Product Idea Exchange

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

Note: To access and up-vote the following PIEs, you will first need to register to be part of the Brightspace Community.

For a list of known Brightspace problems with solutions visit our Knowledge Base.

Current PIE Items

Schema of the process a PIE follows before beong implemented

The PIE process

  • An explanation of the various submission statuses in the Product Idea Exchange (PIE) can be found on this page.
  • If there are other ideas you feel should be upvoted and included on this list, please let us know by contacting the Brightspace Stakeholder Group – Academic Co-Chairs:
ID/Link Status Idea Description
D0583 In Planning Force quiz submissions Allow the option to auto-submit a quiz upon the time/date criteria being met.
D0726 Not Planned Discussion Dates Various items relating to the need for due dates and special access, allowing students to submit outside of the selected availability or locking dates.
D1879 Under consideration Allow importing of feedback to the gradebook from CSV Import feedback to a grade item when using the import from CSV option. This could be included as an additional column labeled “Feedback”.
D2507 Not Planned Display Time Spent on Quiz on Attempts Page Currently, the only way to see the time spent on a quiz attempt is by opening individual attempts. We would like to have the time spent added as a column to the Attempts tab in the Grade Quiz area.
D3202 In Development Auto Zeroing Grade After Due Date Has Passed Faculty shouldn’t have to manually go in and add zeros to the gradebook after each end date or due date (depending on the scenario). Students would immediately be able to see that they didn’t hand in and received a zero grade, and how that zero will impact their final grade through the Gradebook.
D3624 Submitted Bulk edit announcements When copying course components over to a new course you have the option to copy over announcements, and when you choose Copy All Components the announcements are copied. Please add a bulk edit option so that faculty can change the start and end dates and/or set the announcements as drafts.
D4416 In Planning Randomize quiz answers Allowing a bulk edit of the randomization of quiz answers.
D4832 Not Planned Discussion Dates Various items relating to the need for due dates and special access, allowing students to submit outside of the selected availability or locking dates.
D5634 Not Planned Render code-based files in Document Viewer There is a need to display SQL files with .sql extension and other text files with extensions such as .sh for shell scripts. Computing courses have submissions for code. Currently the evaluator has to download the files and then display them.
D5654 Not Planned Annotations Tool Enhancement In the annotations tool, we need to keep going back up to click on the Notes icon each time we need to make a comment. Can this be fixed so that once you click on Notes it stays in that mode with whichever note was selected?
D5932 New Semester Order In the My Courses widget, let us group semesters by semester code instead of semester name.
D5965 Not Planned Course Copy: Release Conditions & Intelligent Agents When intelligent agents are copied from one section to another, any associated release conditions are only copied if the instructor remembers to also check ‘release conditions’. An automatic copy or an alert pre- and post-copy warning instructors about this would be preferable.
D6286 New Course copy: alphabetize the list of selectable components Alphabetizing items for import would make the import process much faster, especially for those of us with multiple sections every semester.
D7079
New
Filter students by late in quiz grading
 When reviewing quiz results, it would be great to filter in only those students with late attempts so that we can quickly manually adjust for late deductions
D7210 New Images in announcement notifications Faculty often write announcements to students. It is often useful to include a picture in the message. Images in announcements do not appear in the email version of the notification.
D7840 New Notifications & Announcements Email Subject Line Currently, all emails that are generated by announcements and other notifications are sent with the {OrgUnitName} at the start of the subject line and the actual subject follows at the end. This means that students have their inboxes flooded with emails that all look the same.
D8195 New Notify instructor(s) when a new student is added or removed Instructors should be able to set notifications so they know if a new student is enrolled in the course or is withdrawn from the course.
D8623 In review Push refresh and associated system notification for students writing a quiz There should be functionality to allow an instructor to force refresh the quiz window of connected students with an associated notification. This would allow instructors to push some modifications to quiz settings while the students are writing the exam, allowing them to a) increase duration, b) change Due and End Dates, and c) activate or deactivate quiz properties, e.g. Allow Hints and Prevent moving backward through pages.
D9523 New Auto global subscription to forum/topic It would be useful to have the option to enforce a global subscription to a forum/topic, rather than requiring individual users to subscribe themselves.

If there are other ideas you feel should be upvoted and included on this list, please let us know by emailing the Brightspace Stakeholder Group.

Successful PIE Items

The following are items that the committee previously voted up and were implemented or partly implemented by D2L.

ID/Link Idea Description
D0211 Discussion Dates Various items relating to the need for due dates and special access, allowing students to submit outside of the selected availability or locking dates.
D0279 PeerMark Integration It’s great to see that D2L is now integrated with TurnItIn Originality and GradeMark. I’m hoping that it can also be integrated with PeerMark. Grading is no longer just done by teaching staff. PeerMark will be able to facilitate peer assessment among students and students can learn from each other.
D0871 Sending images with emails through Classlist When sending an email by clicking on a student’s name in a Classlist, it is impossible to insert an image. This is a major issue with the system as when sending out emails, it attaches the image as part of the course files and as a result, the student does not see the image in their email as they need to be logged in to Desire2Learn to view the images.
D1812 Provide an “Are You Sure?” check before continuing with Copy Course Components Provide an “Are You Sure” pop-up before proceeding to copy or import components from another course into a live environment, or provide an option to cancel.
D2348 Make discussions equivalent to Dropbox when grading Make the grading flow for discussion identical to assignments for easier grading.
D2374 Comprehensive Special Access tool request Development of a tool similar to Manage Dates to quickly manage special access for a student.
D3497 Release Conditions and Intelligent Agents Can we have the Release Conditions for Intelligent Agents working consistently where only students who meet the condition at the time the Agent is run be identified?
D3522 Add Send button to the Bottom of the email window Send button is currently only at the top of the email window. I have to scroll back up to send a message. Please add a Send button to the bottom of the window so that we have both options – top and bottom.
D3610 Edited grades aren’t sent back to Assignments from the Gradebook Scores from the Assignments submissions are automatically sent to the grade book when a grade item is set up. When changes are made in the grade book, they are NOT automatically sent back to the Assignments submission evaluation Score box. Scores should be automatically updated going both ways.
D4998 Quiz: “No Time Limit” Allowing for an option to choose “No Time Limit” when setting up a quiz.
D4853 Announcement Post User Identification The ability to identify who posted an announcement. At present, it is not possible to identify who posted a global or course announcement either through the UI or data set. The data set only displays DeletedbyUserId.
D5124 Release 10.8.9 Changes to Assignment display When a student does a re-submission into the same folder, there is no way of knowing it’s there unless you click into each folder to find it. It seems like it’s set up well for dropbox folders that only allow 1 submission but when students can submit again and again it’s not intuitive for teachers at all.