Brightspace Activities

Test/Quiz Question Generator and Quiz Question Converter

Brightspace Test/Quiz Question Generator

As the issue with the True/False questions is now fixed, we are making the Brightspace Test/Quiz Question Generator available to all faculty. After importing the quiz questions into a Brightspace Quiz or Question Library, it is imperative to double-check for the accuracy of the quiz questions you just imported using the Preview a Quiz option.

The Quiz Question Converter

There is one alternative to the Test/Quiz Question Generator, developed by D2L. To access this version, you will need to create a Brighspace Community account. The D2L version supports the same question types, except for the fill-in-the-blank one. More documentation on this is coming soon. Stay tuned!

Note: If you need assistance in verifying your quiz, please schedule an appointment with the DLE Team.

 

DLE Weekly Update: Self-Enrolment Groups

If you are looking for a way to create sign-up sheets for student presentations, project proposals, or office hours we have a solution for you.

This article describes the steps you need to take in order to allow the students to sign up for one of the projects they need to work on, using self-enrolment groups.

DLE Weekly Update: Turnitin, PIE and Email Address for Brightspace Support

Turnitin in Brightspace

Turnitin is an originality checking and plagiarism prevention service that checks your student papers for citation mistakes or inappropriate copying. Through the integration with Brightspace and the use of a Brightspace Assignment, Turnitin allows you to check for plagiarism using the Originality Check tool, and also to provide feedback and in-line comments on student assignments using the GradeMark tool.

The Originality Check tool helps you identify the plagiarism by automatically comparing your student submissions to an online database of original content. Originality Reports are made available to you and your students (if you choose to), highlighting key areas, and showing a breakdown of matching sources, with direct links to the matching content.

The Grade Mark tool allows you to make comments on student submissions, offering you unique features, such as pre-written comments (QuickMarks).

Turnitin can be used as both a plagiarism tool and an educational tool, as it helps students understand the proper use of quotation marks, how to cite sources properly, and how to paraphrase.

Helpful articles/videos on Turnitin:

Note: Subscribe to Turnitin updates if you would like to be notified by email when there is a Turnitin service disruption.

Product Idea Exchange (PIE)

The Product Idea Exchange (PIE) allows you to share your ideas for improvement and vote for those you would like to see developed. To contribute to PIE, visit the Product Idea Exchange website.

If you would like to see a list of current PIE Items that have been up-voted by you, and also the items that the committee previously voted up and were implemented by D2L, check our LMS Website.

Note: To access and up-vote PIE items, you will first need to register to be part of the Brightspace Community here: https://community.brightspace.com/SelfRegistration.

Reminder – The ONLY Email Address for Brightspace Support

We would like to remind you that Faculty and Staff should be using only the brightspace@algonquincollege.com address when asking for Brightspace Support. In order to make sure that your email reaches us, and we provide the help you need, please take a moment to delete all other emails that contain the word brightspace from your address book. Note that, when emailing the correct email address for Brightspace Support, you will receive an automatic reply with your case number.

DLE Weekly Update: Hiding Grades, DLE KB and Zoom Resources

Hiding Grades in Brightspace

We all know that hiding grades in Brightspace sometimes presents a challenge, as it depends on the type of gradebook columns. We NOW have a great video created by Tamara and Vanessa, explaining in details how to hide two types of gradebook columns: associated with a Brightspace activity (quiz, assignment or discussion) and columns without any associations.

Important: After following the steps outlined in this video, also make sure that your final calculated grade column is hidden, as students can access the grades for hidden columns by clicking on the small calculator icon, beside their percentage for the final calculated grade!

If you need to learn How to Hide the Final Calculated Grade column, this article shows you the steps you need to take.

Reminder: Digital Learning Environment Knowledge Base (DLEKB)

We would like to remind you to check our Digital Learning Environment Knowledge Base that contains more than 150 articles on various Brightspace tools. Please know that we read and welcome your feedback on these articles. Keep them coming and send us suggestions for new articles.

Zoom Resources

As many of you are teaching for the first time using Zoom, we have put together a list of Zoom resources that we hope you will find helpful. This video created by LTS provides a quick guide on almost everything you need to know about Zoom.

How do I schedule a Zoom meeting?

