The individual scores and feedback from Assignment and Discussion grade items are now synchronized with the grade book using the Update button regardless of whether a change was made. The Update button in Assignments and Discussions evaluations is always available to update, even when no changes were made. This feature also enables instructors to verify that the information between the grade book and the Assignment or Discussion tool is properly synchronized.

Previously, In Brightspace, when an instructor evaluated an assignment, discussion, or quiz using a rubric and saved it as a draft, then added feedback directly in the grade book and saved, the feedback did not sync back to the evaluation page when the instructor clicked Update.

This feature updates the instructor workflow of evaluating a rubric and providing feedback to students. Now, instructors can quickly assess all ungraded Rubric criteria and then go back through to add feedback where necessary. To provide a more streamlined experience for instructors using analytical type rubrics for assessments in the Consistent Evaluation experience for assignments, discussions, and written response quiz questions, the instructor can automatically set ungraded levels to a minimum or maximum value.

From a drop-down beside the rubric name in each assessment pop-out, or from a context menu in Consistent Evaluation, there are two options:

Set Ungraded to [lowest rubric level name]: where all ungraded levels within this rubric are set to the minimum value using the bottom level of the rubric.

Set Ungraded to [top rubric level name]: where all ungraded levels within this rubric are set to the maximum value using the top level of the rubric.

If you have not done so already, please feel free to access our D2L guided instructor training course by clicking the link with the D2L moose on your homepage. At first this training looks barren with only a few items, but as you complete each module a new one will open up! This training goes through the basics of D2L all the way through more advanced tools and is available to all instructors of the college. You will also be entered to win some D2L branded prizes such as a Morris the Moose plushie, travel pillows, and tumbler cups!

If you have not done so already, please feel free to access our D2L guided instructor training course by clicking the link with the D2L moose on your homepage. At first this training looks barren with only a few items, but as you complete each module a new one will open up! This training goes through the basics of D2L all the way through more advanced tools and is available to all instructors of the college. You will also be entered to win some D2L branded prizes such as a Morris the Moose plushie, travel pillows, and tumbler cups!

The recycle bin feature has been added to the Groups tool, allowing for restoration of deleted groups and group categories. Previously, all group deletions were final and unrecoverable.

PTC Has two distinct online proctoring services in addition to offering in-person proctoring at any county campus testing center: Honorlock & Respondus Lockdown Browser

Each proctoring service is unique in which class modalities they should be used for and should never be used on the same exam at the same time.

Honorlock is to be used in Online-only courses for the purpose of fulfilling the federal requirements for PTC to properly identify our distance education students – the ability to help flag cheating is just a welcome bonus!
Edit, August 13th, 2025: Starting Fall 2025 it will also be a requirement that our fully online courses proctor their Syllabus quiz to identify our online students before add-drop periods end!

On the other hand, Respondus Lockdown Browser is to be used for in-person synchronous testing at a PTC computer lab, and it’s main focus is to “lockdown” the student browser to prevent cheating.

The dashboards for both programs are in a different area but both serve the same purpose – making enabling/disabling exams fast and easy. For Honorlock you will need to select “More” on your course’s navigation bar and then “Honorlock” which will pull up a dashboard of all exams in your course. From there, you may select “Enable” next to any exam you’d like to require Honorlock, or check results & settings for exams already enabled.

For Respondus Lockdown Browser you can access the “Lockdown Browser” tab on the “Quizzes” area in D2L. It will also populate with a list of tests you can freely activate/deactivate. Please note that this area contains an option for “Require Respondus Monitor” which should not be used – Respondus Monitor is a separate product that PTC does not have.

These services can be enabled at any time before the test! Best practice is to do a sweep of your courses and enable/disable the tests in your needed service at the start of the semester – you’ll never need to touch them for the rest of that course! Keep an eye out for our “Start of Semester” checklists, there will be a reminder in them to do just that!

