Time Saving Tips + Tools — Brightspace

Want to save some time when build­ing or work­ing in your Bright­space cours­es? Want to stream­line your course devel­op­ment? Want some help­ful tips to save you some work? This page con­tains a col­lec­tion of help­ful tips and tools in Bright­space to help you SAVE TIME! Select a tip to explore and jump to the loca­tion down the page or scroll to see them all!

Man­age Files: Upload Zipped Course Files in One Click	Man­age Files: Make Dupli­cates of One HTML Doc­u­ment with a HTML Tem­plate	Man­age Files: Keep an Orga­nized File Struc­ture for Ease in Copy­ing, Shar­ing, and Design­ing in Future
Course Builder: Build Your Course Via Drag and Drop	Course Builder, Con­tent and Man­age Files: Open Three Brows­er Tabs for Ease of Use	Man­age Dates: Change Dates for All Course Con­tent in One Spot
Bulk Edit: Edit and Fix Labels and Val­ues for Assign­ments, Quizzes and Grades in One Spot	Ques­tion Library: Build Quiz Ques­tions Once and Reuse Mul­ti­ple Times	Event Log: See His­to­ry to Restore Delet­ed Items or Stu­dent Grades
Class Progress Tool: Get a Snap­shot of How Stu­dents Are Doing Across Whole Course	Quick Eval: See all Stu­dent Eval­u­a­tion Items in One Loca­tion	Pin­ning in My Cours­es Wid­get: Pin those Cours­es you Fre­quent­ly Access
Spread­sheet View in Grades: Man­u­al­ly Enter, Edit and Change Grades

BONUS Time Sav­ing Tip: Cre­ate “mas­ter” cours­es (via request­ing sand­box cours­es) to house your cours­es with­out dates. Enhance and update the course in the mas­ter course shell. Each term make a copy of the mas­ter course and pull into your live/SRO reg­is­tra­tion-linked cours­es. Share mas­ter cours­es with oth­ers in your depart­ment (by adding them as instruc­tors) to be able to use the mas­ter course for their sec­tion of the course offer­ing.

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If you have all of most of your course con­tent in fold­ers on your com­put­er (e.g., PDFs, images, assign­ments etc.), zip them into one file — and upload the zipped file Bright­space via Man­age Files. Then click on “unzip” and expand to be the same orga­nized set of fold­ers.

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Manage Files: Make Duplicates of One HTML Template Document

Here’s how to make a HTML page, add a tem­plate and then make mul­ti­ple copies for var­i­ous mod­ules all at once!

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MaNAGE FILES: Keep an Organized file Structure

Any web­page, any page in a dig­i­tal learn­ing envi­ron­ment or learn­ing man­age­ment sys­tem always has a back-end file struc­ture. Keep your file struc­ture orga­nized and in align­ment with the same set of files and fold­ers on your com­put­er. Huge time saver now and in the future when build­ing your course.

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Course Builder: Build Your Course Via Drag and Drop

Course Builder (found under Course Admin) is help­ful tool to build con­tent pulling in files from Man­age Files and organizing/arranging and lay­ing out your course for the Con­tent area and your stu­dents. Seri­ous­ly not giv­en enough props — check it out!

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Three Browser Tabs Open at Same Time: Navigating Content, Course Builder and Manage FIles easily

Stop wast­ing time nav­i­gat­ing between Con­tent, Course Builder and Man­age Files with­in one brows­er win­dow — instead open three brows­er tabs in one win­dow and just click and REFRESH each page as you make changes. So much eas­i­er to build in Course Builder and upload files (in Man­age Files) and see how things look (in Con­tent) with less clicks!

