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MCC Daily Tribune

Virtual Campus Brightspace Updates for Faculty (April 2023)

The Virtual Campus is committed to the continuous improvement of our digital learning environment. As a reminder, our Brightspace environment is a SaaS cloud-based environment, so regular updates are made on a continuous basis. You can find the monthly release notes on D2L’s website. Our team works very closely with SUNY to promote other needed improvements in Brightspace at the global level to improve the functionality of our system. 

Please be aware of the following recent changes. 

Brightspace Email Changes (available April 10th)

We have made many small incremental changes to Brightspace Email. One recent change includes a bounce-back message to the user when they respond outside of the Brightspace system and we now include blue banners on messages coming from the Brightspace system to make it easier to spot Brightspace messages and notifications in Outlook and respond in the appropriate place. 

There are two new global email changes that will be made on 4/10:  

  • The preview pane in Brightspace Email will go away so you can see your Brightspace inbox list! 
  • When sending a Brightspace Email message, the notification message that a user receives in their campus mail will be reworded to be clearer. 
    • The default message included in all emails generated from within Brightspace will now read, “This is a notification that you have received a message in Brightspace. Please log into Brightspace to reply to this message. A reply to this message from outside of Brightspace will not be received.”
    • If you have already changed your email signature line from the previous default, you will retain your own personal signature and this change will not affect you.

Brightspace Discussion Change (available April 10th)

Users will be able to compose a post, and save it as a draft. This was available in Bb and will be available on 4/10 to help users think about the submission before posting it. Thanks to Bruce Link (ICT) for the suggestion! 

Turnitin (TII) Change (available April 4th)  

MCC has a college-wide license to Turnitin available through the Brightspace Assignment tool. This is a newer license that has been available since Fall 2022 to replace Blackboard’s SafeAssign tool.

Given the rapid growth in ChatGPT and other AI software, and the impact on written work, TII will be including in the similarity report an indication of what text appears to be AI-generated versus written by a human. They say it is 98% accurate.       

Upcoming Conversation on ChatGPT/AI

Please save the date for a Virtual Campus Brown Bag session on ChatGPT/AI tools on Friday, April 21st from noon to 1pm on Zoom. We look forward to having a conversation on the impact of AI tools in higher education. Please save the Virtual Campus Brown Bag session on ChatGPT/AI Zoom Link. Additional information will follow. 

Adding Users to the Classlist In Brightspace 

Faculty roles in Brightspace will no longer be able to search to add student participants to their course Brightspace Classlist, only faculty users, to avoid any student confusion. 

  • Student enrollments should flow through our Student Information System (SIS) only.  This is done on a regular, automatic, and timed basis. Please note there is always lag time from Banner registration to Brightspace course access. 
  • If you have a unique situation and need us to add a student, please reach out to our office.
  • If you are an instructor on a course, you can add faculty/staff users for observation or support purposes

New “Respondus Instructor” Role

If you plan to use Respondus in your Brightspace course during the end of the semester, please reach out to the Virtual Campus. In order to properly view student video sessions, you will need to have this role updated in your course.  

Questions?

If you have questions, please email the Virtual Campus Office (virtualcampus@monroecc.edu) or visit us during Zoom drop-in hours during the week.

Andrea Gilbert
Instructional Technologies
04/10/2023