The Intelligent Agents tool monitors an org unit to find activity that matches criteria that you set. The criteria that the agents search for are log in activity, course activity, and release conditions in Brightspace.
Example uses for agents include:
- Emailing users with grades below a certain level
- Checking for users that have not logged in within a specific number of days
- Checking for users that view a specific content topic
Requirements
The following are required to use Intelligent Agents:
- To see and use Intelligent Agents, you must have the required Intelligent Agents permissions applied to your role. These permissions can only be accessed by your organization administrator.
- To locate the Intelligent Agents, navigate to Course Admin from your navbar.
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Important: If you cannot find Intelligent Agents in your Brightspace instance, contact your organization administrator to obtain required permissions.
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Visual tour of Intelligent Agents
Figure: Use Intelligent Agents to create new agents, group Agents into categories, export a history of all run Agents, and more.
- Create a new agent, create and edit categories to group related agents together, and select More Actions for more options.
- Enable, Disable, Delete or Bulk Edit existing agents.
- Use the table to select agents, edit agents, and review information about agent run dates.
- Use the drop down menu to filter agents.
- Customize email settings related to Intelligent Agents.
Watch how to encourage engagement using Intelligent Agents
Considerations and best practices for intelligent agents
When you set up an intelligent agent, you must decide on the following:
What the agent is looking for
The agent looks for specific conditions or criteria, such as:
- User login activity
- Course activity
- Release conditions (rules like completing or not completing something)
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Important: Agents check these conditions at the moment they run. This means a user who met the condition earlier may not meet it later, especially for “NOT” conditions (for example, has NOT logged in).
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How often the agent will run
You decide how often the agent checks for users who meet the criteria. You can choose to set a run schedule or to run the agent manually:
- If you set a schedule, it runs automatically.
- If you don’t set a schedule, you must run it manually from the Agent List page.
What action the agent takes
When the criteria are met, the agent can:
- Change course enrollment (in the current course or another course)
- Send an email to the user, their auditor, or another person
- Take no action (useful if you only want reports showing who meets the criteria)
Replacement strings and language locale settings
Your agent can use replacement strings to automatically personalize a learner's last course access date or last login date in an email. If you decide to use replacements strings, you must consider your organization's default system locale language settings and your course offering level locale settings.
For example, if your organization is set to a default system locale of English (Unites States), but the course that your intelligent agent is sent from is set to Override locale preferences to a different language, the replacement string text will use the course offering locale settings.
Specifically, the following replace strings are translated based on the either the default locale settings for your organization or the override locale you set at the course offering level:
- {OrgUnitStartDate} - The start date specified for the org unit.
- {OrgUnitEndDate} - The end date specified for the org unit.
- {LastCourseAccessDate} - The date the initiating user last accessed the course.
- {LastLoginDate} - The date the initiating user last logged in.
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Note: For more information about setting your default locale, refer to Set a default locale. To learn more about the replacement strings you can use in an intelligent agent, refer to the Replace strings available for intelligent agent emails for agents section of Set up Intelligent Agents. |
How often the agent takes action
You choose whether the agent should:
- Act once when a user first meets the criteria, or
- Act every time it runs (for example, sending reminder emails).
Best Practices for Using Agents
To get the most value from intelligent agents, consider these tips:
- Use a consistent naming convention so the purpose of each agent is clear.
- Use the Description field to add notes or reminders about what needs to be updated each term.
- Decide if the agent should repeat (for example, sending reminders regularly).
- Use replace strings to automatically personalize emails (like inserting a student’s name).
- Avoid creating too many agents, especially if the information can be shared with students in another way.