Privacy is very important to us and we will never require a student to consent to recording if they are not comfortable with it. If a student does not want to be remotely proctored, they may be sent to the testing center at any county campus. Staff onsite will input a code for the student that will then disable Honorlock, trading the online proctoring for an in-person proctoring session there.

You can allow students to enter a respondus test without respondus using Special Access in D2L.  Simply check the “Not Required to Take this Quiz” under “Lockdown Browser” in the special access menu. Remember to give the testing center your test password, they will need it!

NO! The passwords that have “HL_NO_EDIT_####” Schema are set by Honorlock automatically. Students should never be asked for a password for an exam that is set up and taken properly, changing the password or giving it out can make the test completely inaccessible to students or allow them to bypass proctoring all together! Honorlock will automatically insert the password for the student without them even knowing!

Firstly, check to ensure that Honorlock has been enabled on your exam. Honorlock uses the password it generates to associate with the quiz it is connected to, if it is not enabled then Honorlock doesn’t know which password to use!

If your quiz is enabled in Honorlock, it is very likely a student-side issue with not having the required extension installed. If a student starts an exam without Honorlock installed – it will prompt them to install it and provide them with a password box. Once installed, the student may begin the exam!

Honorlock provides 24/7/365 US-Based customer service for both students and instructors alike! Your student may click the “Chat Bubble” at the bottom of the screen during their exam at any time, enter their information, and be connected with a support agent within minutes to receive real-time support for any technical issues once an exam starts.

Honorlock supports most any modern device but older Chromebooks may restrict access to updating Google Chrome to a supported version. In that case, the student will need to take the exam at any county campus testing center. Please note that cellphones, even ones using Google Chrome, cannot be used for Honorlock exams.

You can get additional D2L training by clicking Morris the Moose on your D2L homescreen! This will take you to our guided online instructor training which includes online proctoring and many more topics regarding D2L! Complete it and submit the wufoo form at the end to be entered to win D2L-Branded prizes!

If you have not done so already, please feel free to access our D2L guided instructor training course by clicking the link with the D2L moose on your homepage. At first this training looks barren with only a few items, but as you complete each module a new one will open up! This training goes through the basics of D2L all the way through more advanced tools and is available to all instructors of the college. You will also be entered to win some D2L branded prizes such as a Morris the Moose plushie, travel pillows, and tumbler cups!

A warning now appears when a user attempts to add an object (such as a link or image) in Brightspace Editor that has a path outside of the current course. The warning tooltip explains that if the item is copied to another course, the incorrect path would also be copied, potentially preventing learners from accessing the object. This new warning alerts the content creator to ensure a consistent experience for learners. 

With this release, the Final Grade Audit Log page, found in Admin Tools, is no longer available. This page displays the results of a recurring task that recalculates final grades and compares them to the initial calculations to ensure accuracy.

Over the past ten years, no valid issues have been identified. Currently, the recalculation process consumes significant database resources and is no longer effective or required.

Please note that this does not make any changes to the way final grades are calculated or to the edit history seen in the gradebook itself.

If you have not done so already, please feel free to access our D2L guided instructor training course by clicking the link with the D2L moose on your homepage. At first this training looks barren with only a few items, but as you complete each module a new one will open up! This training goes through the basics of D2L all the way through more advanced tools and is available to all instructors of the college. You will also be entered to win some D2L branded prizes such as a Morris the Moose plushie, travel pillows, and tumbler cups!

A long awaited feature is finally here! It is now possible for instructors to attach a rubric to written response (long answer) questions on a quiz. This will allow instructors do add differing rubrics to multiple questions in a quiz.

The Brightspace Tutorials YouTube channel is updated to have only recent, up-to-date videos that reflect current Brightspace workflows. As part of that update, outdated videos that no longer accurately capture Brightspace’s current interface and experience have been unlisted. On October 31, all the specified outdated videos will be permanently removed. If you have embedded one of these videos into your courses, please check to see if the video is unlisted and make changes to the newly updated videos accordingly!

