Brightspace For Faculty

Brightspace tutorials and resources for faculty

York College now uses Brightspace (BrS) as the Learning Management System (LMS) for courses.

To access BrS, go to https://brightspace.cuny.edu/ page and log in with your CUNY Login username and password. Bookmark this page on your favorite browser so that you can access it easily at any time.

If this is the first time you use BrS, we suggest that you follow our recommended workflow to build your course. Even when you want to re-use your course content created in Bb, you may find it helpful to review our recommended workflow.

Recommended workflow to build and work in a course in BrS

Your BrS Settings

Set up your profile, choose your notification settings and account settings, familiarize yourself with the Brightspace landing page.

Setting up your course in BrS from scratch 

Define your course organization and navigation, set up gradebook, get the course ready for the first day of the class.

3a. Individual Activities

Create file submission assignments, Turnitin assignments, journal, quizzes.

3b. Group/Collaborative Activities

Create group projects, class discussions, group discussions, group collaboration on a document in One Drive.

Grading Course Work

Grade assignments, quizzes, discussion posts and group work.

Tasks at the end of a Semester

Export your course content for future use, download grades and more.

Migrating a course from Bb to Brightspace

Migrating a course from Bb to Brightspace includes two steps shown below. Follow the instructions in the linked web pages to migrate your course.

1. Export your course from Bb
2. Import the Bb course package in Brightsapce

Re-using a course migrated from Bb

If you want to re-use a course migrated from Bb, choose the appropriate path listed below.

If you use Points to calculate the final course grade

1. Copying your migrated course to the course you are going to teach
2. Reviewing and modifying, if necessary, your Grade Book settings
3. Reviewing the course content and remove those you no longer need
4. Updating the availability and due dates in the course
5. Adding more content or assignments - you can find tutorials in 2 and 3 listed under the Recommended Workflow above.

If you use Weighted system to calculate the final course grade

1. Copying your migrated course into your new course in Brightspace excluding the grade columns and settings.

When going through the steps for course copy, after selecting the course, at the bottom of the page, choose Select Components.

Under Choose Components to Copy, check the checkbox for Select All Components first.

Then scroll down to uncheck the checkboxes for Grades and Grades Settings.

Click Continue at the bottom. Then, follow the rest of the steps in the above linked tutorial to complete your course copy.

2. Reviewing the course content and remove those you no longer need

3. Setting up the gradebook

4. Linking the assignments, quizzes, etc. to the appropriate grading categories

5. Updating the availability and due dates

6. Adding more content or assignments - you can find tutorials in 2 and 3 listed under the Recommended Workflow above.

If you use Weighted system to calculate the final course grade and already copied the course including gradebook

In this case, you will need to fix the grade book issues as Brightspace uses different ways to set up weighings. Then do all the rest listed above.

Fixing Grade Book issues

Communication and Learner Engagement Tools

Announcements

The Announcements tool enables you to communicate with students easily about course updates, send assignment due date reminders and can help you keep students on track.

Something new in BrS

The Announcements in BrS can be released based on conditions. For example, you can send a congratulation email to some students when they reach a milestone.

Something different in BrS from that in Bb

In BrS, there is no check box on the New Announcement page for you to ask BrS to send the announcement to students' emails. Your announcements will be sent to students automatically if they check the boxes for new announcement available and announcement updated on their Notifications page. By default, the boxes for these two items are checked for all users in CUNY.

Check out the following linked page on creating, editing an announcement and other actions on an announcement.

Creating an announcement in a BrS course

Sending emails to your students from your BrS courses

Something different in BrS than that in Bb

All user emails in BrS are their CUNY Logins. That is, firstname.lastnameXX@login.cuny.edu. No one can change these emails. These emails are mapped into the respective York emails. No personal emails are in BrS.

• For faculty, the CUNY login email is mapped into their business email in CUNYfirst, which is their York email.
• For students, the CUNY login email is mapped into their preferred email in CUNYfirst. You can send the linked page to students on how to change their preferred email in CUNYfirst to their York email.

Below is a link to a short tutorial on how to send an email from your course to your students, and how to add your signature in all of your emails sent from BrS if you wish.

Send an email to your students from your course in BrS

Class Progress

A feature not found in Bb, the Class Progress in your course provides information and a visual presentation about your student's progress in the course. You can access it from your course top navigation bar. Review the linked web page below to learn the details of the Class Progress.

About Class Progress

Intelligent Agents

The "Intelligent Agents" tool in BrS courses enable instructors to set up rules for sending reminder emails to students when they haven't logged in to the course in x number of days, or the grade for an assignment, quiz is below a specific number/percentage, or the calculated course grade is below a specific number/percentage, and many more.

You can find the "Intelligent Agents" on your course top navigation bar. If not, click More on the right of the navigation bar to access it.

Click the links below to learn what "Intelligent Agents" can do, how to set them up and schedule them to run.

• About Intelligent Agents
• How to set up, edit, copy, delete, restore and change the status of an Intelligent Agent
• How to run Intelligent Agents to see which students meet the criteria without sending out emails to them

Online Meeting Tools

We recommend using Zoom or Microsoft Teams Meeting for online class meetings. Both of them are integrated in BrS. Although BrS has Virtual Classroom tool, it limits the meeting time to 50 min and doens't record attendance.

