Brightspace Updates

New Feature! Email a Copy of Announcements in Brightspace

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You can now choose to send an email copy of your course announcements in Brightspace. With the November update a Send Email Copy checkbox now appears when you are creating an announcement. When you check this box, a copy of the announcement will be sent as an email from you to all users in the Classlist. This option allows you to share announcements prior to the start date of the course (even if the course is not active).

For announcements scheduled to publish at a later date, clicking the Send Email Copy checkbox emails the copy to users in the Classlist at the time that the announcement is scheduled to be published.

Create announcement page in Brightspace. A red box highlights the new Send Email Copy feature.

 

Updates to Respondus Monitor

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Two features fairly new to Respondus Monitor that you may not be aware of are the “Sensitivity Settings” and the “Show Your Work” feature.

Sensitivity Settings

Respondus Monitor now has a new feature that lets you adjust the sensitivity settings allowing you to decide how closely the system keeps an eye on student activity during exams. Now, you can now choose a stricter setting to capture more possible concerns or a lower sensitivity to reduce unnecessary alerts, such as slight lighting shifts or natural movements. This flexibility helps create a more balanced testing experience, protecting exam integrity while also supporting a fair and less stressful environment for students. The sensitivity setting is found by visiting the Lockdown Browser tab in Brightspace and accessing the Class Results section of a test.

Sensitivity Levels

    • Strict– Strict sensitivity adds the “Partially Missing” flag to indicate when the student’s eyes and/or portions of the face aren’t appearing in the proctoring video.
    • Standard – Standard sensitivity, which is the default setting, is for a typical exam environment where students have a frontal camera and are mostly looking in the direction of their screen.
    • Relaxed– Relaxed sensitivity relies less on face detection and more on whether a student is somewhere in the video frame. A Missing flag will still result if a person cannot be detected at all. Relaxed sensitivity is recommended for exams that permit students to use additional resources (notes, books, calculators etc.), write on paper, or generally, look away from their screen. It is also recommended when an instructor requires the webcam to be positioned with a side-view angle of the student.

(from Respondus, 2025)

Visit Respondus Monitor: Understanding Proctoring Results to learn more about interpreting flags and sensitivity settings.

Show Your Work Feature

This feature allows students to upload images of any written work completed during the exam. When enabled, students will be prompted to add photos of their work immediately after submitting the exam.

For step-by-step instructions and more details, visit Using the “Show Your Work” feature in Respondus Monitor.

Brightspace Updates: What’s New For Fall 2025

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A few new Brightspace features have been added recently, these features are designed to simplify your workflow and improve the student experience. Here’s what’s new:

New Quiz Experience

The Quizzes tool now matches the look and feel of Assignments and Discussions, making grading more consistent across tools. How you create and administer quizzes hasn’t changed—just the interface for evaluating them. Get familiar with the new quiz evaluation experience.

Printing Quizzes

This update provides an easy way to print a quiz and/or answer key for offline use. This feature also supports randomization options – providing a way to print multiple versions of a quiz. Learn more about Printing Quizzes.

Quizzes: Reopen a quiz attempt

You are now able to reopen the most recently submitted quiz attempt for a student, allowing them to resume a quiz from where they left off. Learn more about this new feature from the release notes available on D2L’s community site.

Ability to Download Group Enrollment Data

Need a quick list of who’s in which group? You can now export group enrollment data directly from the Groups tool using the new Export button. The exported content includes:

  • Group category details
  • Group names
  • User enrollment information
  • Enrollment dates

You can choose a specific group or all groups within a selected category to include in the export.

Students can Access Quiz Attempts through Grades

A small change that students will appreciate, students may now access quiz attempts directly from the grade book. Previously, they could only view attempts by accessing the quiz in the Quizzes Tool. Learn more about Student’s access to Quiz Feedback.

 

Updates to Visual Table of Contents Widget in Brightspace

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Updates to the Visual Table of Contents were applied by D2L the week of January 13th. This update resolves the issue where widget images do not appear in Firefox or other browsers that disable third-party cookies by default.

New default image for Visual Table of Contents

As a result of this update, if no image is present in the module description the Visual Table of Contents widget (located on the course home page) uses the course image as the default image for all displayed modules. Previously, the default image for all modules or units was always an image of a mountain unless otherwise specified.

