The Art of Effortless Instruction: Leveraging Automation in Brightspace
Education has become an increasingly complex and demanding landscape, requiring instructors to juggle numerous administrative tasks alongside their core teaching responsibilities. But, lucky for you, one of the key advantages of using Brightspace to administer learning is its automation capabilities, which can significantly streamline, and reduce time spent on, administrative tasks and improve overall efficiency. Today we will be exploring some of the best ways you can be leveraging these automation tools at your organization so you can focus more on creating engaging learning experiences.
Let's explore a few of my favourite tools that will help you let Brightspace take on some of the heavy lifting.
Release Conditions
Release Conditions are an incredibly powerful (and, in my opinion, under-utilized) feature that allows educators and administrators to control the release of content, activities, assessments and rewards based on certain criteria, or conditions.
For example: If you only want Module 2 of a course released to users after they have completed and passed a quiz in Module 1, this is super easy using Release Conditions. Or, perhaps you only want to give access to a quiz after the learners have visited every content topic. Either way (and many others), Release Conditions to the rescue!
If this sounds like a tool you could be taking advantage of, here are some best practices to keep in mind and how you can get started:
First, check out this community article that digs into how to attach Release Conditions to various content items. Then, check out my best practices below:
- Clearly define learning objectives and expectations: make sure your learners have a clear understanding of the learning objectives, the desired sequence of the content delivery, and what is expected of them. This will ensure that there are no surprises when certain content is not accessible or new content pops up.
- Communicate Release Conditions: it is crucial to communicate release conditions to learners in advance to avoid any confusion. Educators should provide clear instructions on how content will be released, what prerequisites ("conditions") are required, and any deadlines associated with those conditions. This transparency helps students understand the expectations and navigate the course effectively.
- Avoid unnecessary conditions: Although Release Conditions are a fantastic tool, let's not get carried away! Keep in mind that every condition you employ creates an additional step in the system, so using as few conditions as possible will limit the amount of time that learners spend waiting for content to be released, and more time learning!
If you want to see Release Conditions in action, check out the following video:
Intelligent Agents
One of my personal favourite ways to incorporate automation into your learning administration is by using Intelligent Agents, or IA (not to be confused with AI, although they could certainly be related as you will see).
Intelligent Agents are essentially your personal assistant in course administration and can save you an enormous amount of time, as they can perform certain tasks on your behalf such as sending emails, enrolling or unenrolling users, or changing user roles.
Imagine you have a learning path that requires the learner to complete a course before enrolling into the next. IAs can not only enroll those users into the next course when the first course is complete, they can even send a personalized e-mail letting them know of their successful completion and movement to the next step. A learner hasn't completed the course and we're approaching the due date? No problem! There's an upcoming assessment that you want to inform learners about? IAs have you covered! You'd like to send a congratulatory message to a learner for achieving a high score, or provide suggestions for improvement for a learner who may be struggling with a particular concept? Yup, it can do that too.
As you can see, there are a ton of uses for Intelligent Agents that educators and administrators can leverage. Here's a few more:
- automated reminders
- personalized feedback
- automating the movement through a learning path
- communication and support
- and more.
What on earth will you do with all your free time thanks to IAs?
If this sounds intriguing, this community article contains all the ins and outs of Intelligent Agents, and the following tutorial shows exactly how to set them up in your environment:
Pro tip: Use the "Practice Run" feature to run a test run of your Intelligent Agent before making it active to ensure it is running as expected and scooping up the correct users based on the conditions you set. Take it from me, better to be safe than sorry on this one! ◡̈
Intelligent Analytics and Reporting
Believe it or not, automation in Brightspace extends beyond administrative tasks. Educators can leverage Brightspace's automation tools to gain insight into student performance, engagement, and progress.
In fact, this topic deserved its own heading because I think it is so important, but guess which feature you can use to do this?! Thought we were done with talking about Intelligent Agents?
I think one of the most fun things about using an LMS like Brightspace is how easily you can personalize the experience. In this case, why not set up an Intelligent Agent to send YOU, the instructor or administrator, an e-mail informing you of your learner's progress and/or success? For example: Perhaps a learner has consistently been getting failing grades on every quiz in the course thus far. Or, we are coming up on the midway point of the course and a learner hasn't visited any content topics yet. You can set up an IA to send an e-mail to yourself when this occurs, giving you the insight you need to reach out to those learners to offer support.
Additionally, if Data Hub is more your jam, you can even automate the generation of reports in the Data Hub using APIs.
Grading and Feedback
Last but certainly not least, Brightspace can automate the grading, feedback, and release of grades to your learners. Yup, you read that right. Teachers, rejoice!
For objective assessments (such as a multiple choice quiz), Brightspace can automatically grade student answers and assign scores based on the predefined answers, and provide feedback, eliminating the need for any grading from the instructor at all! The best part is (okay, maybe the whole "not having to grade the quiz" was the best part, but I digress) is that you can review and adjust the results of the automated grading before releasing the grade to the learner if you like. Or, heck, why not one more piece of automation for you - the system can release it automatically!
In other cases, such as where you may need a human eye on an assessment (like a submitted assignment or essay), you can semi-automate the grading process using rubrics and grading schemes. Because, well, as smart as Brightspace is, it still needs to know how it is grading these assessments and what that grade is based on. But in doing so, you can easily and quickly grade your learners based on pre-determined criteria and the system can calculate the grade for you. To take it a step further - by setting up and using the Gradebook, you can even have it automate the calculation of the final grade.
Check out this article in the community to learn more about Grades and grading.
All in all, using automation and Brightspace's grading tools helps ensure consistency in grading across learners and courses.
To Wrap it Up
No matter how you use automation in Brightspace, doing so not only saves time and improves efficiency, but it allows you, our educators, to focus on more critical tasks like Instructional Design (!) and supporting your learners.
If you would like to hear any more about any of the tools listed in this article, please reach out to your Account Team. We are all here to help ensure your success.
Comments
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@Jenna.L.923
Hi Jenna, Is there an event, webinar or workshop because you mention "today we will explore….". Or did you mean in general because of the tools in Brightspace -
My sincere apologies @Jay.S.308 - I posted a little prematurely before my post was complete. It is now ready for reading and discusses various automation tools in Brightspace. Sadly, no automation webinars or workshops on the horizon as of now, but I recommend checking out this page on our website if you are interested in webinars!
