July 2023 Learning Hub updates

Availability dates in the Discussions list are now displayed as a simple date range below the titles of discussion topics. Hovering over the date range text displays a tooltip that includes the information about start and end dates. Tooltips also include applied settings to explain how the discussion topic appears to learners before and after these dates.

Figure: The updated format of the availability dates in a discussion topic. Availability details now appear in a hover tooltip.

To encourage user adoption of the new Discussions creation experience, the default state for the experience is now set to ON. The New Creation Experience for Discussions was previously introduced in the April 2023/20.23.4 release as an opt-in feature. This update changes the default state of the d2l.Tools.Discuss.CreateExperienceOptIn configuration variable setting to ON. Administrators can choose to override this change ahead of the July 2023/20.23.7 release by overriding the default setting of this configuration variable to OFF. The ON (Opt-In) value remains available to allow users to choose their experience and let administrators opt in their organization or specific areas.

To improve awareness of any new or outstanding enrollment requests, this release adds alerts in multiple tools and widgets in Brightspace that show instructors and administrators pending enrollment requests. This includes new inline alert messages on the Discover homepage and Classlist views, as well as new access to view enrollment requests from Classlist Enrollment Requests.

In addition, a new status icon now appears in the Updates and My Courses widget cards. Instructors and administrators can turn this off in Customize Widget’s Updates; by default, this status icon is turned on.

This release updates the Quiz Creation experience for instructors by simplifying the quiz timing setup workflow, adding useful new features, including the ability to auto-submit, and removing obsolete quiz timing options.

With this release, learners can show or hide the timer, receive time warning messages, and access more information about their quizzes.

Instructors Workflow Changes

The following workflow changes and advanced Quiz Timing options are now available for instructors.

• Simplified and redesigned Quiz Timing & Display settings
  • The updated settings allow instructors to choose if they want to set a time limit by selecting the Set time limit checkbox, which is cleared by default. If Set time limit is selected, instructors can add a Time Limit and edit the Timer Settings.
  • The previous Prevent the student from making further changes option has been changed to Automatically submit the quiz attempt. Quiz auto-submission automatically hands in quizzes on enforced time limit quizzes at the end of the set time, improving quiz integrity. This behavior is changed on all existing and in-progress quizzes with the update.
    Note: The Automatically submit the quiz attempt option is now the default setting for all newly created quizzes with a time limit and is used automatically if the instructor does not edit the quiz timing settings. The previous default setting was Allow the student to continue working.
  • The previous Allow the student to continue working option has been changed to Flag the attempt as exceeded time limit and allow the learner to continue working. This behavior is changed on all existing and in-progress quizzes with the update.
  • The Grace Period and Allow student to continue working but automatically score zero options are removed to further streamline the process of quiz creation. With this update, any existing and in-progress quizzes that include these settings are changed to the following new behavior:
    • A quiz that previously had a grace period now uses the time limit set on the quiz.
    • A quiz previously set to Allow student to continue working but automatically score zero now sets the quiz to Automatically submit the quiz attempt.