The tooltips in the Assignments and Discussions evaluation experiences now use in-browser experiences. This feature improves accessibility for screen-reader users and creates visual consistency across Brightspace.

With this update, the Confirmation Email Sent Successfully message is no longer displayed for learners in the Email Status field after they submit an assignment. However, when a learner submits an assignment, an email as a receipt of the submission is still sent to them.

This change is taking place due to what was triggering that message, if an assignment was submitted the message would display regardless of email confirmation status.

This is the big update a lot of you have been looking forward to! As of now, PTC currently only has access to the basic version of Lumi, meaning we currently only have the ability to generate practice questions with Lumi. Keep an eye out for future updates for more news on further capabilities!

To generate AI Practice questions with Lumi:

• Navigate to Content.
• Perform one of the following actions:
  • Click Create New > HTML Document.
  • Select an existing HTML file and click Options (…) > Edit.
• Enter a File Title.
• Select a position in the Page Content field.
• Click Other Insert Options (+) > Insert Practice.
  

• Select a supported Practice type. These practice types are marked with a star on the right side.
  

• Click Generate Question.
• If necessary, edit the Source Text field in the Generate Question dialog.
• Click Generate Question.
  

• When your Practice question generates, review the question and perform one of the following actions:
  Regenerate Question: Click to generate a new question.
  Edit Source Text: Click to edit the Source Text and then click Regenerate Question.
  Discard Question: Delete the generated Practice question.

• Click Insert.
• Select the Close (X) icon in the dialog after your Practice is inserted.
• Click Save and Close for your Content topic.

And there you have it, a brand new AI-Generated practice question using the materials provided in the source text box. This is a VERY broad overview and doesn’t delve too deep into the different question types, but feel free to experiment with this new feature!

To improve the user experience for learners, this release introduces several updates to the learner Reading View in Discussions. These improvements include the following:

The Add Attachments section is wider on screen when learners create a new thread.

The Start New Thread button is duplicated at the bottom of the page when viewing a topic, eliminating the need to scroll back to the top of the page.

The Add Attachments section is opened by default when creating a new post or new topic. Previously learners had to open the section manually to add attachments.

If you have not done so already, please feel free to access our D2L guided instructor training course by clicking the link with the D2L moose on your homepage. At first this training looks barren with only a few items, but as you complete each module a new one will open up! This training goes through the basics of D2L all the way through more advanced tools and is available to all instructors of the college. You will also be entered to win some D2L branded prizes such as a Morris the Moose plushie, travel pillows, and tumbler cups!

Brightspace’s minimum for supported browser versions increases every January and July. The July update increases the minimum supported browser versions to: Chrome 124+, Edge 124+, Safari 17+, and Firefox 124+. The minimum legacy browsers are now: Chrome 81, Edge 81, Safari 14, and Firefox 75. The following browsers are no longer supported: Chrome 66, Edge 18, Safari 11, and Firefox 66.

The much-requested feature of automatic zeros for missed due dates is finally here! Let’s discuss what this is, how to enable it, and how to keep your gradebooks up to date!

Firstly, what this feature does. PTC gradebooks are, currently, set up to drop ungraded items. This is shown by a “-%” in the gradebook, which means the grade is currently not being calculated in a student’s final grade. Previously, this would remain the case until a “0” was manually put into that grade by an instructor and it added an additional step to the process of keeping a student’s final grade up to date. With this new feature, the gradebook can be configured to set an ungraded item to a “0” automatically once a DUE DATE passes. End Dates are not currently supported for this feature and will not trigger an automatic “0”. Supported submissions include any text-based Assignments, Quizzes, and LTI tools (H5P, Third Party Integrations, etc) that have active gradebook associations.

This is not going to applied to all gradebooks automatically and it can be changed on a course-by-course basis using the gradebook setup tool. This feature will need to be turned on by the instructor of any given course should they wish to utilize it.

Students, on the other hand, will see a “0” in the gradebook for the related item and additional confirmation in their completion status that it was an overdue item.

