So You Think You Can Brightspace

Learning and Teaching Services thanks you for your interest in the first season of So You Think You Can Brightspace. Our panel of 6 judges, a mixture of staff, faculty and students, were very impressed with the submissions and the results were as follows:

1. Danielle Allard – $50 gift card
2. Kate Ming-Sun – $25 gift card
3. Mark McKenna – $25 gift card

Congratulations to our winners. Here is a video showcasing some of the excellent work that was submitted – we’re sorry that not all courses could be covered in this short video, and we’re very grateful to those who gave permission for their content to be shared in this way.

Look out for our Exemplar Templates, so that you can see some of these ideas in context and copy them into your own courses. Here are some tips for how you can emulate some of what you see here:

• Module Banners – the banners you saw in Danielle’s course were designed using Canva, a free graphics website. Sign up for an account, and you can create and download the images. Then, in your course modules, click on ‘Add a description’ and then use the Insert Image button in the top left of the editor to add the banner. You can also use the description area of the module to add objectives and course learning requirements as you saw in Kate’s course, as well as dates to show when each module starts and ends.
• Groups – Jason and Eric both used groups to manage their discussions and presentations. You can set up your group structure via Activities > Groups, where you will first Add Category to specify the group numbers and tools that they will have access to, before enrolling students in this groups (if auto-enrollment is not selected). For more details, see Brightspace Essentials.
• Random Quiz Question Pools – Eric used a quiz that pulled questions at random from a larger pool, stored within Brightspace’s Question Library. You should first create your questions in the Question Library and then create a new Quiz, using Add/Edit Questions to add a new Question Pool where you can specify how many questions are chosen and from which pool (see here for more details).
• Loot Drops and Awards – Mark used Release Conditions to great effect in his courses, to trigger announcements, content release and awards. This guide provides lots of information on how to set up Release Conditions. If you want to release content (such as a fun video) in this way, first upload the content to your course, then click the chevron next to its header and Edit Properties In-place. Click on Add Dates and Restrictions, and then under Release Conditions click on Create to browse the list of behaviours that can control the release of the content – it can be based on grades, task completion, group enrollment and a whole range of other factors.