Hi everyone,
Me again. I am writing with another exciting Brightspace update, perfect to read on the beach as you soak up these last days of summer. Apologies for sending this through both the department listserv and the Academic Commons site, but I want to make sure that everyone, especially new faculty (welcome, by the way!), receives it.
First, in case you missed my email last week, a reminder to please make sure, to the extent possible, to create your Fall 24 Brightspace courses from migrated course shells and then course copy to Fall 24 (instructions here). Doing it this way will make sure you do not lose your hard work if your teaching assignment changes suddenly. If you are new to KBCC this semester and were not at another CUNY school in the past few years, you may need to create your course shell for Fall 24 from scratch (sorry!). But please back up your work by downloading your course packet and saving it as a Zip file so that you always have possession of it. It can always be imported later.
Ok, I have good news and not-so-good news, so please read to the end because that’s where the not-so-good news is.
Good news first. I want to let you all know that KCC’s Center for E-Learning (KCeL) has its own Academic Commons page devoted to prerecorded Brightspace tutorials. Much material is covered, enough to get you up and running with your own courses.
More good news: Rachel Ihara and Greg Bruno will be hosting, “Virtual Brown Bag Lunch: Learning Brightspace and E-Portfolio Options with Brightspace” on Zoom on August 16 at 1 pm. Here is the link (no registration necessary): https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87481308546?pwd=b0ydWAOWRnnbtioVtuwValNqxX4VXi.1 Please come and share your experiences thus far!
The session will cover the following topics:
- Creating assignments and giving feedback
- Setting up discussions
- Issues with “External Learning Tools” like Hypothesis and Turnitin
- Downloading completed assignments to Dropbox or OneDrive to create student portfolios for CPA
Ok, now for the not-so-good news. As the third bullet point suggests, there are issues with Hypothesis and Turnitin. Turnitin is famous (infamous?) for its plagiarism detection capability, but it also serves as Brightspace’s only tool for peer editing. And Hypothesis is the platform’s annotation tool, so it’s important for us, too. Rachel, Greg and I have been working on a dummy comp course this summer and spending considerable time troubleshooting these tools. None of the training material has covered them thus far, so we are kind of in the dark.
For example, I created a sample Turnitin assignment that for some reason can’t be deleted from the grade book, no matter what I do, even though I have deleted it elsewhere in the shell.
Therefore, I strongly suggest avoiding these tools for now. Rachel, Greg and I will continue to work on the issue and will update when we have clear and foolproof instructions for using them. My own working theory is that the problem is on the admin side, but I cannot say for sure.
If you have any insight into using Turnitin and Hypothesis on Brightspace, please try to attend the virtual brown bag session on the 16th. I’m dying to know what we’re doing wrong. In the meantime, I will reach out to KCel in hopes that they can point us in the right direction. I will update when possible.
Hope you are all well! As ever, let me know if you have any questions.
Best,
nk
