August 2024

Assignments

Advanced Assessments help instructors and administrators to better manage courses with large class sizes and multiple evaluators, delegate and manage evaluator workflows, and reduce bias in marking.

Advanced Assessments allows instructors to:

• Assign multiple evaluators to evaluate a single assignment submission when creating or editing assignments.
  
• Choose which evaluators can publish grades for the assignment from the Assignment tool by setting them as publishers.
• Match evaluators to learners.
• Choose from two multi-evaluator workflows: One Shared Evaluation (Co-Marking) or Multiple Individual Evaluations.

For more information, refer to the Create an Assignment Topic and watch the Assign Evaluators and Publishers in Assignments | Instructor video.

Before the release of Advanced Assessments, there was no ability to create and evaluate delegated co-mark or multi-evaluate assignments.  

Also with this release, the Confirmation Email Sent Successfully message is no longer displayed for learners in the Email Status field after they submit an assignment. However, when a learner submits an assignment, an email as a receipt of the submission is still sent to them.

Previously, even if a confirmation email was not sent to a learner, they also received the Confirmation Email Sent Successfully message in the Email Status field on their Submission History page.   

Discussions

This release updates the deletion and restoration workflow for discussions associated with a group. When a user deletes a group, the associated activities, including discussions, are also deleted. These discussions cannot be restored unless their associated group is restored first.

Once the group has been restored, associated discussions can be restored using the Discussions restore workflow. This updated workflow is consistent with other group-associated activities such as assignments and lockers.

In previous releases, discussions that were deleted when their associated group was deleted could nominally be restored independently using the Discussions restore workflow. In practice, restoring these discussions resulted in errors and other issues.

To improve the user experience for learners, this release introduces several updates to the learner Reading View in Discussions. These improvements include the following:

• The Start New Thread button is duplicated at the bottom of the page when viewing a topic, eliminating the need to scroll back to the top of the page.
• The Add Attachments section is opened by default when creating a new post or new topic. Previously learners had to open the section manually to add attachments.
• The Add Attachments section is wider on screen when learners create a new thread.

Mastery View

The sort component for learner names in Grade book Mastery View is updated to improve consistency with other areas of Brightspace and to resolve minor visual issues with the previous sort functionality. Instructors can now sort learner names in any of the following orders:

• Last name alphabetically
• Last name reverse-alphabetically
• First name alphabetically
• First name reverse-alphabetically