  1. You can schedule it from within your Brightspace course – ideal for when you give lectures to your students. After you schedule the meeting, the link to the new meeting will automatically show up in your students’ course calendar. They will have access to the meeting on the date and time you chose in the meeting’s settings. Note that your students won’t need to sign up for a Zoom account, as they will automatically have access to your Zoom classroom, as participants.
  2. Via the portal or the application, outside your Brightspace course, by signing into the Algonquin College Zoom Portal – recommended for small groups’ meetings, when the participants don’t have Brightspace accounts and/or you don’t want your students to join the meeting by mistake.

How do I set up my Zoom account?

When you first access Zoom Classroom from within your Brightspace course, your Zoom account is automatically created for you. If you don’t have a Brightspace course, but you need to schedule Zoom meetings, you will create the account via the Algonquin College Zoom portal.

How do I manage my Zoom recordings?

Read our KB article on How to manage your Zoom Recordings in Brightspace. Zoom recordings of sessions that are scheduled through Brightspace via Tools > Zoom Classroom, and saved to the cloud, are no longer automatically shared with students in the Brightspace course. Previously, a link to the recording would appear immediately for students via Tools > Zoom Classroom, under Cloud Recordings. This KB article explains How to Publish Zoom Cloud Recordings.

How do I deal with Zoom in Combined/Merged courses.

This article explains how to set up Zoom meetings in a Combined/Merged Course.

Zoom Breakout Rooms

If you are using breakout rooms in ZOOM when delivering your class lecture, and you would like to allow your students to choose the room they want to be in, please note that the “Let participants choose room” option is available to select during a ZOOM meeting, but ONLY for the versions 5.3 or newer. Update your software from your Zoom app or from your profile under the Algonquin College Zoom portal.

DLE Weekly Update: November News, Brightspace Tips and Grade Entry in ACSIS

New great feature introduced by the November release: Retake incorrect questions in subsequent attempts

This feature introduces a new option for Quizzes Attempt settings that allows students to only retake their incorrectly answered questions from previous quiz attempts. When you edit a Brightspace quiz (Activities/Quizzes), the new option is available for you to select from the Assessment tab. Each learner only sees the questions they had previously answered incorrectly in the same order as the initial attempt (including quizzes with random sections and random questions).

Brightspace Tips

Are you marking your students’ assignments anonymously?

Anonymous Marking is a tool in Brightspace which allows you to mark your students Assignment submissions without knowing the identity of the student. In case you are using Anonymous Marking, note it is not possible to publish individual evaluations. To maintain anonymity, all evaluations have to be published at the same time using the Publish All Feedback button. When marking, the first step is to save the grades/feedback as a draft (select Save Draft to save), and then go back to Activities/Assignments/View Submissions page and click on the Publish All Feedback button.

Do you need to copy ONLY the final exam (or any other quiz) from one course to another?

Use the Select Components button when you perform a course copy and select only the Quizzes option, followed by Selected Quizzes, and then the quiz you wish to copy. If your quiz is created as a random quiz with questions from the Question Library, make sure you also copy that particular section from the Question Library, by selecting the Question Library option, along with the Quizzes one. By doing this, you will make sure that you will have that Question Library section in the destination course, for usage in other quizzes.

Preparing a CSV (Excel) File for Uploading Grades into ACSIS

At the end of each semester, you are asked to upload the final grades for your students to ACSIS. This article provides you with step-by-step instructions describing how to prepare a .csv (Excel) file from the gradebook in Brightspace in preparation for submitting/uploading grades to ACSIS.

Does your course contain TechSmith Relay videos?

The TechSmith web server will be shut down on December 31, 2020. Any content not retrieved by this date will no longer be available to users.
You may have inherited a Brightspace course that contains TechSmith Relay presentations, created by you or another faculty member (past or present). The URL will typically contain “replay.algonquincollege.com” and will also indicate the username of the original creator, e.g. “replay.algonquincollege.com/replay/kershar/…” For more information, and the steps that you should take to address this, please take a look at this myAC post.

DLE Weekly Update: New Video on How to Show Quiz Results via Submission Views

Since using the Submission Views options in a Brightspace Quiz is the most common topic almost any time of the semester, we are sharing again the KB article on how to show the quiz results via Submission Views. In addition to the article that it’s been already appreciated by many of you, we NOW have for you a very informative video on this topic, created by our DLE Team.

