Brightspace

Using Brightspace Tabs as Inclusion Tools

• Content

  Brightspace’s Content tool enables faculty members to organize a complex network of knowledge and connect that to important facts, concepts, and procedures.

  The Brightspace Content tool helps students understand how the information in the course is organized and where to find content based on labels. These tabs typically should match what is written on the syllabus, but also connect students to e-copies of the course materials and may offer more detail than the syllabus.

  A highly structured Brightspace Content Unit Tabs helps students locate course readings, materials, and links by Week or by subject. The student can then see the week-by-week organization of the course and knows where to find instructions related to weekly expectations before, during, and after the class.

  Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21633066/

  The following strategies offer ways for instructors to assess and share the knowledge organization of a course with students. This high-structure approach helps students navigate expectations, and develop more connected, meaningful, and flexible ways of organizing their own understanding.

  Organizing Your Content

  Here are some practical next steps you can take in organizing your content:

  1. Create a Concept Map to analyze your own knowledge organization — Experts often struggle to identify and communicate their knowledge organization to students. Creating a personal concept map can clarify this organization. Concept mapping visually represents knowledge structures, making it easier to recognize central principles and key features. This tool enables experts to guide students through their concept map, helping them understand the organizational structures and principles important for their learning. Once you have produced your own concept map, the central organizing principles and key features you use should be easier for you to recognize. You can then walk your students through your own concept map as a way of orienting them to the organizational structures in your domain and illustrating the principles and features around which you want your students to organize their own knowledge.

  

  Source: Ambrose, et al. How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching

  Sample of Content Organization by Week using Unit tabs in the  Brightspace Content Tool.

  

  2. Provide students with the Organizational Structure of the Course
  Avoid assuming that students will naturally grasp the intended flow or basic relationships in the course material. Offering an overview that highlights key concepts and their interconnections can help students understand how the content pieces fit together. This organizational structure can be communicated in your syllabus in various ways: some instructors represent it visually (for example, through a flow chart or diagram) whereas others communicate it verbally. Or you can have the students map it out with each other as an activity early in the semester.

  In addition to presenting and explaining this organization early in the semester, periodically remind students of the larger organizational framework and situate particular class days within it. For example, “If you’ll remember, the first unit of this course focused on developing basic negotiation skills. Today we will be starting the second unit, in which we will see how those skills apply to real-world work situations. You can return to Week 2 on the Brightspace page to refresh your memory and revisit the PowerPoint slides from that week.”

  Source: Ambrose, et al. How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching

• Announcements

  Brightspace’s Announcements tool enables faculty members to organize a complex network of knowledge and connect that to important facts, concepts, and procedures.

  Brightspace’s Announcements tool is where you can remind students of upcoming events and deadlines. It is a simple way to guide them through the flow of the course and help them stay on track. You can stay present and communicate with students through this channel. This is also convenient for students because it stores all your messages in one place so they do not have to sift through their email inboxes looking for class information.

  

  Posting an announcement is a great way to get information to your students, stay connected, and build communication. Announcements should be used to convey changes in specific weeks of the course, important messages, helpful reminders, and to share relevant information about real-world application of course concepts. Sending out announcements helps you create a more accessible and inclusive course experience for all learners.

  A recent study details how several features of Brightspace are highlighted by students as being helpful for communication. Students indicated that they could access lecture notes, learning materials, and course announcements. In addition, they could see reminders for due dates and access their course materials through the Learning Management System (LMS). This communication supports student success in your classroom.

  We want our students to be self-regulated learners who can organize their obligations. But reminders through the announcements tabs support student success and ensure students develop these skills.

• Assignments

  Brightspace’s Assignments tool enables faculty members to organize a complex network of knowledge and connect that to important facts, concepts, and procedures.

  Brightspace’s Assignments tool is where students can submit files, pictures, and text electronically, after which you or your assistants will review and grade them. Providing clear and concise assignment descriptions, rubrics, and due dates is vital to student success. For instance, rubrics can be a crucial assessment tool that lays out specific performance expectations for an assignment. When students know exactly what they are expected to learn and understand, it can decrease anxiety about unknowns in the course material. The more precise and clear the instructions, the better students can focus their attention on achieving the assessment’s outcome, instead of guessing at expectations.

  Grading and Assessment

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  Learn how to effectively use rubrics in your assessment.

  This feature on Brightspace allows you to upload videos where you can give a demonstration, a Word document with further details, and other forms of media. Get support for designing transparent and clear assessments.

