July 2021
Assignments – Add categories in the New Assignment Creation Experience
This feature builds on features in Assignments that were released in April 2021. The new assignment creation experience supports the alignment of assignments to categories. This feature is turned off by default. When it is enabled, instructors can add new or existing assignment categories when creating or editing a new assignment.
Figure: The new assignment creation experience with the ability to align assignments to categories
Assignments – Org Defined Id (Student Number) field in the User Profile card
When an instructor hovers over a learner’s profile in the new Assignment Evaluation Experience, the User Profile card now displays the value of the Org Defined Id field or Student Number, if enabled in the Profile Cards tool.
Brightspace Editor – Available in ePortfolio External Comments and Quiz Builder
This feature updates the Brightspace Editor feature released in June 2021 and includes the following items:
- External users adding comments in Brightspace ePortfolio can now use the new inline limited version of Brightspace Editor.
- The Quiz Builder now supports the new inline Editor
- The right-click menu is no longer available when creating tables.
Figure: The inline Editor in the Quiz Builder
Avenue to Learn – New External Resource icon
To differentiate from the similar generic download icon, the external resource icon is now changing to a building block icon. This new icon better represents the building block approach of external resource functionality.
The new icon now appears in the following locations:
- External Learning Tools under the Add Existing options of the Classic Content tool and the Lessons tool (Instructors)
- External Learning Tools in the Classic Content Experience and the New Learner Content Experience (Learners) Feature description
Figure: The new external resource functionality icon
Grades – Add categories for text, calculated, and formula grade items
This feature enables you to better organize your grade book by adding categories to text, calculated, and formula grade items. This improved organization does not impact the calculation of the category these grade items are in. The totals in these categories do not contribute to the final grade.
Quizzes – Quiz Introduction field
To reduce redundancy in the Quizzes tool, the Introduction field is being phased out. In this release, when an instructor creates and/or edits a quiz, the Introduction field is no longer available.
If any quiz previously had text in the Introduction field, on clicking Edit, the text is automatically appended to the Description field. A message appears indicating that these two fields have been merged. Instructors can review the modified quiz description prior to saving the quiz.
Note: In some interfaces, for example Classic content, the Instructions field is displayed. This Instructions field already maps to the quiz Description field. Hence, there is no change to this workflow.
Figure: The Edit Quiz page with the message that appears when you edit a quiz containing an introduction
Note: Check the visibility of the Description field prior to saving the quiz.
When importing a course using Import/Export/Copy Components, text in the quiz Introduction field automatically appends to the quiz Description field. The export and copy workflows remain unchanged.
When viewing a quiz topic in the Classic Content tool, the text in the Introduction field now appears under the Instructions header.
Figure: A view of a quiz in the Classic Content tool – text in the Introduction field will appear under the Instructions header
Quizzes – Relocation of the Reports Setup functionality
The Report Setup tab on the Edit Quiz page is now available on the context menu of a quiz and reads as Setup Reports.
The Reports option available on the quiz context menu is also updated and reads as View Reports.
Figure: The New Quiz page with the Reports Setup tab before the update
Figure: The Quiz context menu before the update
Figure: The updated quiz context menu with the Setup Reports and View Reports options
Quizzes – Set grace period time to 0 minutes
When setting an enforced time limit for a quiz, instructors can now set the grace period for a quiz to 0 minutes, in place of the default grace period setting of 5 minutes. Entering a 0 minute grace period flags the quiz attempt as exceeded immediately when the quiz time limit is reached by the learner. Quiz attempt logs display when the learner attempt exceeds the regular time limit, grace period time limit or any extended time limit. Grace period of 0 minutes can be set for quizzes with special access restrictions as well.
Note: setting a grace period can support learner accessibility requirements and other situations, such as slow internet connections when completing quizzes. A Quiz is more accessible when a grace period is set to a non-zero value.
Figure: Enter 0 in the Grace Period field that appears with the Enforced Time Limit option for a quiz
Quizzes – Status and workflow changes for quizzes with ungraded questions – Pending Evaluation status
To support instructors who need to manually score questions within quizzes, the following quiz status and quiz grading workflow updates are available:
- For quizzes that contain questions that need to be manually scored (such as Written Response questions) AND that have the “Allow attempt to be set as graded immediately upon completion” option disabled, a new Pending Evaluation status appears beside the quiz attempt on the Grade Quiz page.
- While evaluating a quiz attempt with unevaluated questions, the instructor can now select Pending evaluations in the Question View drop-down menu to filter for only the questions that require manual evaluation.
- Instructors can now filter the Users tab by status. The available filters are: Published, Saved as draft, Pending evaluation and an empty status. The empty status denotes a quiz with auto-scored questions, where all questions are evaluated and there is no question evaluation pending.
Figure: The updated quiz status filters appear on the Attempts tab
Figure: The new Pending Evaluation filter appears in the Question View drop-down menu to easily locate questions requiring manual evaluation by the instructor.
Microsoft
Avenue to Learn will soon will integrate with Office 365 to help give users access to their productivity tools right within the LMS. More information about this in future months.