Gotchas — Avoid These Actions

• Sand­box cours­es (-sand­box) are man­u­al­ly cre­at­ed cours­es that are geared for a vari­ety of uses. They nev­er get delet­ed unless you ask for them to be delet­ed and serve as a safe place to build course con­tent, test out fea­tures and func­tions of Bright­space or use as a “mas­ter” course to build a course in one loca­tion and always copy/update in one spot.
• Sand­box cours­es are not linked to any reg­is­tra­tion and you should NOT man­u­al­ly add stu­dents ever to a sand­box course
• Copy con­tent from a sand­box course to a live/reg­is­tra­tion-linked course near the start of term — and then add in your ter­m’s dates and announce­ments

• Start a course nice­ly orga­nized with all con­tent (attach­ments, PDFs, HMTL pages) all struc­tured in the Man­age Files Area
• This is how cours­es should be designed and orga­nized for ease of use, to ensure no dupli­ca­tion, bloat­ing and loss of data and pro­vide you now and in the future with an orga­nized course

• Unless you need stu­dents to down­load and fill out a Word doc­u­ment, upload all your files (Word docs, Pow­er­Point files) as PDFs
• Bright­space con­verts Pow­er­Point and Word doc­u­ments to PDF doc­u­ments to show on the right side of the con­tent area — but you can help it go faster by start­ing with PDF files

• Faster, more effi­cient, eas­i­er and more con­trol over the way you build a course — use Course Builder
• Con­tent Area seems more intu­itive but it has many lim­i­ta­tions  — it is real­ly meant for quick addi­tions once you have the struc­ture set up and to view what it looks like for stu­dents

• Be effi­cient and cre­ate a blank HTML page, go to Con­tent area and add a HTML tem­plate and then copy that file in Man­age Files — so you have some­thing to start from each time

• These pages do not show up in the Pulse App, nor track for usage and should only be used for a ban­ner and overview text/outline of con­tents about the module/unit
• Instead put a ban­ner image and a list­ing con­tents or list­ing of what is with­in that unit — it will synch with the Visu­al Table of Con­tents on the Course Home Page

• Do not add bonus points to the total score or you will skew all your grades — total score must but out of 100 to have it con­vert­ed to appro­pri­ate let­ter in grade scale

• The error mes­sages (that appear at the top) in the Man­age Grades area real­ly are help­ful to pay atten­tion to and act upon.
• You should have NO error mes­sages in Man­age Grades when you are done your Grades.

• If you know your grade items and cat­e­gories, set them up with “grade item” place­hold­ers and get your scor­ing all cor­rect, then when you add assess­ments to assign­ments, quizzes or dis­cus­sions you will see the grade item already show­ing up and you just need to attach to it

• If you only have a cou­ple of assign­ments or one or two quizzes or a small col­lec­tion of assess­ments, skip the use of cat­e­gories. Cat­e­gories with one item in them is unnec­es­sary work.

• If you have mul­ti­ple quizzes and you want them all to be equal weight­ed or you want to drop the low­est score, or if you have mul­ti­ple assign­ments you want to pro­por­tion­al­ly all worth dif­fer­ent amounts accord­ing to their points total — don’t do the math — let Bright­space do that for you in using cat­e­gories.

• Cat­e­gories should equal 100% of all the indi­vid­ual items and each item should have a rel­a­tive per­cent­age of that 100% accord­ing to one of three choic­es you have when you set up a cat­e­go­ry

• Even though you cre­ate grade “items” in Man­age Grades — they are mere­ly place­hold­ers for either man­u­al­ly added grades by the instruc­tor in the Enter Grades area OR they are wait­ing for you to “asso­ciate” (con­nect) to a quiz, assign­ment or dis­cus­sion you have cre­at­ed (or will cre­ate).
• You can do this eas­i­est by going into the quiz, dis­cus­sion or assign­ment and ensur­ing the item is ‘linked to the grade­book’ so when you enter marks for those items the marks will trans­late to the grades area

Done via the Set Up Wiz­ard, do enable the Adjust­ed Final Grade Col­umn as even­tu­al­ly we will use this to send grades back to the Reg­is­trar’s office in 2023

• Use for doing any instruc­tor adjust­ments to a final grade

• Don’t squan­der the use of this help­ful pop up win­dow to noti­fy stu­dents before they enter a course
• If you don’t want to use it — then don’t set it up and stu­dents won’t see it. It will still show for you but hit “dis­miss” and it won’t show again.
• If you want to use, cre­ate a module/unit with the word “Wel­come” in it and cre­ate one or two HTML pages to host con­tent you update

• For each module/unit page in Con­tent area, add a ban­ner and some descrip­tive text — this will allow the Visu­al Table of Con­tents to be active
• If you put a lot of con­tent (text) on the module/unit page this will show in the Visu­al Table of Con­tents and look odd

• If one instruc­tor for a course, use the Instruc­tor Pro­file to add a pho­to, a few words and delete the Face­book and twit­ter links
• If more than one instruc­tor, make note of the instruc­tor names in the Pro­file but cre­ate a page for their bios in the Con­tent area
• Best not to have this remain blank — it is not pos­si­ble for you to delete this wid­get

• The default text is the name of the course (which already appears at the top of the page) so go to the three dots on right side of ban­ner image and choose to change the text to “cus­tom”
• Con­sid­er using the {First­Name} Replace­ment Code in your text to have the stu­dents’ names appear on the ban­ner to wel­come them

• The Instruc­tions sec­tion appears for stu­dents and is help­ful to add images, videos and links to guide stu­dents in doing the assign­ment
• If your instruc­tions are with­in a doc­u­ment, con­sid­er pulling out or copy­ing into the instruc­tion sec­tions

• Go to Sub­mis­sion and Com­ple­tion sec­tion on right side > Sub­mis­sion Type = File and Sub­mis­sions = Only the most recent sub­mis­sion is kept
• This allows stu­dents to make mis­takes by upload­ing the wrong file and caus­ing emails and com­mu­ni­ca­tions with you — instead they can just keep upload­ing their lat­est ver­sion and by the time the assign­ment due date comes only the lat­est ver­sion will be show­ing

• Con­sid­er mark­ing online (or offline) all assign­ments and use the ‘draft’ save mode to keep rubric items, com­ments and marks and pub­lish all at same time when ready
• Go to Sub­mis­sions in Assign­ment, check­mark all and select “pub­lish feed­back”

• If you change your mind and your assign­ment is now total­ing anoth­er mark, update the mark in “Grade Out Of” area in Edit Assign­ment page
• This grade/mark will auto­mat­i­cal­ly update IF you have select­ed this to be “In Grade Book”

• This is just an effi­cient and help­ful action to do — build all quiz ques­tions in orga­nized file fold­ers in the Ques­tion Library first
• Or bring in ques­tions from anoth­er course and edit here before you make your quizzes
• Then when quiz is cre­at­ed go to Ques­tions area > Add Exist­ing > Browse Ques­tion Library to locate your ques­tions and add them this way

• Your pri­ma­ry view is what will dis­played to stu­dents moments after com­plet­ing their quiz (most like­ly you want the default of the mes­sage, total grade and no answers or learn­er response dis­played)
• Your Addi­tion­al View (or edit the Pri­ma­ry View) you might want to set up to dis­play the answers to the quiz after the quiz is com­plete (so add a dis­play date, mes­sage and what sorts of ques­tion respons­es you want)

• If you need to edit a quiz ques­tion, go to the Ques­tion Library and edit it there (where it was cre­at­ed) so if the ques­tion is used in mul­ti­ple quizzes it updates across all