What’s New in Brightspace Summer 2021

Posted by Michael Coley on Wednesday, August 18, 2021 in Releases.

There have been several updates to Brightspace over the summer, so we wanted to share with you the highlights of new things you can find in Brightspace starting this month. While these are just the highlights, we will link to the full release notes at the end of this post.

Brightspace Text Editor

The addition of a format painter allows users to copy formatting easily from one section of text to another. This works anywhere you can type in Brightspace.

LaTeX Rendering

Instructors can now preview and see math and scientific formulas directly in the Brightspace Editor using the LaTeX rendering system.

Rubric Updates

If you are editing an assignment that has a rubric which has already been used to grade students, you will get a warning if you try to remove the rubric. If you do, assessments will be deleted as well.
Instructors can now reorder criterion groups within rubrics.

Quizzes

Introductions now go under the description area.
Instructors can now search for pending evaluation to see only those questions that need to be graded.
Quiz Reports has moved away from its own tab and is now under dropdown with edit, grade, etc.

Discussions

The new evaluation experience for discussions is similar to the new assignments evaluation experience that was released earlier this year. The updated discussions evaluation will be available when assessing a topic or an individual learner, allowing instructors to better review and evaluate discussion contributions. This new experience involves a new page layout, with evaluation tools and the post being evaluated displaying side-by-side. The divider between the discussion post and the evaluation tools is also able to be adjusted as needed to customize the width of each section.
Within discussions, you can use @ mentioning to tag people in a post. This will create a link to the profile of the person tagged, and it will notify the person tagged.