Instructor Quick Guide for Springboard 10.6 The Appearance has Changed One of the first things you will notice is that w e have updated the Springboard logo, color scheme, and the navigation bar. By default, the course homepage should look similar to this: Why does the interface look different? The new interface creates easier navigation throughout Springboard while focusing your attention on each page. The pages will load and perform better on a wide variety of mobile devices. Why did the navigation bar change? Over the years, many new features have been introduced to Springboard. We want to make it easy for instructors and students to access these tools, but also keep the default navigation bar from stretching across multiple lines. We've condensed the existing links (and a few new ones) into dropdown menus in order to provide quick access to all of the key tools. Can I use the old navigation bar? Yes. You can still choose the NavBars option from your My Tools menu to choose the Springboard 10.3 Default NavBar. Rev. July 19, 2016 Page: 1
Tool Names have Changed One of the most obvious changes will be that D2L has renamed a few key tools: News will become Announcements Dropbox will become Assignments (students and instructors often confuse the D2L Dropbox with the file storage system Dropbox) Edit Course will become Course Admin Pager will be called Instant Messenger Why are tools changing? D2L performed extensive user testing with new, first time D2L users and found that these tool names were the most easily understood by new users. Can I use the old names? Short answer: Yes. (We even made it easy for you to get there, there s a new item on your My Tools menu called Rename tools.) Longer answer: Not really recommended. Keep in mind that when the tool name changed, all of the documentation automatically changed. We install D2L s help documentation. Students also know how to Google things like How do I submit an Assignment in D2L? Unless your class is very confused or you have drafted a lot of custom help for your students, we recommend that you use the new default tool names. Personal Dashboard The Personal Dashboard and Course Setup Checklist is an optional new landing page and workflow for instructors that provides a welcome tour and task list for a quick and easy way to setup your courses. The Personal Dashboard homepage displays an instructor s full course list. You also have the ability to set current courses as favorites for faster access. You can also view a notification if your courses are not visible to students yet and quickly view and edit your profile from the Dashboard view. If you want to access your original MyCourses home page, you can select the Classic Homepage link. You can also choose your default landing page to be either the Classic Homepage or the Personal Dashboard by clicking the Settings link. The Settings link also allows you to reset the Welcome Tour to view it again. Personal Dashboard vs Classic Homepage Personal Dashboard Classic Homepage Visual course tiles Easy access to user profile List of all your courses on homepage Course Setup Checklist Access to organization widgets Search courses in Course Selector No suggested course setup Switching between the Personal Dashboard and the Classic Homepage is possible at any point; simply toggle between the two by selecting the view you would like from the top right of your page. You can also choose your default view by clicking on Settings or reset the Welcome Message. Rev. July 19, 2016 Page: 2
Course Setup Checklist The Course Setup Checklist contains a list of suggested course setup tasks with shortcuts to the tools. Tours appear on those pages to demonstrate how to get started on the task. The checklist lets instructors keep track of completed items. The Course Setup Checklist can also be accessed from the top of course level pages when there are still items to complete. This tool will help you fast track the process of setting up a course with fewer clicks. Can I get rid of it? Yes. If your course is already setup, you can simply: 1. Click on the Setup tasks remaining link to Open the wizard. 2. Select Mark all complete 3. Close the wizard. Release Conditions NOT Operator The Release Conditions gets a major improvement with the addition of the Has Not logic. This is something that several faculty have noticed as missing from the Intelligent Agent and we re excited to see its addition. With this update, you can configure Springboard to control access to content or to trigger an event (e.g. send an email to yourself and a student) when a logical condition is not met. For example, you can trigger an event when there is an: Incomplete checklist (You can t submit your assignment until you mark that you completed these steps) Content topic not visited (Syllabus anyone?) No discussion posts authored in topic (We ll never get to know you if you don t post an introduction!) No submission to dropbox (Hey, you haven t turned in Draft #2 of your paper) No completed quiz attempt (You might want to take the midterm. It s worth a few points towards your final grade) Advanced: This new feature will work in tandem with Intelligent Agents. For example, you can set up an agent to send an automated email to anyone who has not posted to a discussion topic or has not submitted a quiz attempt. Rev. July 19, 2016 Page: 3
