Quizzes – Confirmation dialog for learners exiting a quiz
This feature introduces a confirmation dialog to learners closing in-progress quizzes. The dialog is context-based, providing additional information about the impact of exiting the quiz (such as whether a learner will be able to return to their quiz after exiting).
Figure: The Exit Quiz confirmation dialog for quizzes with a time limit and no end date.Figure: The Exit Quiz confirmation dialog for quizzes with an end date, no time limit, or an end date that will arrive before the time limit expires.Figure: The Exit Quiz confirmation dialog for quizzes that have an end date in the past.
Respondus LockDown Browser – End of Support for Windows 7
As of June 28, 2023, support for Respondus LockDown Browser on Windows 7 will end. Several technologies relied on are ending their support for Windows 7 on that date, which means LockDown Browser will also cease working on Windows 7 computers at that time.
Students using Windows 7 will need to upgrade to Windows 10/11 or find another device that is supported. LockDown Browser can be used with Windows 10+, Mac 10.13+, and iPads running iOS 11+ (if enabled by the instructor).
We remind students that OpenEd offers a laptop loan service on the Guelph campus. Please contact cts@uoguelph.ca for booking or more information.
Instructors Only
Discussions – Introducing the new creation and editing experience
The new discussion creation experience brings create and edit consistency changes from Dropbox and Quizzes to Discussions, making it familiar and easy to learn. This first release is at full parity with classic discussions and brings refreshed workflows and improvements to restricting group topics and threads, associating topics to forums, and wording changes to a few settings that you may be familiar with.
Figure: The new Discussions creation and editing experience.
The primary panel on the left contains the same frequently-used fields as Dropbox and Quizzes. These fields are most relevant to learners and are core to discussion topic creation. The right-hand panel provides advanced options such as start and end dates and release conditions. These options follow the same logical groupings as found in Dropbox and Quizzes. Other topic-specific settings can be found in the right-hand panel.
Learners can now share achievements from the Awards tool directly to their LinkedIn profiles.
This feature simplifies showcasing awards in LinkedIn profiles. Awards can now be shared directly from CourseLink without using a third-party tool or creating a link to the award first.
To share an award to their LinkedIn profiles, learners can navigate to the My Awards page, select the desired award, click Share, and then click the new Share to LinkedIn button.
Shared awards appear in the Licenses & Certifications section of learners’ LinkedIn profiles.
Figure: The new Share to LinkedIn option in Awards.
Media Library – Adapt the player to match available space or video resolution
When using Insert Stuff in the CourseLink Editor to insert a video, the video preview screen is updated to show a responsive player and will now scale to the available maximum width. Height and aspect ratio are still respected. Previously, the player was too small, especially for users with smaller devices. In addition, users had to specify a size to embed the player.
The layout slider will be removed as the responsive nature of this update makes it redundant. Existing videos that were added to Editor before the March release will remain statically sized.
User Management and Settings – Easily change language preferences using the User Menu
A new language selector is available in the user menu to easily change the language setting to the user’s preferred language. Previously, a user had to navigate to Account Settings or use a custom installed widget with a complex workflow. Users can continue to access language and locale within the Account Settings page; this update provides an option that you can more easily access.
Figure: The User Settings menu with the current language highlighted.
Instructors Only
Calendar – Prevent duplicate calendar events on copy/import to reduce performance issues
With this release, calendar events are checked to see if they are duplicates when performing a course copy or import. When either action is performed, CourseLink only copies the following:
Calendar events that have an association, such as to an activity that is being copied into the course offering.
A single unique Calendar event that is manually created.
When a user manually creates multiple calendar items, CourseLink compares the following fields when checking for duplicates:
Title
Description
Start Date (or Start Day for All Day Events)
End Date (or End Day for All Day Events)
If its an All Day Event
Repeat Every (e.g.: every day, every second month)
Repeat On (day of week, only valid for Weekly events)
Repeat Until Date
Repeat Type (None, Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Annually)
Event Visibility
Location
Group associations
This feature only applies when performing a copy into a course offering and when importing course packages. It does not check if existing events are duplicates.
Previously, manually created or imported calendar events were not checked for duplication, creating duplicate calendar items.
Rubrics – Easily assess merits for evaluated rubrics using institutional logos
Printed rubrics now include the logo from the organization that issued the rubric; specifically, the logo image that appears on the printed rubrics is the image displayed in the course navigation bar. The logo image provides clear organizational recognition for rubrics that were evaluated in courses in your organization and distinguishes rubrics within a learner’s Portfolio if they have taken classes from multiple institutions. Registrars can use the brand recognition of the logos to assess the merits for credit from other institutions.
Figure: The institutional logo (highlighted) appears at the top of the printed rubric.
Contact
If you have any questions about the updates, please contact CourseLink Support at:
Groups – Leave Group option enabled for Self Enrolment groups
In response to instructor questions about self enrolment groups, CourseLink will enable the Leave group option for the Self Enrolment group type.
If a learner wants to leave a group that they self-enrolled in before the date and time specified by the Set Self Enrollment Expiry Date option (if selected), on the My Groups page, learners can click Leave Group.
