Brightspace Email Enhancement:

February 19, 2025

Next Thursday, (2/27/25) URI will receive our February Brightspace update.  Part of this update is a requirement to validate email addresses that Brightspace forwards messages to.  Details are below:

What does this apply to?

Within your Brightspace account settings (email tab) you have the ability to forward “Brightspace emails” to your URI email account.  You do this by checking the box next to “Send a copy of each outgoing message to_____”.

What is changing?

After the update is applied, anyone (student or faculty) who sets up forwarding or changes the address emails are sent to will need to validate their email address before forwarding takes effect.  Users will receive an email at the address they enter, and need to click a link to confirm their address. After doing that, email forwarding will work.

Does this impact me?

If you have already setup  forwarding before the update, you should not see any interruption or need to validate your address.  The email validation should only apply when setting up forwarding for the first time, or when changing an email address.

Who should I contact with questions or if I need help?

Please reach out to the IT Teaching and Learning Services team by:

1. Submitting a Service Desk Ticketthrough ServiceNow.
2. Attending a TLS Zoom drop-in session for help with educational technology or Brightspace.

Brightspace February Update:

February 18, 2025

On Thursday, 2/27, D2L will apply our monthly update to Brightspace. The release notes can be found here, and a few highlights from this update are below. If you have any questions or concerns, please submit a ticket via Service Now or attend one of TLS’s daily Zoom drop in sessions.

Accessibility Checker Update:
D2L has updated the icon used to run their built in accessibility checker. This useful tool can be used to review content that is built within the Brightspace editor.

External Email Validation:
Users who configure their Brightspace account to send copies of emails to their URI email will need to validate that email address before messages are sent to it.
Please note this only impacts users setting this up for the first time or those changing their email. Users who already have this setting configured should not be impacted.

Quizzes – Filter statistics by section or group:
When viewing quiz statistics, users can now filter their results by section or group. This will allow faculty to easily view this data in a more discrete format.

Brightspace Hotfix:

February 12, 2025

On Thursday 2/13, D2L will apply a hotfix to address bugs they identified in their latest release.

If you have any questions or concerns, please submit a ticket via Service Now or attend one of TLS’s daily Zoom drop in sessions.

Brightspace Hotfix:

January 29, 2025

On Wednesday 1/29 at 9pm, D2L will apply a hotfix to address bugs they identified in their latest release.

If you have any questions or concerns, please submit a ticket via Service Now or attend one of TLS’s daily Zoom drop in sessions.

McGraw Hill Integration Update:

January 21, 2025

As we embark on the Spring semester, TLS wanted to provide an update to faculty about the Brightspace/McGraw Hill integration.

Before Winter Break, our team collaborated with McGraw Hill support and URI faculty to review, revise, and update our setup guide for this tool. Faculty members followed this guide for JTerm classes, and reported that their courses worked without issue.

Going into the Spring semester, we recommend that any Faculty using this integration follow the setup and configuration steps outlined in this guide. If you run into trouble or need assistance, our team is happy to assist. Please submit a ticket via Service Now or attend one of TLS’s daily Zoom drop in sessions.

Brightspace January Update:

January 21, 2025

On Thursday, 1/23, D2L will apply our monthly update to Brightspace. The release notes can be found here, and a few highlights from this update are below. If you have any questions or concerns, please submit a ticket via Service Now or attend one of TLS’s daily Zoom drop in sessions.

Minimum Supported Browsers:
In order to ensure best performance, please ensure your browsers are updated as to the following minimum versions

• Chrome 129
• Edge 129
• Safari 18
• Firefox 130

Bongo:
Faculty using Bongo in courses will find several new features detailed in their update notes. Highlights include enhanced setup workflows, the ability to show and hide instructor feedback, recognition of Brightspace sections, and peer review being enabled by default.

Consistent Evaluation:
For Assignments and Discussion, updates will now be synchronized with the Gradebook by clicking the “Update” button.

Visual Table of Contents:
There are a number of changes to this module that many users see when logging into their courses.
-There are visual changes to the appearance of the Visual ToC.
-If content module images are not separately defined, the course banner image will be used.
-New module preview dialogue boxes have been added.

Portfolio:
The ability to search by dates has been added.
Instructors are able to add items to the portfolio.

Rubrics:
Instructors now have the ability to define minimum and maximum values for ungraded rubric criteria.

Brightspace/eCampus User Sync:

January 8, 2025

Update 1/21: TLS believes this issue to be resolved. Please contact the service desk with any additional issues.

IT Teaching and Learning Services is aware of users who have been unenrolled from courses in Brightspace. Our team is actively working with the appropriate teams to remedy this as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience and understanding as we work to resolve this.

Brightspace December Changes:

December 31, 2024

IT Teaching and Learning Services is excited to announce the roll out of several new enhancements and new tools for Brightspace:

New LTI Integrations
-Perusall (released to faculty as needed)
-OpenStax (available to all)
-GradeScope (available to the Computer Science department)

Learning Outcomes
-Enabling this tool will allow TLS and ATL to collaborate on the use of this tool to support faculty and student success.

Removal of Pearson MyLab and Mastering LTI 1.1
-All faculty seeking to integrate Pearson resources with their Brightspace courses must use the new Access Pearson LTI 1.3 integration. Detailed step by step guidelines can be found here: URI Knowledge Base.

Fishtail Service Interruption (Resolved):

December 23, 2024

Update: 4:32pm, This issue appears resolved. Please contact the service desk if ongoing issues are noticed.

TLS is aware that faculty who are attempting to merge courses in Fishtail do not see their courses listed. We have engaged the vendor and appropriate ITS teams to resolve this issue as soon as possible. Please contact the Service Desk with any questions or concerns.

Brightspace December Update:

December 16, 2024

On Thursday, 12/26, D2L will apply our monthly update to Brightspace. The release notes can be found here, and a few highlights from this update are below. If you have any questions or concerns, please submit a ticket via Service Now or attend one of TLS’s daily Zoom drop in sessions.

Brightspace Virtual Assistant/Online Chat Help: The current help chat within Brightspace is being rebranded as Lumi Chat. It has been enhanced with generative AI in order to improve its responses and usefulness.

Pulse App: External links will now open in the devices default browser.

Engage Widget Update:

December 5, 2024

Monday, December 9th IT TLS staff will be updating the Table of Contents widget in Engage. This will NOT impact the primary instance of Brightspace.

While we do not anticipate any impact to end users, if instructors find that the images they used as content thumbnails were changed, steps to correct this can be found in the following help article: https://uriprod.service-now.com/sp?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0010295

If you have any questions or concerns, please submit a ticket via Service Now or attend one of TLS’s daily Zoom drop in sessions.

Brightspace/Pearson Integration Upgrade:

December 5, 2024

Deadline: December 30, 2024

What’s Changing:

• Pearson is updating its integration to enhance functionality and security.
• The integration name will change from Pearson MyLab and Mastering to Access Pearson.

Impact on Faculty: Faculty members currently using MyLab and Mastering will need to:

1. Remove links to MyLab and Mastering in your courses.
2. Remove related gradebook items.
3. Add the new Access Pearson tool to your course.
4. Configure your course as needed.

Support and Resources: 

IT Teaching and Learning Services has created this step-by-step guide to assist faculty

• URI Knowledge Base

Pearson has provided step-by-step guides to support you through this process:

• Guide to remove MyLab and Mastering
• Guide to add Access Pearson

Support and Resources: Pearson has provided detailed guides, and our team is available for support.

Contact us through ServiceNow, visit us in the Library (Room 227), or join one of our Zoom drop-in sessions:

• Daily Zoom Drop-in
• Dec 20 Drop-in

Deadline: The MyLab and Mastering tool will be discontinued as of December 30, 2024. Access Pearson will be the only supported option after this date.

Brightspace November Update:

November 22, 2024

On Thursday, 11/28, D2L will apply our November update to Brightspace. The release notes can be found here, and a few highlights from this update are below. If you have any questions or concerns, please submit a ticket via Service Now or attend one of TLS’s daily Zoom drop in sessions.

Assignments: For those using Advanced Assessments, there is now a warning message if instructors are removed, leaving students without an assigned evaluator.

Groups: There is now a recycling bin, allowing you to restore a previously deleted group.

Brightspace Project Site Enrollments:

Update: November 12, 2024

This issue has been resolved. Please contact the IT Service Desk with any ongoing issues or concerns.

November 4, 2024

Over the last several days IT Teaching and Learning Services has become aware of issues around manual user enrollments in Brightspace. This has tended to show up specifically in Project Sites and on the Engage platform, when users with the role of “Project Site Owner” or “Project Site Manager” try to add other faculty/staff as learners.

