads, "Your report is being generated. You will receive a notification in Brightspace when your file is ready to be downloaded". There is a Close button at the bottom of the pop-up box. After clicking the Close button, a notification update alert appears next to the bell icon in the navigation bar. By clicking on it, a pop-up with all finished exports opens. By clicking on the new finished export, the Quiz Report Export Summary page opens. In the main content area, there is a message stating, "The Quiz report export was successful." Below this message is a link with the text "Click here to download the export file" and the Done button underneath.

Figure: Quiz reports are generated asynchronously. Instructors are notified when they are ready for download via the bell notification icon in the navbar.

Previously, quiz reports were generated slowly and would time-out in large classes.

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