Please keep in mind that this is an automatic system and you still may need to adjust these grades on a case-by-case basis. After the “0” is implemented, if changed it will not go back to a “0” automatically even if an assignment has not been submitted.

Keeping your gradebook up-to-date is still a top priority for our educational requirements, and it should still be regularly monitored to ensure this even with this new system in place!

Announced last week at the annual D2L conference, the AI-powered Lumi is coming to D2L Creator+! This feature will allow you to generate practice questions in the content area of courses with the power of AI. It will only draw from resources that are currently in your course and all questions will present an opportunity to be vetted before being implemented into your course. This feature is not quite ready yet but we are looking at a late August release, please look forward to it! Below is a link to a completely free webinar for how to use Lumi if you’d like to go ahead and sign up!

https://www.d2l.com/events/ai-enabled-education/

If you have not done so already, please feel free to access our D2L guided instructor training course by clicking the link with the D2L moose on your homepage. At first this training looks barren with only a few items, but as you complete each module a new one will open up! This training goes through the basics of D2L all the way through more advanced tools and is available to all instructors of the college. You will also be entered to win some D2L branded prizes such as a Morris the Moose plushie, travel pillows, and tumbler cups!

This release updates the Assignment Annotations tool from PSPDFKit Version 2023.4.0 to Version 2024.3.0 This update fixes several defects; in addition, some icons and menus have received minor changes and may vary from the previous version.

The option to directly upload a file from Microsoft OneDrive® is now available when editing and evaluating an assignment. Users can upload a file by clicking File Upload, and then clicking  Microsoft OneDrive in the Add a File window.

Previously, Microsoft OneDrive files could only be added as link attachments.

Some of you may see a new in-product feedback rating window as you access parts of D2L. This is an extremely rare occurrence and once prompted for feedback you will not be asked again in the future.

The in-product feedback asks users for ratings on one to two questions; these questions ask about users’ experience with Brightspace as a whole, their experience meeting goals in Brightspace, or their experience in a particular workflow.

D2L will be holding a virtual, on-demand conference this year! Register for free now to participate: https://d2l.tkeventsregistration.com/d2lfusion2024

Exam Guidelines can now be viewed using a side panel that does not overlay on top of exam content.  The side panel can be left open throughout an exam, providing students with better visibility of exam guidelines when needed. This information was previously only available prior to starting the exam.

If you have not done so already, please feel free to access our D2L guided instructor training course by clicking the link with the D2L moose on your homepage. At first this training looks barren with only a few items, but as you complete each module a new one will open up! This training goes through the basics of D2L all the way through more advanced tools and is available to all instructors of the college.

This feature allows instructors to ensure that students can easily review feedback from the Grades tool.

Instructor feedback added in Assignments, Quizzes, and Discussions is now visible to students under Grades.

Previously, feedback files were only available to the student by accessing the activity.

Going forward we will be adding a reminder to these monthly updates regarding the Guided Instructor Training. If you have not done so already, please feel free to access our D2L guided instructor training course by clicking the link with the D2L moose on your homepage. At first this training looks barren with only a few items, but as you complete each module a new one will open up! This training goes through the basics of D2L all the way through more advanced tools and is available to all instructors of the college.

Instructors’ attached files now appear in the Attached Files section for each student’s discussion evaluation. Students can view attached file feedback when viewing their evaluated discussion topic.

Instructors can view all attached files by clicking on the student’s name and selecting Discussions. Student can view all attached files by clicking on Discussions in Class Progress. Instructors and students can view all attached discussion evaluation files in the Class Progress tool.

Additionally, the Discussions tool’s evaluation process is now consistent with the Assignments and Quizzes tools’ evaluation processes.

As a heads up, on May 3rd we will be disabling SMS Text notification settings for all users in D2L. This is a feature that is not widely used, but is available for students on an opt-in basis from their account page. This feature is sunsetting DURING summer semester otherwise, so it will be turned off early before the semester begins.

I apologize for any inconvenience caused. Push notifications, which is more widely used, will not be affected by this change.