Note: If no expiry date is set, students can click the Leave Group button at any time and transfer to another group. It is recommended to set the expiry date to lock the group memberships.
Figure: The leave group option on the student My Groups page.
Instructors Only
Intelligent Agents – Support for copying One-Time Run agents
This feature allows users to copy, export, and import One-Time Run agents and their schedules. This allows users who utilize course shells which are copied to multiple courses to schedule One-Time Run agents to run as needed in all destination courses.
Note: This functionality only applies to agents that have yet to be run. If the agent has been run, no schedule exists to copy.
Previously, agents that were configured with scheduling frequency One-Time Run would copy without a scheduling frequency.
Media Library – Support added for Bulk Actions
To improve the audio-video content management experience, this release adds the ability to perform bulk actions in Media Library.
Instructors can perform the following bulk actions:
Delete files
Restore files in Media Library > Recycle Bin
Figure: The bulk Delete action in Media Library.
Quizzes – Add quiz availability dates to your Calendar
Instructors can now add quiz availability dates to the Calendar tool in the Availability Dates & Conditions menu in the new quiz creation experience. Instructors can select the Add availability dates to Calendar checkbox when creating a quiz to add quiz availability dates to their Calendar. This feature provides instructors with more control over where Start Dates and End Dates appear to learners. Previously, only the Due Date was automatically added in the new quiz creation experience; and control over adding availability dates was limited to the Manage Dates tool. Instructors previously had to revert back to the legacy quiz creation experience to add quiz availability dates to their Calendar.
The following is a reminder of how Calendar events are generated when using either the legacy or new quiz creation experience:
If the Start Date and End Date are set, an End Date event is created.
If the Start Date is set, a Start Date event is created.
If the End Date is set, an End Date event is created.
Figure: The Availability Dates & Conditions menu displaying the Add availability dates to Calendar checkbox.
Quizzes – Additional paging options
Two new paging options are available in the Timing & Display menu in the new quiz creation experience. Instructors can choose to display 5 questions per page or 10 questions per page. The change optimizes instructors’ options when building quizzes with page breaks.
Figure: The new paging options in the Timing & Display menu in the new quiz creation experience.
Rubrics – Keep track of changes to assessed rubrics with enhanced visual cues
To maintain the integrity of assessments, any rubric that has been used to assess a grade item is locked. However, there may be incidences where it is necessary to add or update the text on a rubric without changing any points, or without adding or deleting any criteria or criteria levels. The text on the rubric, including criteria names and descriptions, level names, and default feedback, can continue to be updated after the rubric has been locked. To increase the value of the Rubrics – Clarify grading criteria by editing text fields in assessed rubrics feature released in November 2022, you can now use enhanced visual cues to keep track of the changes you have made.
Note: It is not possible to edit the name of the rubric using this feature.
When an instructor makes a change to a previously assessed rubric, it is updated with a blue highlight and the text Edited in the lower right corner. When the user saves and closes the rubric, the edit indications no longer appear.
Note: It is only possible to make changes to assessed rubrics that are created in the current course or are copied from another course. Shared rubrics remain locked.
This feature addresses the following accessibility criteria:
This release updates the list of retro or legacy browsers (specific older versions of supported browsers). If you are using a browser below the latest updates, the “Your browser is looking a little retro” warning message appears. The browsers include:
Chrome 107+ (released October 2022)
Android Chrome 107+ (released October 2022)
macOS Safari 16+ (released September 2022)
iOS Safari 16+ (released September 2022)
Firefox 106+ (released October 2022)
Previously this message would only show for browsers under Chrome/Edge 100, Safari 15, and Firefox 99. There are no changes to legacy browser requirements that remain at versions below Chrome/Edge 74, Safari 13, and Firefox 67.
HTML Editor – Equations render consistently for all users
To improve consistency in the HTML Editor, this release updates the Editor so that it renders all equations during editing or creation in the same MathJax format as when published. This helps with correct formatting and spacing of equations, which makes it easier to review work prior to publishing.
Previously there were layout and styling differences during creation and editing; the former used WIRIS format rendering and the latter MathJax.
Note: There are no changes to the Equation Editor used to create an equation to insert into the editor.
Figure: The Equation Editor showing the rendering of an equation during creation after the January Release.
Pulse – View topic descriptions
Building upon the Brightspace Pulse – Access links and images in module descriptions when you’re on-the-go feature originally released in October 2022. This feature improves the experience of learners using Pulse to review course topics by making full HTML topic descriptions available.
Previously, learners could access Content in Pulse, but could not see information included in topic descriptions that were visible in the CourseLink web application.
Figure: The View Description option for a topic in Pulse.
Instructors Only
Learning Outcomes – Clear aligned learning outcomes from assessment activities
A Clear All button is now available to remove all Learning Outcomes aligned to an assessment activity. When you click the Clear All button, a verification message appears to ensure that you do not mistakenly remove all aligned outcomes from an activity.
This feature addresses the following accessibility criteria:
Figure: The new Clear All button. The Clear All Alignments dialog requires you to verify that you intend to clear all alignments.
