Brightspace offers instructors many tools for their course designing and delivery. You will find these under “Course Tools” in your navigation bar.
This table below summarizes the tools available under “Course Tools” along with links to useful resources.
| Course Tool | Short Description | Link to Brightspace documentation page and video |
|---|---|---|
| Course Admin | Course admin is where instructors will find a complete list of all tools for setting up and managing your course, delivering content and assessing learning. Course Offering Information is located here. |
Brightspace Documentation: Course Administration
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| Discussions | Use the Discussions tool in your course to encourage users to share thoughts on course material with their peers. You can set up forums and topics for users to ask questions, discuss course content and assignments, and work together in assigned groups and sections. You can also use this tool for individual blogs and learning journals. |
Brightspace Documentation: Discussions Brightspace Tutorials: Discussions
|
| Assignments |
Assignments allows learners to electronically submit assignment files. These files can be accessed at any time and location by the instructor.
|
Brightspace Documentation: Assignments Brightspace Tutorials: Assignments
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| Quizzes | The Quizzes tool enables you to create and manage points-measured assessments. Use them to evaluate learning progress and learning outcomes and deliver synchronous and asynchronous exams. Create and manage quiz questions from the Question Library or the Quizzes tool and organize quizzes into categories to make it easier to find assessments with similar or related content. | |
| Groups |
Use groups in your course to facilitate collaboration and/or manage access to specific groups of students. Important: Groups have a maximum enrolment of 200 users. However, you can use Group categories to manage large numbers. There is no limit on the number of group categories in a course. |
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| Echo360 Media | Echo360 is UVic’s video platform. Echo360 enables you to record in-person and online classes, create and share videos and video assessment, and support student engagement through polls, Q&A and more. | Getting Started with Echo360 |
| Crowdmark | Crowdmark is an online collaborative grading platform that allows instructors to deliver homework or assignments to students and provides students with methods to upload their completed work for evaluation. Note: Crowdmark does not support automatic grading for online assessments. |
Crowdmark Assessments |
| Competencies | The Competencies tool allows you to view, edit, and add competencies: skills, knowledge, and useful take-away for your course.Competencies help track information about the knowledge, skills and abilities learners acquire as they participate in courses or other learning experiences. | |
| LOR | Brightspace Learning Repository (LOR or LR) is an online library for storing, managing, and sharing your learning objects. A learning object can be a quiz, presentation, image, video, or any other kind of document or file. |
Brightspace Documentation: Learning Repository |
| Checklist | A checklist contains important or required assignments, readings, or other items to complete. Each checklist contains one or more categories, into which checklist items are organized. For example, you might have an “Assignments” checklist with categories for written assignments and quizzes, both of which could have multiple items that must be completed. | |
| Surveys | Create surveys and use the statistics tools to monitor current course trends, seek opinions, and assess user satisfaction. Surveys are an excellent way to solicit feedback from participants regarding any aspect of a course. For example, use surveys as a method of collecting course evaluations, mid-year reviews, and content delivery preferences. | |
| Self Assessments |
Self assessments are a series of questions that provide students with an informal, low-stakes way to evaluate their own learning / progress. Note: instructors cannot view or grade responses. |
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| Awards | The My Awards tool enables learners to see awards granted by instructors of a course. There are two types of awards: Badges and Certificates. | |
| Chat |
The Chat tool is a real-time, text-based collaboration tool. You can use the Chat tool to brainstorm ideas, hold a question and answer period, have a debate or discussion, or organize a remote study group. As opposed to other collaboration tools, such as Discussions, Chat conversations occur in real-time. Note: Chat is best for conversation and doesn’t preserve session in a way that can be graded by the instructor. |
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| Announcements |
Use the Announcements tool to read instructor messages, course information, and other Announcements updates. Announcements items appear in the Announcements widget, but you can also receive instant notifications about postings through email, SMS, and RSS feeds. View, edit, and add announcements to alert students of upcoming deadlines or events. |
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| Glossary | View, edit, and add glossary terms for field-specific jargon. Each course also has its own glossary and it can be populated with explanations of concepts and terms that are relevant to the course. |
No Brightspace documentation link No YouTube videos from D2L or Brightspace tutorials |
| Virtual Classroom |
Virtual classroom is a built-in live session tool in Brightspace. Note: Zoom is the recommended tool for virtual live sessions and is integrated into Brightspace |
Brightspace Documentation: Setting up Virtual Classroom D2L Tutorial: Virtual Classroom
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| Video Assignments |
Video Assignments allow learners to respond to course materials, or do presentations remotely. Note: Echo360 is the recommended media manager in Brightspace |
Brightspace Documentation: Video Assignments D2L Tutorials: Video Assignments
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| Zoom |
Getting Started with Zoom Meetings is a detailed walk through of all the basic functions of Zoom. Zoom Meetings for Education is an extremely helpful and thorough walkthrough of all the functions you need or may want for online lectures. We all have licensed access. |
Getting Started with Zoom Meetings (45 mins) Zoom Meetings for Education (45 mins) |