Content

Content is a space that houses course and lecture materials, lessons and documents.

It is the central design space for online asynchronous and synchronous learning experiences.   For face-to-face courses it is the key space for any materials that are student facing.

The TA role in Brightspace does not allow for TAs to modify the Content area; modifying is part of an instructor role.

Generally content is best organized with a series of “units” or tabs in a vertical organization on the left side of the Content screen.  Within a unit will be what Brightspace calls HTML documents or other kinds of documents.

Content can be designed in many different ways with benefits and drawbacks for each decision about how to design content.  If you are uncertain or your instructor has requested help with design, please feel free to reach out to cpi@brocku.ca for some tips and tricks.

Assignments

Assignments is a space to collect student submissions and documents. It is a one to one conversation between a learner and an instructor or TA, students only have access to their own materials and their own feedback.

TAs can see, grade and publish feedback in the Assignments area.   Assignments can be set up in a variety of ways to accept files (including video submissions) from students.

Assignments can be configured for group submission (all students get the same mark, but it can be adjusted in Grades) or an individual submissions.  Additionally multiple files can be submitted by one student, or one group to a single assignment.

Assessing Assignments 

When assessing and evaluating assignments we want to think about clarity, specificity, inclusivity, trauma-informed practices, and the other elements of Nicol’s chart (2010) of the Principles of Effective Feedback.

Feedback can come in mutli-modalities, we should understand whether we are giving feedback OF learning (summative) or FOR learning (formative).

Choosing one space to grade for an assessment is important for accuracy, consistency and efficiency, so if grading in Assignments, grade all the submissions in Assignments.  If grading in Grades, enter all the grades in Grades.

Overall Feedback and Overall Grade

Brightspace offers many different assignment feedback options that can be used when grading assignment submissions. The two main forms of feedback are overall feedback and overall grade, which provide summative feedback for students on their assignment submission. It is possible to provide formative feedback to students in the overall feedback area by offering methods or tools for improvement or requesting a meeting for further discussion.

Learn more about the steps for grading submissions in our Grade Assignment Submissions documentation.

Annotator Tool

Brightspace offers a robust annotation tool where instructors can provide specified formative feedback for student assignment submissions. With options such as creating sticky notes on the submission document, highlighting passages of note, and using shapes to emphasize specific content, instructors have many different ways to provide feedback for students to work from.

Learn more about the ins and outs of the annotator tool from our Annotation Tools documentation.

Publish vs Save as Draft

Many instructors will wish to publish feedback on assignment submissions to every student at the same time. This is done by saving each individual student’s feedback by selecting Save draft, and then publishing them all at once when done. Publishing feedback as a group is best done when instructor’s want every learner to address the feedback at the same time.

There may be circumstances where publishing feedback on an individual, one-at-a-time basis could be beneficial. For example, instructors may find that releasing feedback individually when the assessment is scaffolded or ties into other assignment to be beneficial. Students may not submit at the same time, but may require feedback soon after submission to be able to move onto the next assessment. Additionally, it’s important to keep in mind that feedback should be released in a timely manner, and that releasing other students feedback a bit later (if they are submitting late or had other extenuating circumstances) might be a better practice than hanging on to all the feedback before releasing it. Releasing grades and feedback to students one at a time can be accomplished by selecting Publish at the bottom of the feedback page.

This video by Stony Book University is a concise and easy introduction to grading in the Assignments tool:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=vQ6SWQvnZRU%3Ffeature%3Doembed%26wmode%3Dopaque%26rel%3D0

If a Rubric is attached to the Assignment, it will appear above the Overall Feedback space and you can enter the ratings there.  Remember to always select a rating before changing any individual criteria grade.   The Rubric will populate the Overall Grade field automatically.

Discussions

Step-by-step instructions about the technical aspects of setting up Discussions can be found here: Discussions instructions.

In creating Discussions assessments for students the key to designing them effectively is to remember that each Discussion set-up is contextual and most often assessment specific.

Discussions Glossary:

• Forums are used to house discussion topics that are similar. For example, there might be several discussions in the first week of the course, so a forum titled “Week One Discussions” could contain those.
• Topics are where the discussion actually takes place. This is where students can post threads in response to a discussion prompt.
• Threads are the initial comments added to a discussion topic.
• Replies are responses posted to a specific discussion thread.

Quizzes

Quizzes is the tool where weekly quizzes, mid-term or final exams, surveys or polling, and other types of question and answer assessments happen.   Quizzes is also connected to the Survey and Self-Assessment tools. Quizzes can set up for a variety of purposes that range from final exams to surveys, polls and weekly quizzes.  Most summative assessments like exams or term tests will have a single attempt restriction, time limits, auto-submit and end dates that require students to take the quiz in a structured way.   Feedback is usually released in a controlled, restrictive way for summative assessments.  Formative assessments allow for more flexibility for one or more of those settings.

Quizzes can be formative or summative:

Formative assessments evaluate the progress a student is making in a course. Essentially, it is using assessment as learning or assessing for learning, where the learning is part of the assessment rather than a final destination.

On the other hand, summative assessments evaluate what a student has learned in a course, and how well they are able to demonstrate it.

There are different designs and structures that support formative and summative quizzing assessments and in Brightspace these are represented by three different options:

• A Quiz provides students with a score. Quizzes can be linked to the gradebook to affect the final grade, but are not required to be. This tool can be used for both formative and summative assessment but is commonly used for summative assessment (i.e. quizzes, tests, exams).
• A Survey is not graded or scored, but does provide results to the instructor. Survey results can be viewed and downloaded as needed. Surveys can be anonymous.  Surveys are good to collecting information and polling students or formative assessments.
• A Self-assessment is solely for the purpose of the student to assess their understanding of the content. Instructors cannot view the results of a self-assessment, but they are able to see who has taken the self-assessment. Self-Assessments are only formative as an assessment.

Grading in Quizzes

Most grading in Quizzes happens automatically for question types such as multiple choice, true-false, fill-in-the-bank, but Written Response questions will need grading by a TA or instructor.   Grading in Quizzes is accessed by finding the quiz and selecting the downward facing arrow and select “Grade”.   Grading can happen by the user or by question tab as per this help article from DePaul University: Grading Quizzes.

Creating Quizzes

If you are asked to set up Quizzes there are a number of parameters to consider.  A good starting point is this article Create a Quiz.

Quiz questions can be created in the quiz creation screen or in the Question Library.  If you want to create a structure where students answer 5 questions out of a list of 10 starting in the Question Library is necessary.

Classlist

Classlist is available to TAs and Instructors only.  It is not available to students.  Class list is where you can see the roster of students enrolled in the course and it is auto-populated from the Registrar’s office.   If you are looking for a particular seminar you can “View by” and choose “Sections”.  Sections is the name of seminars in Brightspace.   You can email students from the Classlist, but they cannot reply back to you directly, it will come from a Brightspace email that does not have a reply-to function.

Grades

Grades has two separate areas. One is called “Enter Grades” and is the default landing space.  Enter Grades is where TAs can enter numeric grades directly into a spreadsheet view.   “Manage Grades” is where the columns and properties of the columns or grade items are set up.   Assessments already built and sent to gradebook may yet need some set up in the Manage Grades area.

Entering grades requires the selection of a grade item (column) and then a selection of the downward facing arrow beside the title.  One of the menu options is to “Enter Grades” and it will take you to a space with fields that can be entered.

Entering zeroes in this area is important if a student has not submitted or been present, even if the gradebook looks like there is a zero in the larger table.   Please speak with your instructor about extensions, trauma informed practices and allowing students to submit required work.

More detailed “How-to” options can be found in the article Grades.​