When students complete quizzes, they will be eager to see their results AND feedback. The default quiz settings show only the overall grade, and nothing else. To release more information to students (i.e. questions, correct/incorrect answers, class averages, etc.) you need to either edit the default submission view or set up an additional submission view.

This KB article describes how to set up a submission view (Default View or Additional View) for a Brightspace quiz. The Quiz Submission Views video is included in this article.

Note: To check if it works the way you want it to, add the Test student account to your course.

Important: Make sure you select the correct role (teststudent) when adding this account to your course. If you use the learner role, you and the rest of the instructors won’t be able to impersonate it.

For more tips and documentation on Brightspace quizzes, please read these KB articles:

DLE Weekly Update: The Assignment Preview in Brightspace

Do you know that you could preview a Brightspace Assignment as a learner?

The Assignment Preview allows an instructor to submit and view their assignments as a learner, whenever there is the need to double check the assignments’ settings. You can simulate a student uploading a file to an assignment, grade it as the instructor, and also test your grading rubric, if you have linked one to the assignment.

Read the Assignment Preview in Brightspace KB Article for detailed information on how to use it.

Note: If you are interested in learning how to preview a quiz as a learner, read the View Content as a Learner: Preview a Quiz article.

Want to know more about the Assignments tool in Brightspace?

DLE Weekly Update: Zoom Update and Brightspace Tips

Zoom recordings of sessions that are scheduled through Brightspace via Tools > Zoom Classroom, and saved to the cloud, will no longer be automatically shared with the students in your Brightspace course.

To find out more about this Zoom update and a few Brightspace tips, please read this article.

DLE Weekly Update: Regrading a Quiz in Brightspace

Possible Scenario: You noticed that you have a “bad” question in a quiz (wrong answer is set up as correct), but ONLY after all your students submitted the quiz. The first impulse is to delete the “bad” question, hoping that the quiz points will go down (e.g. from 30 points to 29 points), and that Brightspace will show the quiz score without the points for the deleted quiz question.

What You Need to Know:

  • The deleted question is NOT actually removed from the quiz, as the delete happened after the students submitted the quiz. The change will apply ONLY to the future quiz attempts.
  • The grade for the deleted question is still included into the attempt score for all students who submitted before the change.
  • The maximum points for the quiz remain at 30 points, for ALL students’ quiz attempts, as the change applies only for attempts taken from this point forward.
  • Having the grade book column adjusted from 30 to 29 points will not work, as Brightspace will only try to keep the same weight for the attempt and not actually reflecting the new grade out of 29 points.

Options You Have:

  • Regrade all students’ quiz attempts for the bad question and give to all attempts zero points. Note that the students who already got that question right will end up with a lower grade than the other ones.
  • Regrade all student’s attempts and give to all students the maximum points for the bad question.

This KB Article on Regrading a quiz has instructions on how to regrade the quiz, by going to Activities/Quizzes and then Grade (click on the chevron of that quiz).

Recommendations:

We recommend giving the points for the bad question to all students’ attempts, while keeping the points possible for that gradebook column as 30. In this way:

  • you will avoid having grades with decimals in the gradebook, in the case that you change the points to 29
  • you will avoid having a lower percentage for the students who already have right now a higher grade, as they got that question 19 right
  • you would avoid having different grades in the quiz and the gradebook column that will be less confusing.

More articles on Quizzes:

DLE Weekly Update: How to Show Quiz Results via Submission Views

How to Show Quiz Results via Submission Views

When students complete quizzes, they will be eager to see their results AND feedback. The default quiz settings show only the overall grade, and nothing else. To release more information to students (i.e. questions, correct/incorrect answers, class averages, etc.) you need to either edit the default submission view or set up an additional submission view.

This KB article describes how to set up a submission view (Default View or Additional View) for a Brightspace quiz. To check if it works the way you want it to, add the Test student account to your course.

Important: Make sure you select the correct role (teststudent) when adding this account to your course. If you use the learner role, you and the rest of the instructors won’t be able to impersonate it.

For more tips and documentation on Brightspace quizzes, please read these KB articles: