Are you looking for the basics to help you get started with building courses in your Avenue to Learn site?

Knowing where to find the things you need to build your course site:

Navbar: a navigation bar found at the top of the page that contains links to tools or materials that you and your students will use in your course

Course Admin: a navbar link that gives you access to all the tools you need to use to build and maintain your course site

Homepages and Widgets: create a homepage for your course and add widgets that put the information you want your students to see right up front

Suggested Learning Paths (how-to information)

• Get started with Brightspace Learning Environment

• Getting started for Instructors

• Navigate Brightspace Learning Environment for Instructors (video tutorial)

Use the Content tool to build the framework for your course site. Set up folders and sub-folders (modules) to organize your learning materials. You can import/export course components from previous versions of a course, drag and drop content from 3rd party tools like Google Docs, create new content with the HTML editor, and create learning activities like assignments, discussions, or quizzes etc.Suggested Learning Paths (how-to information)

• Set up and deliver a course

• Semester Start for Instructors (video tutorial)

If you’re looking for ways to make it easier for faculty to communicate with students, and make sure students are engaged with their peers and instructors, consider these tools/features.

A formal way to make course-wide official announcements (no interactive elements)

Suggested Learning Paths (how-to information)

• Interact and engage with learners

• Teaching Tips – Make regular announcements – Instructor(Video Tutorial)

An informal, interactive, social-media like way to share information in a course (faculty and students can author activity feed posts and write comments on posts)

Suggested Learning Paths (how-to information)

• Post messages and links to course materials

• Activity Feed widget for Instructors (video tutorial)

A place for students to discuss course materials in an organized way, moderated by an instructor (faculty or student creates a discussion post with instructions, and other students reply). It is possible to assign a grade and a rubric to discussion posts so that students receive credit and feedback for their participation in discussions.

Suggested Learning Paths (how-to information)

• Create and Manage Discussion Forums

• Discussions tool for instructors (video tutorial)

• Assessing Discussions

Add the calendar widget to your course homepage so students can see what’s coming up in the course. The calendar will display anything that you have assigned availability dates to when you added it in content.

Suggested Learning Paths (how-to information)

• Manage course events

• Calendar – Create an Event – Instructor (video tutorial)

A space for interactive video discussions with faculty or between students. Can be used to hold virtual office hours with faculty/ instructors.

Suggested Learning Paths (how-to information)

• Virtual Classroom and Video Assignments by Bongo

• Virtual Classroom and Video Assignments for Administrators (video tutorial)

Students love the ability to access their Brightspace site on their mobile devices. Help learners succeed by making sure your courses are optimized to perform effectively with the Pulse App.

Suggested Learning Paths (how-to information)

• Brightspace Pulse effective practices for instructors

If you’re looking for an easy way to monitor student activity in your course or looking for ways to make the assessment experience easier for faculty and students, consider these tools/features.

View, compare and track learner performance at a glance.

Suggested Learning Paths (how-to information)

• Class progress tool for instructors (video tutorial)

Dig deep into the statistics of how some of the tools you’re using in your course site are being accessed to get a better picture of how your students are accessing and engaging with various components of your course, ex/ view quiz statistics to understand student performance issues, view content statistics to see how much time users spent viewing content items.

Suggested Learning Paths (how-to information)

Tool statistics is a feature that is available inside of most Brightspace tools – to access the statistics of a tool, click “related tools” > “view reports”

• Course Content Statistics (how to access the statistics for content specifically)

Build quizzes from a question library or from scratch. The quiz tool allows for many question types including equations, multiple choice, short answer etc.

Suggested Learning Paths (how-to information)

• Assess and grade learners

• Quizzes tool for instructors (video tutorial)

Create or use existing rubrics to evaluate an activity or item based on a predefined set of criteria. Rubrics help ensure that activities and items are evaluated fairly and consistently and deliver effective feedback for students. Using rubrics as part of your course assessment options streamlines the grading workflow for faculty/instructors.

Suggested Learning Paths (how-to information)

Rubrics Basics

• Rubrics Basics

Rubrics Tool for instructors (video tutorial)

• Rubrics Tool for instructors (video tutorial)

Set up a grading system for your course and connect it to your course assignments, discussions, tests etc. It takes a bit of effort to set up the grade book for your course, but once you’ve done so, the grades tool looks after recording the grades you assign students for any of the associated learning activities in your course site and calculating how they contribute toward the student’s final grade. The grades tool can even record the grades you’ve assigned to students through Rubrics (as long as those rubrics have been set up in the grade book).

