What's new (recently) in D2L?
Each month, the Brightspace learning environment that supports the NLU Online Campus receives updates. Some updates are hidden deep in the infrastructure, but others directly impact the student or instructor experience.
Streamlining instructor work has been the theme of recent D2L updates and improvements, both small and large. Instructor-focused changes rolled out this summer and early fall include:
- Providing a clean, single page workspace to build or edit rubrics (July);
- Making it possible to print or PDF a rubric with the touch of a button (July);
- Consistent Evaluation Experience for Assignments and Discussions (September);
- Updating the rich text editor you use for creating and editing course material across the system (July);
- Merging two often redundant text fields into one in the quiz tool (July).
Additional information, along with demonstration videos, can be found below.
Rubrics
New Rubric Creation Experience
Building and editing rubrics is now faster and more intuitive. Your workspace is a single page, and you can quickly click in and out of rubric cells to build or edit the text. Reordering or reorganizing criteria becomes drag-and-drop simple. See the video demo below.
Print or PDF a Rubric -- Finally!
This was one of the most requested enhancements in the Brightspace Community. Finally, D2L has delivered -- a Print button on the rubric preview, with the option to save as PDF. A student has the same Print button when viewing the evaluated rubric.
Consistent Evaluation Experience
Assignments
You can now the work submitted by a student side-by-side with the slick, slender rubric in the Assignments - Consistent Evaluation Experience. Prefer the familiar full-bodied rubric view? The video below demonstrates how to bring it up.
Special Note
The zero-grade-from rubric bug that caused us to temporarily withdraw the consistent evaluation in August experience has been fixed. The Assignment Consistent Evaluation Experience is now available with no need for any work-around, as is the version for Discussions!
Discussions
The Consistent Evaluation View for Discussions works quite similarly to that for Assignments, while retaining and enhancing Discussion-specific features such as displaying and distinguishing a student's posts and replies.
Brightspace Rich Text Editor
The rich text editor has been optimized for modern web authoring. While there might be some initial disruption due to tools that have moved around, the new editor will quickly feel natural.
Quizzing
Quizzes were updated to reduce the redundancy of the two fields entitled "Description" and "Introduction". The Introduction field has been phased out and there is now just the Description field where you can enter a description and/or instructions for students. NOTE: If a quiz previously had text in the Introduction field, then when you next click Edit, the text will be automatically added to the Description field. When this occurs you should ensure that Description Field is “ON” so it displays to students.