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Manage Dates: Change Dates for All Course Content in One Spot

Man­age Dates is a very handy tool to see ALL of your due dates, start dates and end dates for all of your con­tent, quizzes, assign­ments, dis­cus­sions — all in ONE SPOT. You can see the date but also the state (vis­i­ble or invis­i­ble). While it is pos­si­ble to change and edit dates with­in each assess­ment and each con­tent item, Man­age Dates gives you a bird’s eye view of all of your dates across the whole course and you can change and edit in this same spot. Man­age Dates also lets you edit in bulk (but­ton called “Bulk Edit Dates”)- a col­lec­tion of con­tent pieces or many items at once rather than one by one. Also Man­age Dates allows you to edit ALL the dates in a course by a whole year or a whole term etc through “Bulk Off­set Dates” (e.g., change all dates by 365 days or 366 days to change dates from a pre­vi­ous year etc.).

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Bulk Edit: Edit and Fix Labels and Values for Assignments, Quizzes and Grades in One Spot

There are three key spots to find “Bulk Edit” oppor­tu­ni­ties to have one screen to edit labels, dates and acces­si­bil­i­ty eas­i­ly and to save you time. There is a fourth loca­tion in Man­age Dates that allows you to bulk edit dates for the whole course.

1. Bulk Edit  (under Assign­ments)
2. Bulk Edit (under Quizzes)
3. Bulk Edit (under Grades)
4. Bulk Edit Dates (under Man­age Dates)

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QuESTION Library: Build Quiz Questions Once and Reuse Multiple Times

Build your ques­tions (or import exist­ing ques­tions) into your Ques­tion Library. Your ques­tion library is like your ware­house of all ques­tions sort­ed by ‘sec­tions’ (or file fold­ers). Build in the library first and then bring into each quiz as you need. Do not build your quiz ques­tions in the quiz itself — if you delete the quiz you will lose the ques­tions!

 

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Event Logs: See History to Restore Deleted Items or Student grades

Grades — Found under “More Actions” — par­tic­u­lar­ly help­ful in both set­ting up your grade­book but also in track­ing your man­age­ment of stu­dent grades. See more here in D2L Bright­space Com­mu­ni­ty Help page.

Assign­ments — Found under “More Actions”

Quizzes — Found under “Attempt” link under a stu­dent sub­mis­sion you will see “Quizzes Event Log” to explore the his­to­ry of the time when the stu­dent start­ed the quiz, saved each ques­tion and when they sub­mit­ted and com­plet­ed the quiz. See more here in D2L Bright­space Com­mu­ni­ty Help page.

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Class Progress Tool: Get a Snapshot of How Students Are Doing Across Whole Course

The class progress tool helps instruc­tors get a snap­shot of how all stu­dents are doing in the course with aggre­gat­ed infor­ma­tion on access to pages, grades etc. Video shows what an instruc­tor sees as well as what a stu­dent sees. Class Progress tool does not allow stu­dents to see each oth­er’s progress — just their own progress.

 

This is D2L’s short sum­ma­ry of the Class Progress Tool.

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Quick Eval: See all Student evaluation Items in One Location

A handy fea­ture of Bright­space on both the main home page of the plat­form and on the course home page of each course is “Quick Eval”. This is a fea­ture to allow instruc­tors-only to see what sub­mis­sions have come in from stu­dents and what is requir­ing mark­ing — all in one spot.

The Quick Eval on the Bright­space home page shows all cours­es and all sub­mis­sions received where­as the Quick Eval on the course home­pages of each course only shows what has been sub­mit­ted in that spe­cif­ic course.

This video from D2L gives you anoth­er per­spec­tive on how to use Quick Eval where the demo has more items to grade.

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Pinning in My Courses Widget: Pin those Courses you Frequently Access

You can­not delete or get rid of a course (course sec­tion or cross-list­ed sec­tion) but you can PIN cours­es or sec­tions you want to fre­quent­ly access.

 

Check out this video for some quick tips in using the PINNING fea­ture in My Cours­es wid­get and the waf­fle icon (course selec­tor).

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Spreadsheet View in Grades:Manually Enter, Edit and Change Grades

For Grade Items that are not marked by Bright­space or by you with­in the plat­form, you will need to use the Spread­sheet View in Enter Grades found under Grades.

This allows you to man­u­al­ly enter grades, over ride or edit grades and also upload grades from a spread­sheet offline and also export or down­load all grades.

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