  In the Assignments tab you can provide the following details to students:

  • What is the purpose of the assignment?
  • What are the tasks required to perform for the assignment?
  • What criteria will be used to evaluate the assignment?
• Discussions

  

  Brightspace’s Discussions tool enables faculty members to organize a complex network of knowledge and connect that to important facts, concepts, and procedures.

  Brightspace’s Discussion Forum is an excellent place to allow students to co-construct knowledge, tap into their prior knowledge, and bring the real world into the classroom. It enables a sense of belonging. Important to the global cultures of NYUAD, it also allows a space where students can participate without speaking up in the live classroom sessions.

  NYUAD has a diverse community of students, faculty, and staff from all over the world with different linguistic and cultural norms. Within this context, there are different norms for speaking up due to social and cultural expectations. The Discussion Forum tab provides an opportunity to elicit students’ knowledge in an asynchronous format, giving students time to formulate their thoughts in English and share without the pressure of a live classroom setting.

  To activate students’ relevant prior knowledge you can open the Forum with a simple prompt, such as: "Think back to the research design Johnson used in the article from last week" or "Where have we seen this phenomenon before?"

  Source: Ambrose, S. A., Bridges, M. W., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M. C., & Norman, M. K. (2010). How learning works. John Wiley & Sons.

  1. Use Multiple and Diverse Examples

  Multiple examples are important if students are to understand the theories and concepts that can operate in a variety of contexts and conditions, and they also increase the likelihood of students relating to at least some of them. For example, plan examples that speak to both sexes,

  work across cultures, and relate to people from various socioeconomic statuses, and traditional ages as well as adult returning students. Using the “Discussions” tab can help students feel connected to the content, that they belong in the course or field, and reinforce their developing sense of competence and purpose.

  2. Establish and Reinforce Ground Rules for Interaction

  Ground rules can help to ensure that peers are being inclusive and respectful in order to create an effective learning climate and promote students ’ development. To generate maximal buy-in for the ground rules, you can involve students in the process of establishing them. See Appendix E for an example of such a process. Of course, you will still need to occasionally reinforce the ground rules and correct students when established class engagement norms are not respected.

  Establish Ground Rules for interaction in your lecture slides and Brightspace page. Where appropriate incorporate the Ground Rules into your Syllabus.

  Sample Ground Rules For Online Discussions

  • Ask for clarification if you are confused.
  •  Challenge one another, but do so respectfully.
  •  Critique ideas, not people.
  •  Do not offer opinions without supporting evidence.
  •  Avoid put-downs (even humorous ones).
  •  Take responsibility for the quality of the discussion.
  •  Build on one another ’s comments; work toward shared understanding.
  •  Always have your book or readings in front of you.
  •  Do not monopolize discussion.
  •  Speak from your own experience, without generalizing.
  •  If you are offended by anything said during the discussion, acknowledge it immediately.
  •  Consider anything that is said in class strictly confidential.

  Source: Ambrose, S. A., Bridges, M. W., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M. C., & Norman, M. K. (2010). How learning works. John Wiley & Sons.

  3. Turn Discord and Tension into a Learning Opportunity

  Students need to learn that debate, tension, discord, and cognitive dissonance are all opportunities to expand one’s perspective, delve deeper into a topic, better understand opposing views, and so on; hence, we need not avoid them. Since college students are still developing social and emotional skills, these can often overshadow intellect, logic, and rational thinking. As a result, we need to work to continually shape our classroom climate. So do not foreclose a discussion just because tensions are running high; rather, funnel those emotions into useful dialogue. For example, you might ask students to take on another perspective using a role-play or simply explain how and why discomfort and tension can be a valuable part of learning.

  

  How Students Experience Hidden Expectations

  "Using the Brightspace forum throughout a core class provided me with a space to voice my opinions about the materials we were discussing and to ask questions about the readings. By posting on the forum, I was able to communicate with other students and the professor about the questions that interested me the most, and my interests were reflected in the class discussions. The fact that the professor used students' posts to inform class content made me feel that my voice mattered and that I had agency over my learning."

  --Anna Rygielska, Class of 2024

• Quizzes

  

  Brightspace can be used to deliver online quiz activities to give both formative and summative feedback. The Quizzes tool in Brightspace offers flexibility in the creation, delivery, and grading of online quizzes.

• Zoom
  Guest Speakers can diversify the curriculum in your course, and help to bring the real world into the classroom. Use the Zoom tool on Brightspace to bring in people from around the world to add perspective to a given topic.

• Grades
  Brightspace’s Grades tool is based on the allocation of points and the percentage weighting of individual tasks to an overall assessment. The high-structure nature of the formatting means you can give consistent and clear feedback to students more easily using this tab. It makes their performance more transparent. Feedback is most effective when it explicitly communicates to students about some specific aspects of their performance relative to specific target criteria, and when it provides information that helps students progress toward meeting those criteria.

  The Grades tool in Brightspace can be used to increase grade transparency. Transparency is the act of making explicit to students the underlying features of the learning environment (Winkelmes, 2013). A significant aspect of grade transparency involves respecting the diversity of students’ social identities as well as their varied interests. Brightspace allows students to access graded submissions by going to the GRADES tab. If provided access, students can see the points for assignments, the letter grade, and feedback. Students who perceive a greater degree of transparency in the purposes, tasks, and criteria of their assignments report significant gains in academic confidence, sense of belonging, and mastery of the skills that employers value most (Winkelmes, 2013). 

  Source: Winkelmes, M. (2013). Transparency in learning and teaching: Faculty and students benefit directly from a shared focus on learning and teaching processes. NEA Higher Education Advocate, 30(1), 6–9.

• Pronunciation & Pronouns
  The use of student names has been shown to build classroom community, increase student engagement by helping them feel more comfortable, and make students feel more accountable to the instructor (Cooper et. al 2017, Murdoch et. al 2018, O’Brien et. al 2014). 

  Failure to know or correctly pronounce student names has been tied to implicit bias and feelings of alienation among students, particularly for students with ethnically distinct names (Mitchell 2016 and Ohuabunwa 2021). 

  Faculty members can use Brightspace’s Pronounciation & Pronouns tool to promote inclusive teaching and make students feel like they belong in their classrooms.

• Media Gallery

  MEDIA GALLERY offers a media processing, storage, and streaming option for all audio-video materials. Faculties can use the Media Gallery tool to create, view, edit, and manage all your audio-video content by bringing in different mediums of content delivery such as documentaries, podcasts, and images. 

  NYU Stream is a great way to share media via NYU Brightspace, Stream channels, NYU Wikis, Web Publishing, Google Sites, as well as any other website to which you have publishing rights.

  You can build collaborative and dynamic media channels that support asynchronous communications and foster out-of-classroom discussions by diversifying students' engagement in content. You can also organize and manage video lists that support your learning goals by using Media Gallery on your NYU Brightspace course site.

  Read more about the Media Gallery on NYU Stream
• Class Progress

  

  The Class Progress tool tracks your learners' overall engagement with the course site content and tabs as a course and individually.

  Video: Class Progress Overview for the Instructor (Provided by D2L Brightspace).

  To view your course progress in the Class Progress tool

  1. Navigate to your course.
  2. Click Class Progress. This may be in the navbar, the More drop-down menu, or the Course Tools menu.
  3. Click a menu item to review the following items:
     1. Content: Shows all the content available for the course. This tab also shows your Topics Visited, Total Visits, Time Spent, and Completed Topics by student. Each course has a progress bar that displays your completion level. Students can also review their course engagement with course materials in this way.
     2. Discussions: Displays all discussions for the course and students Read Posts, Threads Created, and Replies Posted. This only indicates they have clicked on the various discussion forums. It is raw data, and to determine level of engagement comes from your course rubrics. But at a general level, you can see if a student has logged into brightspace and if they are clicking on relevant and assigned aspects of the course. The figure below provides an example (provided by D2L Brightspace) of the instructor view of student progress in Discussion Board engagement.

   

  

  A low engagement level in the Class Progress indicates the need for a conversation, not a grade for class participation. Note that this is raw data. For example, a student may not be clicking on the readings because they are accessing course materials via a classmate. A low engagement level in the Class Progress indicates the need for a conversation, not a grade for class participation.

  • Assignments: Displays all your assignments. You can view details of your submissions and your instructor’s feedback on each assignment you’ve submitted.
  • Quizzes: Displays all your available quizzes for the course. You can see your attempts and attempt feedback on this tab.

  You may want to use the Class Progress tool to do any of the following:

  • Monitor class engagement for any or all users in your course. Note that this is raw data. For example, a student may not be clicking on the readings because they are accessing course materials via a classmate. A low engagement level in the Class Progress indicates the need for a conversation, not a grade for class participation.
  • Prepare progress reports.
  • View user profiles, email users, or instant message users.
  • Track when a user accesses the course and downloads course content.
  • Track a user's grades, completion of learning objectives, access of content topics, participation in discussions, assignment submissions, quiz submissions, checklist completion, survey responses, login history, and system access.
  • Set up intelligent Agents for learners who are falling behind in a course.
  • View feedback and submissions for assignments, discussion topics, and other assessments for individual learners.