Suggested Learning Paths (how-to information)

• Create a Grading System

• Grades Tool for Instructors (video tutorial)

View all ungraded student submissions in one place. In Quick Eval, you can see a summary of what grading work is waiting for you to complete. You can sort submissions by course, student, assignment etc. so that you can grade student work in whatever way suits you. You can evaluate submissions and publish feedback and grades right from within the quick eval tool so you don’t need to navigate all over the place to get your grading done.

Suggested Learning Paths (how-to information)

• About Quick Eval

• Quick Eval – Grade Submissions Using Quick Eval – Instructor (video tutorial)

Use built-in annotation tools to mark-up assignment submissions and give meaningful feedback using highlighting, freehand drawing, shapes, and associated commenting.

Suggested Learning Paths (how-to information)

• Create assignments and assess submissions

• Assignments (Dropbox) Tool for Instructors (video tutorial)

If providing your students with a personalized learning experience is important to you, consider using these tools in your courses.

Provide merit-based awards to motivate and engage students as they progress through your course.  Badges can be automatically awarded based on release condition criteria or can be manually awarded.

Suggested Learning Paths (how-to information)

• Issue awards to recognize learner accomplishments

• Awards Tool for Instructors (video tutorial)

Gain insight into student’s involvement in your course so you can automate and personalize how you interact with them. The intelligent agents tool finds an activity that matches predetermined criteria, and then automatically (and proactively) triggers an action – ex/ emailing users that have not accessed your course in a week or have missed an assignment submission due date.

Suggested Learning Paths (how-to information)

• Find an activity that matches certain criteria

• Teaching tips – Use Replacement Strings for Personalization (video tutorial)

Use release conditions to create a custom learning path through the materials in your course. When you attach a release condition to an item, users cannot see that item until they meet the associated condition, ex/ attach a release condition to the second topic in your course’s content area that would hide that topic until users viewed the topic before it

Suggested Learning Paths (how-to information)

• Create a custom learning path in a course 

• Content – Attach a release condition – Instructor (video tutorial)

• Teaching tips – Use Replacement Strings for Personalization (video tutorial)

Add special access for learners who require different access to content and/or quizzes in your course, ie/ use special access to allow a student to submit an assignment after the due date, or take more time to complete a quiz

Suggested Learning Paths (how-to information)

• Add special access to an assignment

• Quizzes – Grant Special access to Users for a Quiz – Instructor

• Assignments – Add Restrictions to an Assignment – Instructor (video tutorial)

Data analytics is an exciting area of the Brightspace platform that allows your school to create reports and data visualizations to analyze what people (students and faculty) are doing in Brightspace. Typically, these data-related tools are used by your school’s Brightspace administrators, not by individual faculty and instructors. To learn more about data and your school’s Brightspace site, speak to your school’s Brightspace administrators.

Brightspace Data Sets are intended to be downloaded regularly and loaded into a data warehouse for use with a Business Intelligence tool by joining them together.

Suggested Learning Paths (how-to information)

• Brightspace Data Sets

• Data Hub – Set up Brightspace Data Sets – Administrator (video tutorial)

Combines Brightspace data sets and Advanced Data Sets to provide a fuller picture of all your data from Brightspace. Advanced data sets give a slice of the overall data and a more complete report. Brightspace Data Sets are intended to be downloaded regularly and loaded into a data warehouse for use with a Business Intelligence tool by joining them together.

Suggested Learning Paths (how-to information)

• Data Hub tool

• Data Hub Tool for Administrators (video tutorial)

Contains 3 dashboards: adoption, engagement, assessment quality. Each dashboard was built for mid-level to administrative roles who need to have data visualized across courses or across the entire organization.

Suggested Learning Paths (how-to information)

• Brightspace Insights

• Brightspace Insights – Manipulate Data in Adoption Dashboard – Administrator (video tutorial) 

• Brightspace Insights – Manipulate Data in Engagement Dashboard – Administrator (video tutorial)

Use this predictive analytics tool to be proactive in identifying and making interventions with students who might be at risk in your course. S3 uses historical data to make weekly predictions about student performance.

Suggested Learning Paths (how-to information)

• Brightspace Student Success System

• Student Success System

https://community.brightspace.com/s/article/Mapping-Brightspace-Functionality-Higher-Education