New module description icon

Previously, if a user selected the information or “i” icon the card flipped to display the module description. Now, users will find this information under the Show Description or “?” icon.

To learn more, visit the Brightspace Release Notes available on the Brightspace Community. Please note, release notes include updates for all products and some products may not be available on our platform.

The Academic Community is Now on Brightspace

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The FCTL Academic Community site is now available to faculty on Brightspace. The FCTL Academic Community offers a curated collection of materials to enhance your teaching that are aligned with research-based best practices. Faculty will also find technology resources and resources from the Showcase on Teaching and Learning keynote speakers.

To access the FCTL Academic Community, faculty will need to self-enroll in the community on Brightspace.

Instructions: How to Enroll in a Community Site on Brightspace

Brightspace Back to School Checklist

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With the start of the semester next week, you might find the following information about Brightspace helpful.

Run the Grades Setup Wizard

Grades Setup Wizard needs to be run for each course and will help you configure Grades to suit your approach to evaluation. This is also where you would provide your students with access to the Final Grade column so they can track their progress throughout the semester.

When you access Grades within your course for the first time, the Setup Wizard loads, however if it doesn’t, click Setup Wizard tab in Grades.

Learn more about setting up your gradebook in Brightspace

If you have already run the Setup Wizard, you may not have been aware of a new feature that was recently added called Automatic Zero. This feature allows a score of zero (0) to automatically be applied when a student does not complete an activity after the due date has passed. To apply this setting, you may need to re-run your Setup Wizard. Learn more about Automatic Zero on the Brightspace Blog.

Activating your Course

Once the semester begins you will need to make your course active so your students can access the course materials.  Learn how to make your course available from the Knowledge Base article: Activating your Brightspace Course.

Turnitin

With the move to Brightspace the university had to select a new tool for checking plagiarism. Turnitin is now integrated into Brightspace. For instructions on how to apply Turnitin to an Assignment visit Assignments and Turnitin. You may also be interested in these additional resources:

Where to Get Help

Brightspace Virtual Assistant

The Brightspace Virtual Assistant is a 24/7 support tool that is integrated directly into the platform. It provides immediate access to help documentation, step-by-step guides, and video tutorials for all Brightspace users. You can also connect directly with live agents and open support tickets.

The Knowledge Base:
Brightspace articles and how-to guides housed on the Missouri State website.

Brightspace Guided Training
Located on the institutional navigation bar when you first access Brightspace. The Brightspace Guided Training is a self-paced program that includes instructional videos and step-by-step walkthroughs for many of the features you will use as an instructor.

Brightspace Tips: Automatic Zero – New Feature Alert!

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Recently Brightspace has added a new feature, the Automatic Zero feature.

This feature allows a score of zero (0) to automatically be applied when a student does not complete an activity after the due date has passed. This setting is a better alternative to “treat ungraded items as 0” and will eliminate the need for you to manually record zeros for missing work. Additionally, it provides students with a more accurate view of how they are performing overall in the course.

Automatic Zero is applicable to file and text-based assignments, quizzes, and LTI tools that have gradebook associations. The tool respects any exemptions and release conditions set for an activity. Automatic Zero is triggered within one minute of the due date and is based on local time zones for both instructors and learners (Brightspace, 2024).

This feature is available to you on Step 3 when you run the Setup Wizard in the Gradebook. Simply check the box to enable. Keep in mind, if applied after the semester has begun, the setting is not retroactive and will only impact future assignments.

Automatic Zero for Missing Submission dialogue box on Step 3 of the Brightspace Setup Wizard.


 

 

 

 

 

 



Once a due date has passed, you will see the auto zero applied. If you hover over the score a tooltip displays showing it was automatically applied by the system.

Automatic zero applied to a missing submission with an explanatory tooltip.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reference:
Brightspace (2024). Release Notes for July 2024. https://community.d2l.com/brightspace/kb/articles/26098-july-2024-20-24-7


Final Access for Blackboard is Right Around the Corner!

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Now that the spring semester has officially ended there are a few housekeeping things you may still need to do in Blackboard before access ends on May 31, 2024.

You may need to download your gradebooks. Depending on your department’s specific accreditation requirements, you should download at least the past academic year (Summer 23, Fall 23, and Spring 23). Check with your department if you need to keep more than one academic year.

