Brightspace - an introduction for instructors
Channel: Kevin Dunn
Date: 22/03/2017

So Brightspace is here and as an instructor, you are probably wondering: what benefit does this new system have for me? 

We will break it down into a few sections. 

Let's start with adding content. 

We know that students spend around 60% of their time with content, so it is important that you as an instructor or teaching assistant can quickly add this. 

What is meant by content? These are materials such as lecture slides, notes, explanations, videos, readings, and so on.

In Brightspace you are able to drag and drop these files and rearrange them. New content can easily be copied and pasted from Word documents and these retain their formatting, speeding up the time taken to create new materials on your course website. 

There is seamless mathematical and technical authoring with LaTeX in Brightspace. And, if you are using video or large attachments, these can be uploaded and used right within the Brightspace environment. 

You have a large storage capacity in your course folder, so you can be creative with the types of content and the amount of content you want students to use in your site. 

Once you have this content in your site, have you thought of ever using release conditions, to create an interesting learning path, or learning paths, for various students in your course? Release conditions allow you to open up materials at different times, for different students, depending on prior conditions being met. 

There are some other interesting types of content that you may have never considered using before. What about adding a checklist to your course, or using the integrated Brightspace survey tool, rather than an external survey? You can create quizzes and combine them next to the course materials, so students can quickly check their knowledge, before moving on. 

The next broad section of improvement in Brightspace is around communication. It is very easy to create announcements in your site and these can be sent as notifications to your students. Students are also informed via a notification that there is new content being added, or that a new grade for a piece of work has been released.

There is a whole series of videos on our support website around communication with students, and understanding the various ways you can do that in Brightspace.

The last major section of improvements are around the administration of your course. Brightspace has a flexible and powerful gradebook, any grades from assignments, quizzes, attendance, and other pieces of work can be integrated and shown to your students. This gives them an understanding of their progress in your course. 
This gradebook can also be exported to, and imported from, CSV and Excel files.

For you as an instructor or teaching assistant, there is the grading tool built into Brightspace. Or you could use an app to assist you. If you prefer to grade offline, you can also easily download all the uploaded work from your students, grade those, add comments, upload the files back again, and in an automated way, those files are distributed back to the students where they can receive their feedback from you.

It is easy in Brightspace to monitor the progress of your class, at a glance, and there are also learning analytics tools available. Please look at the Class Progress tool to see how you can keep track of the progress of your students and intervene before potential problems occur. 

Another area of administration is around groups for various purposes, whether it is for labs, projects, workshops or assignments. And you are able to create groups where students can self-select and change their enrollment, or you manually allocate the groups yourself.

So feel free to browse around the rest of Brightspace to discover various improvements you can use to make your course better. And always remember, we are here to assist you at the Brightspace support website, and various training options are available to you, your colleagues, and your teaching assistants.