Overview of Brightspace

Overview of BrightSpace

BrightSpace (D2L) is Sask Polytech’s integrated learning platform. This online environment provides instructors with an interface for uploading the content of their courses online for their students to access, including the course outline, course content, assignments and quizzes, a grade book, discussion forums and much more. This training snippet provides a cursory view of how to access and navigate BrightSpace, and how to use some of the afore-mentioned tools.

Access Your BrightSpace Courses

There are two ways to access your BrightSpace courses.

1. Log on to mySaskPolytech, go to the "Faculty" tab, then go to "My Course." If your courses are set up to use BrightSpace, you can click the course name to access that course on BrightSpace. Or

2. Open a web browser (Firefox and Chrome are recommended) and go to Log in with your Sask Polytech credentials.

Navigation

This online learning environment contains a number of features that allow you to move freely through the courses that you have access to.

Minibar

The minibar is the main navigation tool to your courses and personal settings. The minibar contains a link to My Home, the course selector, alerts, and your personal menu. It looks similar to the picture below.

Navigation Bar

The Navigation Bar (or Navbar)is located near the top of this window and contains links to tools that are used in this course. It normally looks similar to the picture below.

You click a tool name (or icon) to activate that tool. If the tool has a down-facing arrowhead, then it is a tool category and clicking it will expand the category to reveal the tools available. The picture below shows the Navbar with all tools expanded. Note that depending on the tools that are enabled for your course, you might see more or less tools than displayed below.

Commonly-Used Tools

Some commonly used Navbar tools include:

Content is where you can upload course content. Note that this is a tool, and not a tool category, and so it never has to be expanded. You can upload Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, PDF documents and other types of documents to the content area. You can also use the built-in HTML editor to create HTML documents.
Calendaris where you can publish important dates related to your course. When you specify a due date for an assignment or a quiz, a calendar entry for that assessment item will be created automatically for you.
Dropbox is where you set up and grade assignments. It eliminates the need for students to use email to submit assignments.
Gradesis where you set up a gradebook and enter students' grades. Grades can be linked to assessment items such as assignment, quizzes and discussion forum postings so that as you grade these assessments, the grades will be transferred to the grade book automatically.
Quizzes is where you will design and deliver quizzes for your courses. Quizzes can be set up so that questions (for examples, multiple choices questions) can be automatically grades.
User Progress is where you can monitor students' progresses in the course. You can access such information as when was the last time they logged in to the course, pages they viewed, and grades they achieved, etc.
Classlistis where you can view a list of students enrolled in your course and interact with them (for example, emailing them).
Emailcan be used to contact your students in this course. If you choose to use theEmailtool on the navbar, be aware that it is send-only email. This means you can send emails, but you need to log on to SIAST email to check replies to your emails.
News is where you can post course-related announcements.

For more information, watch this video: To learn how to use any tools listed in the navigation bar, schedule a training session with a Learning Technology Trainer on your campus.

Created by: Kelvin Hu