Academic Technology Services | Academic Tools for all SBU faculty & students (2024)

In order for student to see their grades in Brightspace, you’ll need to automatically or manually release final grades. (Note, releasing final grades in Brightspace does not send grades to SOLAR; you can eitherimport your final gradesOrenter them in SOLAR)

Before releasing final grades to students, you must first check your Grades settings to determine which type of grade will be release and if final grades are set to be released automatically. Alternatively, you can choose to manually release final grades.

For more information: https://it.stonybrook.edu/help/kb/releasing-final-grades-in-brightspace

Creating Letter Grades in Brightspace

It’s time for Wednesday Wisdom….on a Thursday! We apologize for the late post, however we have a great tip for you this week. Did you know that you can create letter grades schemes in Brightspace? With these schemes, you can automatically show a letter grade next to each student’s score on a graded assignment. To learn more, check out this article!

Customizing the Navbar in Your Course

Did you know? If you use Groups in Brightspace, your students can’t see the group tool in their red navbar unless you manually customize it. Fortunately, customizing your navbar in Brightspace is a straightforward process that puts you in control of what your students canaccess with ease. By tailoring the nav bar to suit your specific course needs, you can enhance the user experience and streamline access to important resources.

With Brightspace’s customization options, instructors can add or remove shortcuts to various areas of the platform directly from the navbar. Whether you want to prioritize quick access to the Content tool, Discussions, Quizzes, or any other component within Brightspace, customization empowers you to tailor the nav bar according to your teaching style and course requirements. Additionally, instructors can rearrange the order of these shortcuts, ensuring that the most frequently used tools are prominently displayed for both you and your students. By taking advantage of these customization features, instructors can create a more intuitive and efficient learning environment within Brightspace. To learn more on how to customize your navbar, check out this article.

Task/Assignment Management in Brightspace

Do you currently use the built-in Brightspace calendar?

Do you know how to add the Work-to-do widget to your Brightspace homepage?

Both these tools help keep your students organized!

To find out more, join us this Thursday for our Mini-Byte.

Deleting Unwanted Grade Items

As an instructor using Brightspace, keeping a tidy gradebook is essential to ensure grade calculations are accurate and easy to understand for both yourself, and your students. However, achieving this cleanliness sometimes requires a bit of digital housekeeping, especially when it comes to deleting grade items. You may find that the process of deleting some grade items is simple when running into old activities, or duplicate grades that need to be removed. However at times, you may run into a situation where some activities seemingly cannot be deleted. This week, we’ll be focusing on how to remove these pesky grade items that seemingly won’t go away.

The reason some grade items seemingly cannot be removed is because of their association to an assignment, discussion, or quiz. You’ll notice in the Manage Grades tab of the Grades area, certain grade items will have something listed next to them in the Association column. This will usually say Assignments, Discussions, or Quizzes.

This means that those grade items are associated to either an Assignment, Discussion, or Quiz created in Brightspace, and needs to be disassociated before it can be removed. To learn more about how to disassociate these grade items and how to delete them, check out this article! In addition, we’ll be talking about this and other gradebook topics in our webinar on Common Gradebook Issues and How to Resolve Them on Tuesday, April 16th from 1:00 to 2:00 pm. Click here to register! We hope to see you there!

Are you currently using the built-in Brightspace Calendar tool?

If not, you should start today!

Display all upcoming events to learners in one spot.

Add items such as:

• Assignments
• Quizzes/Exams
• Project due dates
• Office Hours
• In-class Events

Students have told us that they are more on track with their assignments and exams/quizzes when their Instructor uses the built-in course calendar!

For more information: https://community.d2l.com/brightspace/kb/articles/18115-calendar

Thinking of what you could do this spring break?

How about previewing your grades in Brightspace!

Make sure grades are accurate for your students before they return from break!

Use the Preview option to see exactly how a student sees his/her grades.

1. In Brightspace,click the course selector near the top center and select the course
2. Once in the course, in the Navbar select Grades
3. Near the top left, select Enter Grades

Scroll down (or use the View By or search tools) to find the student whose grades you want to preview grades for and select the dropdown next to the student’s name and select Preview

In Brightspace, instructors have the ability to create groups to facilitate collaboration amongst their students. Once groups are created, instructors can use the groups for various purposes.

Examples include creating:

• Group Assignments
• Group Discussions
• File sharing amongst group members

The Question Library is a central repository that stores and archives questions which you can reuse within a course. You can create multiple collections within the Question Library to organize your questions by type and topic, making it easier for you to find questions for your quizzes, surveys, and self assessments.

As a best practice for storage, organization, and easy access, we recommend that you create all your questions using the Question Library. You can also consolidate questions created within the Quizzes, Surveys, and Self Assessments tools by importing them back into the Question Library.

Want to check in on how students are progressing in your Brightspace course?

Instructors can access Class Progress and see overall how all students are doing!

You may want to use the Class Progress tool to do any of the following:

• Monitor progress for any or all users in your course
• Prepare progress reports
• View user profiles, email users, or instant message users
• Track when a user accesses the course and downloads course content
• Track a user’s grades, completion of learning objectives, access of content topics, participation in discussions, assignment submissions, quiz submissions, checklist completion, survey responses, login history, and system access.
• Set up intelligent Agents for learners who are falling behind in a course
• View feedback and submissions for assignments, discussion topics, and other assessments for individual learners