Forced pauses

Question

Hello,

I am developing a course that involves a lot of self reflection. My development team would like the learner to have forced pauses in their learning where they take time to reflect and integrate their learning into practice between key learning points in the course. For example. Between Modules 1 and 2, and again between modules 4 and 5, the learner would be required to take a learning break (a few days to a week) in which they would take time to reflect on the learning so far before moving forward.

I'm looking for ways to introduce a forced pause in a course and hope the community can help brainstorm how this might be done in Brightspace.

Thanks in advance.

Shonelle Wilkinson

Steve.B.446 · Answer

Sadly not. Maybe you could run it on a Monday so that they have at least paused for the weekend?

Inactive courses don't appear in the list but can be used to release content.

Shonelle.W.988 · Answer

In the first scenario you offered, is there any way to set the intelligent agent (IA) to run the enrollment after a set period of time? If I'm visualizing this correctly, having the IA run weekly won't necessarily ensure the learner has a full pause of the required number of days. For example, if they finish the course on Sunday and the IA runs Monday would only create a one day delay.

Will the inactive courses appear in their course list? One problem I've noticed in the past is hidden content (in this case it was with release conditions) confuses the learner into thinking they have less to do than in actuality.

Steve.B.446 · Answer

Assuming you want this to be automatic and not reliant on somebody going in and releasing things weekly:  Create an extra course that is inactive. Use Intelligent agents to enrol users in that course once they complete module 1 (this requires an extra permission that is not enabled by default - see Set up Intelligent Agents - Brightspace).  Have that agent run weekly.

In your main course, use release conditions based on membership of the inactive course to release the content.

Alternatively, as you tagged APIs, you could write a script to run daily that would identify students who had completed module 1 (by whatever criteria) more than x days ago and write a value to a hidden grade item which you could then use to release content.