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What's New

Winter 2021

If technical issues arise with Brightspace during an exam delivered in D2L Brightspace, all students, instructors and TAs are asked to use the "D2L Brightspace Exam Help" form.

A link to this form will be visible on your course homepage during the exam period, between April 19 and May 01.

The D2L Brightspace Exam Help form button

Technical issues reported through this form will be given higher priority, as it will only be used during the course of an exam.

Please use this instead of calling or emailing the support teams for technical issues related to Brightspace.

If students have questions related to the content or delivery of the exam, they must be directed to their instructor (and not to the technical support form).

If students or TAs complete the form regarding an issue in the final exam, instructors will be included on any subsequent communications. As most exam-related issues must be resolved by the course Instructor or TA, we will work with you to troubleshoot the issue and advise on next steps.

Instructors should plan to be available during the exam time, regularly checking your @torontomu.ca email inbox.

At the end of February, Brightspace introduced a new "Accommodations" feature in the Classlist tool that will allow instructors to set quiz accommodations for their students.

This new feature sets accommodations on a per-student basis, that will be applied to all quiz activities in the course. This is in addition to the existing "Special Access" feature (in both Quizzes and Assignments) that allows instructors to change access settings for individual assessments. 

Quiz-specific Special Access settings can be used to override accommodations, if required.

The quiz accommodations will include:

  • Modified time limit, either as a multiplier of the original quiz time (i.e. 1.5 times) or as a set amount of added time (i.e. 30 minutes)
  • Always allow right-click during a quiz

In our Brightspace update at the end of December 2020, the multiple choice quiz question type was updated. This update removed the option to display question answer options horizontally.

As our students are increasingly accessing Brightspace using a variety of devices (desktop computers, smart phones, tablets), it is important to consider the limited screen space they may be working with.

Preventing the horizontal layout of question answer options may help to ensure our quiz questions can be accessed from a larger variety of devices.

We always recommend that you use the most recent version of a reliable web browser, such as Google Chrome (external link, opens in new window)  or Mozilla Firefox (external link, opens in new window)  to access D2L Brightspace.

In August 2020, Microsoft announced that the non-Chromium based Microsoft Edge Legacy (external link)  will reach its End of Life in March 2021. This means that after March 9th, 2021, Edge Legacy is no longer a supported browser by Microsoft and will not receive any more security fixes or updates. 

For Legacy Edge users only, instead of the traditional Browser Check pop-up, Brightspace are presenting users with a warning banner notifying them that browser is no longer supported by Microsoft, linking to Microsoft’s EoL announcement. 

Check your system
Brightspace's announcement on Edge  (external link) 

Find out which Brightspace tutorials have been popular during this shift to remote teaching.

Are you or your students having trouble accessing Google-stored content linked in Brightspace? We have recently updated our helpful workflow (and there's a link to share with the students, too).

We have a workflow that can help you to share course videos from Google Drive to D2L Brightspace (and it can be used for other kinds of Google Docs, as well)!

Are you facilitating more virtual groupwork? The Brightspace Groups tool can help create and manage groups, and can be leveraged for private group discussions and assignments.

Did you know that you can export the group membership from your Brightspace groups and use them to create your Zoom breakout rooms?

Here is a collection of new documents and updated documents related to the use of D2L Brightspace at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Due to the changing nature of our teaching and learning practice, there are many many resources being developed and adapted daily. We'll do our best to add links here!

Updates to this website (courses@TMU)

Other great resources developed for TMU:

Are you new to Brightspace at Toronto Metropolitan University?

The best place to start is our Getting Started section!

 

View the latest video tutorials and webinars 

Find all of our D2L Brightspace video tutorials and webinars on our Brightspace Ryecast page (opens in new window) .