Release Conditions – Additional Replies Only release condition for Discussions
This release alters the existing release conditions for Discussions by adding a new Replies Only option to the Posts authored in topic and No post authored in topic condition types drop-down menus. This helps instructors release material, or not release material, based solely on replies.
Previously the only options were New Threads Only and Threads and Replies.
Figure: The Create a Release Condition dialog with the new Replies Only option selected from the Type drop-down menu.
Rubrics – Discard incomplete evaluations
The Rubric evaluation workflow provides an autosave feature to streamline the evaluation process; however, if an instructor exited the partial evaluation, the automatically saved parts of the assessment were committed to the rubric and visible to the learner. To provide a better experience in Consistent Evaluation (inline and pop-out views), the instructor has the option to Publish the current evaluation, or to Save as Draft. If the instructor chooses to Save as Draft, the working copy of an evaluation is saved to a temporary file until the instructor clicks Publish, and then commits the assessment to the Rubric. If an instructor clicks the new Cancel button, the working copy is deleted. If an instructor edits a previously published evaluation and then decides to cancel before updating, all the changes in the evaluation, including the rubric evaluation changes, are discarded.
Note: Grade book pop out windows and the Rubric Create and Edit windows currently only support the auto-save functionality.
Figure: The Discard button on an in-process evaluation. The Saving and Saved indicators no longer appear at the top of the evaluation window.
Rubrics – Statistics icon moved to allow more space to grade tasks
The Rubrics Statistics icon is available when the rubric tile is collapsed and expanded. When the rubric tile is collapsed, the icon appears at the bottom of the rubric tile. When the rubric is expanded, the icon now appears inside the grading task. This change provides expanded horizontal space for evaluators to complete the grading tasks.
Previously, when the icon appeared outside the expanded rubric tile, the space available to grade tasks was limited by the space used by the icon.
This change provides parity between the legacy evaluation experience and the new Consistent Evaluation experience.
Figure: Previously, the Rubrics Statistics icon appeared outside the collapsed Rubrics tile.Figure: Now, the Rubrics Statistic icon appears at the bottom of the collapsed Rubrics tile.
Contact
If you have any questions about the updates, please contact CourseLink Support at:
This feature updates the assignment availability dates to be consistent with the new availability date model, which was previously added to Discussions. Instructors can now include availability dates in the Calendar and have greater control over the behavior of availability dates for their learners. As a result, instructors can:
Stop late submissions.
Let learners view assignment information and submissions after it ends.
Schedule the visibility of an assignment.
Allow learners to view an assignment while preventing them from attempting it.
Post the start and end of an assignment to the Calendar.
Instructors can choose the default settings for availability dates for any new assignment. The settings are available on the Availability Date Defaults page, which can be found under Course Admin.
Figure: The New Folder page with activity dates and date settings.
Intelligent Agents – Improved consistency with the removal of legacy scheduling options
Building on the Intelligent Agents – Create Agent page facilitates more flexible scheduling and frequency options feature released in April 2022, this feature cleans up the Intelligent Agent scheduling interface by removing the unused Scheduled Agents Run Time area from the Intelligent Agents Settings page.
If a client has a course export package containing Intelligent Agents that was created prior to the April release, those agents are now imported without a schedule. Previously, these agents’ schedules were supported based on the PreferredRunHour configuration.
Quicklinks – Easily find audio-video content with improved Quicklink filters
To help users more easily find Media Library content, users can now use improved CourseLink Editor Insert Quicklink filters to better locate content available in Media Library. These new filters include:
Content Type: Filter by either audio or video content type.
Source: Filter by where content was added from. Multiple filters can be selected:
Content: Filter by AV content uploaded from the Content tool and Lessons.
Media Library: Filter by AV content uploaded or created in Media Library.
Audio or Video Note: Filter by content created using Audio and Video Note.
Imported: Filter by content added from course imports.
Other: Filter by content added prior to the addition of source tracking.
Date Modified: Filter by date modified. This changes to Date Deleted on the Recycle Bin screen.
Date Created
Previously, the Insert Quicklink feature included in Editor did not provide the ability to filter Medial Library content.
Figure: The new filter options included with the Insert Quicklink feature of CourseLink Editor.
Rubrics – Removal of legacy Rubric assessment type for learning objectives associated with quizzes
When you create a new quiz that has an associated learning objective, the Assessment Type drop-down menu no longer includes the Rubrics assessment type. Using the quiz assessment in this manner previously caused an error because it is not a supported workflow. This change ensures that users creating quiz assessments with learning objectives can no longer mistakenly use that worklflow. The Numeric assessment type continues to function normally.
Figure: The new Manage Quizzes page, without the Rubric assessment type option.
Removal of Turnitin PeerMark LTI 1.1
With the introduction of the Turnitin PeerMark LTI 1.3 tool added in October 2022, the older version (1.1) will be removed. Instructors should create all PeerMark assignments using the new PeerMark option found under the Content tool Existing Activities dropdown.
Figure: The Turnitin PeerMark integration.
Contact
If you have any questions about the updates, please contact CourseLink Support at:
