Display multiple images in-line in evaluation

Joshua.F.430

Is there any way to display images in-line for evaluation? I am an art professor using BrightSpace and I regularly have students submitting 5-10 jpg images which I then have to click and open each link individually to view the jpg. As you might imagine, this is arduous when assessing a large class. For PDF files, the submissions display in-line. Is there any way to display a preview of jpg files in-line for submissions? I've been struggling with this for years… Thanks!!

Johnny.B.962

@Joshua.F.430, when viewing Assignment Submissions, each file is a separate entity, so you'll have to open each separately. Prior to submission, you could have your students combine their jpg files together as a single PDF and the images would be separate pages. There are a number of free online tools to do this, but you may want to review them for security and data privacy concerns prior to having your students use them (may want to consult your organization's IT department on this to assist), so I won't be recommending a particular one here.

Alternatively, if you setup your Assignment as a Text submission, this will give your students just a text block to enter in their submission (much like creating the description for your Assignment). Students could use the toolbar to insert each of the images they want to submit into the text block and add comments around if they would like. Depending on how big the images are, this could make loading the evaluation page a bit slower for you, and you wouldn't have access to the annotation tools via this method, but it would show all the images inline as you indicated. [See comment below]

As with many things regarding teaching with Brightspace there are multiple ways to go about getting the particular result you want, just depends on how exactly you want to set things up. I hope that helps!

-Johnny
D2L LAM

Joshua.F.430

Thanks for the advice! I've currently been having them make PDF files but as you might imagine, compliance is challenging. I tried to use the text submission method but when I went to insert an image as a student view, it only allowed for an image url and not an upload. Am I doing something wrong there?

Joshua.F.430

Johnny.B.962

Oh… right… My bad! Bad suggestion there on my part. I forgot using that method requires you to be able to access the files for the course, which students wouldn't normally have. So please disregard that suggestion.

Is the compliance issue that they are just not making a PDF at all, and just submitting the jpgs? If so, you could utilize the Restricted File Extensions option to limit to PDF Only. Now they may still just convert all their images individually into singular PDF files, which wouldn't be any better than your situation currently, but that might get those non-compliant to reread the instructions one more time when they get an error that they can't upload a jpg.

I believe what I suggested previously would work if instead of an Assignment, you utilized Discussions instead. If you create a Topic as a Group Discussion and use Single user, member specific groups, then it's like a personal chat between you and the student. If the students embed/insert the images into the post rather than use the attachment field, then it might work in the way I was attempting to suggest earlier.

Maybe either of those will be helpful?

-Johnny
D2L LAM

Joshua.F.430

Thanks Johnny, appreciate it.

The initial suggesting of limiting file type is probably an option though will take some training to get them in the habit and they don't all have access to computers to process things into pdf format (I primarily teach freshmen art students).

My institution's IT dept also suggested the discussion method but honestly, the system should really support this functionality without confusing the students by putting their assignments into an entirely different mislabelled category (that is sort of like installing a toilet in a room labelled "conference room"). While discussions might allow for the functionality, the fact that it is labelled discussions is likely to cause more problems than it is worth. If there was a method to create a "discussion" WITHIN an assignment that might have worked.

Ideally, I'd like to have my department continue to robustly use D2L but it isn't institutionally mandated that we do so. I may have to look for some other learning resource that can support direct image submissions. As our department grows I would prefer to give my already overworked faculty a streamlined process that fits our needs. Sounds like BrightSpace just isn't built to support multi-image submissions (ironically, when I posted the images to this forum earlier it was super easy, exactly what I'm looking for, displays the images in-line, and seems like is generally the industry standard).

Thanks again for your help!