Our team is actively engaged with the Vendor to identify a long term fix for this. In the meantime, if you are experiencing this issue and need assistance, please submit a ticket via Service Now or attend one of our team’s daily Zoom drop in sessions.
  
A member of the TLS team will be able to assist with these enrollments until a permanent fix is in place. To do so, we will need the following information from you:

• URL of the course
• Name/email of users to enroll
• Role to enroll users into

Thanks for your patience and partnership as we work to resolve this. We will provide additional information as it’s available.

Brightspace/McGraw Hill Connect Integration:

September 6, 2024

IT Teaching and Learning Services is aware that some faculty are running into trouble pairing Brightspace Courses with McGraw Hill. Fortunately, this can be easily remedied through the following steps.

1. If your course is already paired, click on your McGraw Hill Connect link in Brightspace and select “Reset Section Pairing”. Remove the McGraw Hill Connect link from Brightspace.

2. From your course, select “Add Existing Activities” then select “McGraw Hill Connect LTIA” from the menu.

3. Proceed with linking and deploying McGraw Hill content as you are accustomed to doing.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact the TLS team via the service desk or join our daily Zoom drop-ins. To change the images, follow the instructions in our online help system: https://uriprod.service-now.com/sp?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0010295.

Brightspace Widget Update:

August 29, 2024

Welcome back! We hope you had a restful summer break. The IT Teaching and Learning Services (TLS) team wants to inform you of a recent cosmetic update in Brightspace.

Over the summer, Brightspace made a change to the default images in the “Visual Table of Contents” widget, which is used in many courses to streamline student navigation. If you have customized each module tile with different images, this change will not affect your course. However, if you used the same custom image for all modules, your image may have been replaced with the new default.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact the TLS team via the service desk or join our daily Zoom drop-ins. To change the images, follow the instructions in our online help system: https://uriprod.service-now.com/sp?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0010295.

Brightspace Course Chat Removal:

January 20, 2024

With the January 2024 update, D2L will disable its course chat feature. Course chat is a lesser used feature, whose capabilities have been surpassed by third party communication tools, and rendered redundant by Brightspace’s own Instant Message and Discussion features.

Faculty and Instructors with concerns should contact the IT TLS team via the Service Desk for a consultation about alternative chat tools.

Brightspace Support Enhancement:

December 29, 2023

URI and D2L are excited to introduce an improved end user support experience through the introduction of the Brightspace Virtual Assistant. The Virtual Assistant will function alongside the existing 24/7 Chat support for the Spring 2024 semester, after which the 24/7 chat will be shut off.

Virtual Assistant will continue to provide the same 24/7 access to D2L support agents that we have today, but with the following added benefits:

1. Providing users with direct access to URI support resources via the Virtual Assistant.
2. Intelligent searching of support documentation will get needed resources to URI faculty and students faster.
3. No loss of 24/7, Live agent support

Stay tuned for more information about and documentation of this exciting enhancement!

Brightspace Enhancements:

December 29, 2023 – 5-7am

Course Announcements
– A global setting change will be made in Brightspace that adjusts course announcement deliveries – starting December 29 all course announcements will be sent automatically to the URI emails on the course class list.

Public Award Sharing
-A global setting change will be made that will allow users to publicly share Awards earned in Brightspace

Security Enhancements
-Access changes will be made to Guest Lecturer and Read only roles to protect student data

Role Promotions
-Access changes will be made to the Collaborator, TA Plus, and Section TA roles that enhance the instructors ability to control who has access to their Brightspace courses

TA Mapping
-Changes will be made to the mapping of TA roles between eCampus and Brightspace

Office Hours
TLS will be hosting open Zoom office hours at the following dates and times to discuss any of these changes:

November: 8th, 17th (noon)

December: 5th (9am), 21st (2pm)

January: 24th (9am)

February: 9th (noon)

Texting Error

Sep 2023: The error with texting in Top Hat was resolved.

Respondus Lockdown Browser (LDB) installed in Quinn 215

Sep 2023 – IT is installing LDB on some campus computer labs so that faculty may check them out to secure and run in-person exams. Learn more at the Respondus service page.

Respondus Monitor

Sep 2023 – IT is launching a small pilot to test Respondus Monitor for securing online remote exams. Learn more at the Respondus service page.

Panopto Folder Error

July 2023 – The bug with adding Panopto folders to Brightspace courses was resolved.

New Quiz User Experience

June 2023: Reminder that the new end-user quiz experience is being made permanent in Brightspace in July, 2023. Read more here.