What is the awards tool? The Awards tool can be used to create Badges and Certificates to reflect the achievement of different milestones within a course offering. In the Awards tool, instructors can design badges and certificates and link them to release conditions to allow automatic awarding. Students can see the awards that they have already earned, as well as those that they have yet to earn, in the associated My Awards tool. Students can let others know what they have earned by sharing their awards to their learner profile or to social media via Mozilla Backpack. We recommend that you attend a training session to learn more about designing your own Awards and using them in your course. Watch the email digest for announcements about the training that we will be offering in the Fall. In the interim, you can learn more about the Awards tool in this Quick reference: https://community.brightspace.com/sharedresources/sharedfiles/awards_tool_quick_reference_guide Groups Usability and administration enhancements Enhancements have been made to the Groups tool that enable learners to join groups more easily, and give instructors and administrators the option to set up and manage groups more efficiently. The enhancements are as follows: When creating or editing a group category, the Enrollment Type called # of Groups of # Self Enrollment has been changed to # of Groups, Capacity of # Self Enrollment to clarify its usage. When creating or editing a group category, a Group Prefix field is now present. When creating or editing a group category that supports self enrollment, a Set Self Enrollment Expiry Date option is now available. When creating or editing a category, and when Set Self Enrollment Expiry Date is selected, the Allocate unenrolled users after Self Enrollment Expiry Date option can also be selected. Once a category and groups with capacities have been created, capacity markers display (in the form x/y where x is the number of enrolled students and y is the capacity). Learners can now see the names of the members of each group before they enroll. More features and enhancements to existing tools: News (now called Announcements ). If you accidentally delete an announcement that you meant to keep, you can now recover deleted Announcements. When you grade a discussion topic with a rubric, the numeric score from the rubric total is automatically transferred to the topic score for the discussion when you ve completed (or update) the rubric. Additionally, the rubrics associated with discussions topics have been updated so that they are more accessible to users of screen readers and those who use keyboard navigation. You can now select to automatically sum the total of post scores for a discussion topic when setting up grading in discussions. This is a great option to better score students who are active participants. Overdue feature for students. There is a new feature under the Content called Class Schedule. Students can view a list of all overdue content topics within a course in the Overdue tab in the Course Schedule area. The topics on this list are sorted from most to least overdue. Students can click the topic to immediately access and complete the topic. Only topics with a set due date but no end date or an end date later than the due date appear on this list since students must have time remaining after the due date to access and complete the topic. The Overdue tab only appears if students have content topics that are not complete by the set deadline. Rev. July 19, 2016 Page: 4
In the Summary and Content Progress pages, User Progress contains statistics on the amount of time a learner spends in a content topic. The update to this feature corrects the inaccuracies that can occur when a user session times out or loses connectivity. As a result, the statistics for the amount of time a user spends in a content topic will now be accurate to the default frequency of 10 minutes. The time spent statistics for other scenarios (such as viewing a content topic and then browsing to the next topic or to another tool) continue to capture the exact duration. The File Submissions area of Dropbox (now called Assignments ) has a log that can be filtered to determine if and when a learner submitted a file, and if anyone deleted the submission. If a submission was accidentally deleted, you can restore it from the submission log. Now, the Export Event Logs button on the Grade Quiz page enables instructors to export the quiz event log of all quiz attempts made by learners of a quiz to a Comma Separated Value (CSV) file for offline analysis. The IP address of all users' actions is included in the event log. In Quizzes, there s a new option in Special Access that allows you to override the number of quiz attempts. This will be helpful in cases where you need to give an additional quiz attempt to one student (perhaps because they had a technical issue or something). In Quizzes, you have the option to specify IP ranges for a quiz. (Previously, you were limited to one location). This will be helpful if you want to require students to take quizzes in a lab that has more than one IP address. Copy Course Components History. There is a new View Copy Course History page that displays historical events for all course copying. When you copy a course, using Import/Export/Copy, the new copy will be more complete. In the past, certain settings and special content (such as links to external tools) did not copy completely. Many issues have been corrected in the course copy process. Throughout the system, a Now option has been added just about any place where you can choose a date. This will save time and clicks when you just want to quickly make something available to students. Rev. July 19, 2016 Page: 5