Accessing Zoom from your BrS course to create meetings

Accessing Microsoft Teams Meeting from your BrS course to create meetings

More BrS tools

Attendance

Attendance tool in BrS allows instructors to record multiple class attendances. For example, you can have one to record the attendance in weekly class meetings, another to record the attendance in supplementary sessions to help students prepare for exams.

BrS uses Registers to separate different types of attendance. In most of the cases, instructors just need to create one Register to record the attendance of weekly class meetings. Review the web page linked below to learn how to create a Register and add sessions to the Register, set up your cause of concern percentage, record and manage the attendance.

• Create and manage attendance registers
• Create and manage attendance sessions

CUNY Demo Student

The CUNY Demo Student tool enables you to view and interact with your course as a student does. To learn the detailed information about this tool and how to enable it, go to the linked article below.

Creating a Demo Student

Rubrics

Rubrics enable instructors to inform students about the assessment criteria which help students better understand assignment requirements. They also help keep consistency in grading assignments.

You can create rubrics in your course and easily re-use them in your other courses. When creating assessments, you can associate a specific rubric to a specific assessment.

Watch a short video below to learn how to create a grading rubric.

If you prefer to learn from the text version of this how-to, check the linked web page below.

Create a rubric using the Rubrics tool

Content Editor

In BrS, Content Editor appears in many places. It enables you to add formatted text, images, videos, tables, mathematical equations and many more, as well as to check the accessibility of the content and provide guidance to fix the accessibility issues.

Something new in BrS

Audio and video recording is available in the content editor.  Under the content editor, click Record Audio or Record Video to start.

Watch a short video below to learn what you can do with the Content Editor.

If you prefer to learn from the text version of this how-to, check the linked web page below.

About Brightspace Editor

The Portfolio Tool

The Portfolio tool in Brightspace provide a space for students to collect and reflect on their learning artifacts, share them with peers and instructors.

Overview

Using Portfolio to assess student learning

Third-party tools integrated in BrS

eSyllabus

Set up your eSyllabus in your Brs courses.

Adding the link to your eSyllabus in your BrS courses

LinkedIn Learning

LinkedIn Learning offers high-quality comprehensive instructional videos for a diverse range of applications including Adobe Creative Suite and Office 365 suites such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SPSS, EndNote, etc. Content covers a wide range of subjects including "soft skills", coding, leadership development, business writing, and creativity.

York College provides all students, faculty, and staff with a free subscription to the vast collection of instructional video resources of LinkedIn Learning.

It is even better that instructors can add linkedIn Learning videos or courses in their Brightspace courses and see if students complete them in the Gradebook. The process is easy with a few clicks as illustrated in the linked page below.

Adding LinkedIn Learning content in your BrS courses

VoiceThread (VT)

VT is a cloud application that enables faculty and students to present, comment on and share content and ideas.  With VT faculty and students can have threaded conversations in text, images, audio and video formats.

VT is integrated in our Brightspace. You can create and post your lectures on VT and ask students to answer questions in your lectures in audio or video format asynchronously. You can also ask students to present their understanding of your course topics, and interact with one another in audio or video formats. To learn more, go to the linked web page below.

Using VoiceThread in your BrS courses

Accessing Turnitin, Textbook Publishers and other third-party tools

Turitin, Textbook publisher's platforms and other third-party tools can be access from one of the two places.

1. Go to any of the Content page. Click Existing Activities. You can scroll up and down to find the tool or platform on the dropdown box. For example, Turnitin.

2. If you cannot find the tool or platform you need on the Existing Activities dropdown box, click External Learning Tools. A pop-up window appears. You should find it there.

More on Turnitin in Brightspace

In Brightspace there are two workflows to create Turnitin assignments. One is LTI 1.3 which works as an external tool; the other is V2, which works within the Brightspace Assignment workflow. Which workflow you choose depends on the goals of the assignment. Go to the linked web page below first to see a comparison of the features in both workflows before creating your Turnitin assignment.

Feature comparison of the two workflows (LTI 1.3 and V2)

Workflow I - LTI 1.3

Workflow II - V2

Comparison of Brightspace and Blackboard

Most of the tools in Blackboard can be found in Brightspace. But the same tools may have new or different features in Brightspace. On the linked page below, you can find the similarities and differences between Brightspace and Blackboard tools.

Comparison of Brightspace and Blackboard

Brightspace FAQs for Faculty

On the linked page below, you will find frequently asked questions by faculty and answers. If you cannot find an answer on that page for your question, Google it or write an email to us. We'll find an answer for you.

Brightspace FAQs for Faculty

Need more help? Contact the CTLET LMS Support Team

Email: lmshelp@york.cuny.edu

Walk-in Offices: AC-4EA1 and AC-4G01

Phone: (718) 262 - 5219

Online Live Support Room can be found in the CTLET site in Brightspace. After logging in to Brightspace, look at My Courses > Organizations tab.