Migrating content from Blackboard

While the past academic year will be migrated by Computer Services, courses older than Summer 2023 and master courses will not be migrated by default. You will need to migrate those manually. Here are a couple of things to keep in mind when migrating content:

You need to request a source course before you migrate content into Brightspace. DO NOT migrate content into a live course. Here are three reasons why:

  1. The settings from Blackboard are retained when you import content so you could inadvertently make your course available once you have uploaded the course zip file to Brightspace.
    • If announcements were included in your export file and your course is switched to “active” your students will start receiving notifications of those announcements as soon as the import process has finished. This could cause quite a bit of confusion.
  2. Students would be able to access to your course before you have had a chance to make changes and do any necessary clean-up post migration.
  3. There will be clean-up post migration.
    • It is completely normal to have some clean-up to do after migrating content from one platform to another. Using the Transitioning to Brightspace Checklist can help.

Need to make your course active (or inactive)? Learn how from the Knowledge Base article: Activating your Brightspace Course

Incomplete Grades

If you were using Blackboard during the Spring 2024 semester and have assigned an incomplete grade for a student and they will need longer than May 31st to complete work, you will need to submit a request to Computer Services to have them added to the next semester offering of your course in Brightspace.

Requesting Brightspace Access for students with Incomplete Grades

If you have questions or need to contact the MSU Help Desk, please do so by submitting your question/request directly to the Help Portal.

Are you ready to teach with Brightspace?

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You should have heard by now that the university adopted Brightspace as our new learning management system (LMS).

Beginning with summer intersession, all faculty will be teaching with Brightspace.  The Brightspace Course Readiness Checklist is constructed to align with the expectations outlined in the university wide LMS use policy, to help you self-assess your readiness to use Brightspace in your courses. The checklist covers logging into Brightspace and organizing course materials, setting up your gradebook, communicating with students and where to get support when needed.

If in doubt, Migrate!

Now is the time to request your Brightspace source courses and migrate any content you would like to keep that is currently in Blackboard over to Brightspace. Computer services will only be migrating content from the past academic year (Summer 2023 to Spring 2024). Master courses will not be migrated. If you have content from courses older than Summer 2023, you will need to migrate that content.

As you migrate content from Blackboard to Brightspace you may find the following resources helpful:

Download Your Gradebooks

Student data will not be able to be migrated from Blackboard into Brightspace, so it is vital that you to download your gradebooks from the past academic year courses.

Key dates to remember:

  • The use of the Blackboard LMS for teaching classes will end May 12th.
  • Beginning with Summer Intersession – May 13th, the Brightspace LMS will be used for teaching all classes.
  • Faculty access to Blackboard for course migration will end May 31st. 
  • Faculty will need to download gradebooks and final data from Blackboard by May 31st.
  • The Blackboard LMS will be retired on June 1st.

Tip #3: Using the Welcome Widget

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When you first access a course on Brightspace you will encounter a pop-up window, this window is referred to as the Welcome Widget. The Welcome Widget is a great tool to introduce your learners to the course. It can include text, images, and even videos. The Welcome widget can also be used to provide an overview of the course, to introduce yourself as the instructor, or to share important announcements.

Adding content to your welcome widget is just like adding content to a regular module. (If you haven’t done this yet or need a refresher visit Create Course Content.) While instructions for how to create your Welcome widget are also included on the initial pop-up window, I have included them here as well:

  • First you will need to create a module for your course that includes the word “Welcome” in the Module title.
  • Next, access your newly created Welcome module and add content by selecting the Upload/Create button and choosing “Create a File”. Each file you create is a page in your Welcome Widget.

That’s it!

Sample first page of a Welcome Widget in Brightspace.
Sample first page of a Welcome Widget.

The widget will appear when learners access the course and will reappear each time they visit the course homepage unless they dismiss it using the Dismiss Button, located on the last page. It will also appear any time new content is added (even if they have dismissed it previously).

Students do not see the Welcome Widget until you create content for the widget. If you decide not to use the Welcome widget, simply do not create a module with “Welcome” in the title. You can dismiss the Welcome Widget by paging through to the last page and clicking “Dismiss”. To relaunch the Welcome Widget, scroll to the bottom of your course home page and locate the Welcome Widget and select “Relaunch the Welcome Window”.