By Ted Haag, End User Support Manager
The start of a new semester can be a stressful time for instructors, especially if you’re working in a new and complex system for the first time. In this aid brought by the Brightspace end user support team, we wanted to put together a few resource links for some of the tools we most often see instructors have questions or issues with and some information that will hopefully make your use of Brightspace smoother.
Grades and the Gradebook
For a general outline of the Grades tool and related functionalities, we would recommend reading out community documentation for the grades tool:
https://community.d2l.com/brightspace/kb/articles/3305-about-grades
While creating your gradebook, if you run into an error message at the top of the Manage Grades tab noting that some categories do not sum up to 100%, the system is identifying categories with incomplete grading information. In essence, the category either does not have enough information to properly contribute to the final grade or has too much information. In either case, the weight of each item needs to add up to 100. Editing these values or adding or removing items should correct this issue.
Another thing to bear in mind is final grade visibility and the running final total. In the course of the setup of the gradebook, you will get to specify whether or not the final grade is automatically kept up to date and whether or not the final grade is automatically published to students. If the final grade is automatically kept up to date, you will see a running total of student grades. If the auto-publish is toggled, students will see this running grade, kept up to date whenever a new grade is added or an existing one is updated. A setting that interacts with this one in an unexpected way is the setting that affects how ungraded items are treated, as 0s or as dropped. If ungraded items are treated as zero, the running total will be low and scale upwards as more items are graded. If they are treated as dropped, then the running total will appear as a true average of what has been completed so far.
Course Materials
If you are looking to import materials from an external package or copy the materials from another course, we would recommend reading our community documentation on the import/export/copy components tool:
https://community.d2l.com/brightspace/kb/articles/16771-import-export-or-copy-course-components
If you are looking to manually create your course materials, you may instead want to check out our community documentation on quizzes, assignments, discussions, and content:
Quizzes:
https://community.d2l.com/brightspace/kb/articles/3303-about-quizzes
Assignments:
https://community.d2l.com/brightspace/kb/articles/3304-about-assignments
Discussions:
https://community.d2l.com/brightspace/kb/articles/3301-about-discussions
Content:
https://community.d2l.com/brightspace/kb/articles/3300-content-experiences
Restoring Deleted Course Materials
If you have accidentally deleted course materials that you need to be restored, we would recommend reading our community article on data restoration to confirm how you can go about getting your data restored:
https://community.d2l.com/brightspace/kb/articles/6059-how-to-restore-data
Please bear in mind the following:
Some course materials can be restored by instructors or your institutional admins, others will require D2L support, and some cannot be restored at all. A specific list can be located within the article above.
A Course Reset is not something that can be rolled back.
Material rollbacks, as opposed to the restoration of deleted materials, are generally not something that can be done. As such, we would recommend keeping a backup of course materials you are working on either within the course itself, externally in another course such as a sandbox or testing environment if you have one, or even external of the site entirely via material export.
Final Words
If you’re ever in doubt about your course materials or you are having trouble putting a course together, we would recommend reaching out to your institutional admins or support contacts for assistance.
If you can see our Homepage Support Widget (pictured below) on your Brightspace homepage, navbar support link, or Brightspace Virtual Assistant widget located in the bottom right corner of the Brightspace site, this means you have access to the D2L Brightspace End User Support helpdesk. You can contact us for support with any inquiries or issues you might be experiencing relating to the site and its many tools and features!
Brightspace End User Support Widget
Brightspace Virtual Assistant
