November 2025 Updates to Brightspace
This month there are several updates to Brightspace that bring both new features and helpful quality of life updates to the platform. Below are highlights of this month’s update. For a link to the full release notes, refer to the References at the bottom of this post.
- Admin Tools — Enhanced user experience
- Announcements – Email a copy of an announcement to your Classlist
- Assignments – Advanced Assessment now shows when an evaluation has no designated evaluator
- Brightspace – Progress bar for uploading files
- Grades – Bulk edit now supports excluding items from final grade
Admin Tools — Enhanced user experience
For those users who have access to the Admin Tools menu, this month’s update brings a new look and feel to the menu. To improve administrator workflows, this release enhances the Admin Tools menu by providing Administrators with:
- A single column display
- Search and auto-complete functionality
- Pin and save tool functionality
- Alphabetized pinned items
The new Admin Tools menu tool also pins the following tools as a default:
- Courses
- External Learning Tools
- Homepage Management
- Navigation & Themes
- Org Unit Editor
- Organization Files
- Roles and Permissions
- Users
Previously, administrators could not search, filter, or pin tools in the Admin Tools menu.
Figure: Before this update, the Admin Tools menu displayed all tools in a single window, often requiring administrators to use Ctrl+F to search for and locate items.
Figure: The new Admin Tools menu allows Administrators to quickly search for tools, pin them to the Pinned tab, or review the All tab for a categorized list of tools for easy access.
Announcements – Email a copy of an announcement to your Classlist
In response to many requests over time, when Instructors create a new announcement in a Course Offering, they can now choose to send a copy to all users in their Classlist as an email, sent as if from the instructor themselves.
In the user interface for creating or editing an announcement, a new Send Email Copy checkbox now appears when an instructor creates or edits an announcement.
When an instructor selects the new checkbox, the system emails the content of the announcement to all users in the Classlist on publishing.
Users who are not subscribed to receive a notification for announcements will also receive an email, ensuring that important information contained within the announcement is delivered to every learner.
For announcements scheduled to publish at a later date, clicking the Send Email Copy checkbox emails the copy to users in the Classlist at the time that the announcement is published.
Assignments – Advanced Assessment now shows when an evaluation has no designated evaluator
A new alert in the assignments evaluation user interface now notifies instructors when an evaluation currently has no evaluator assigned, so they can quickly identify the problem and take steps to assign a new evaluator.
This update helps prevent unexpected evaluation errors and improves clarity, especially for institutions with large enrollments and multiple sections.
Previously, if an instructor used Advanced Assessment features to delegate evaluation to a user who later became unenrolled from a course, there was no way to identify which submissions needed to be assigned a new evaluator. Learner submissions could remain unevaluated for extended periods of time, causing confusion and errors.
Example of a warning message when an assignment has no assigned evaluator.
Figure: An example of a warning message when an assignment has no assigned evaluator.
Brightspace – Progress bar for uploading files
With this release, Brightspace improves visual consistency and accessibility by updating progress bar indicators across several tools. These improvements enhance support for screen readers and assistive technologies.
Visual indicators have been updated in the following areas:
- New Content Experience – Upload a file
- Quizzes – Add Existing Question
- Import Quiz Questions – Upload a file
- Quiz Study Support – Check if the quiz meets the study support requirements
- Generate Question – Choose a file to generate a question
- Content Uploader – Upload a file
- Manage Groups – Export progress bar
- Upload File (Classic Content) – Upload a file
Figure: An example of the progress bar updating as a user adds a module to the Table of Contents in D2L Brightspace, indicating the step-by-step progress.
Grades – Bulk edit now supports excluding items from final grade
Instructors can now use the Exclude from Final column when bulk editing grade items in the Grades tool. Selecting this option excludes the grade item from the final grade calculation. Previously, this setting was only available when editing individual grade items. This enhancement helps instructors manage large grade books more efficiently by allowing them to update multiple items at once.
Note: This option is only available in courses using the Points grading system. Courses using Weighted or Formula grading systems can exclude items by assigning a weight of 0 or excluding them from the formula, respectively.
Figure: In the Bulk Edit Items and Categories page, select Exclude from Final for each item to omit from the final grade.
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