May 2024

Grades

This feature allows instructors to ensure learners can easily review feedback from the Grades tool.

Instructor feedback added in Assignments, Quizzes, and Discussions is now visible to learners under Grades.

Previously, feedback files were only available to the learner by accessing the activity.

Grades Mastery View

To improve the user experience within the Grades tool’s Mastery View, this feature addresses user feedback regarding the Publish All and Retract All actions.

Previously, a time delay could occur between initiating Publish All or Retract All actions and the visible update of the action’s status in the Mastery View table. This delay sometimes made it unclear whether the action was successfully applied.

To provide immediate feedback that a publishing or retracting event is in progress, the Mastery View page now displays as pending or updating immediately after a user clicks Publish All or Retract All. Updates can take several minutes to complete. Users can navigate away from the Mastery View page while updates are ongoing to perform other tasks. Upon returning to Mastery View, the page clearly displays the status for the Publish All or Retract All actions.

Learning Outcomes

This feature adds learning outcomes assessment into the evaluation interface of group assignments. Instructors can now assess learning outcomes aligned directly to group assignments or through rubric alignments. Instructors can also apply a learning outcome score while evaluating a group assignment. All members of an assessed group receive the same learning outcomes score, ensuring consistency and fairness in the evaluation process.

Previously, learning outcomes could be aligned directly or through rubric criteria to group assignments but were not assessable within the evaluation interface. This limitation made it impossible to capture outcomes assessment data for group assignments. Now, instructors can easily assess learning outcomes in group assignments, and organizations can gain additional data on learner achievement.

New Content Experience

The New Content Experience is updated to no longer run a user's preferred browser when viewing a PDF. Users' browser renderers created an inconsistent experience for viewing PDFs. Instead, the New Content Experience now uses the Brightspace PDF renderer to view PDF files. The change aligns the New Content Experience with the PDF renderer used throughout Brightspace.

Manage Files

As of this release, whenever users add (zip) or extract (unzip) one or more files to a ZIP archive in Manage Files, a new dialogue confirms that files are being zipped or unzipped in the background. Once the process is complete, a notification will appear in the Update Alerts (the bell icon).

Previously, adding files to a ZIP archive was not a background process; thus, there was no notification after zipping. In addition, the notification for unzipping files appeared in the Subscription Alerts area.