#brightspace — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #brightspace, aggregated by home.social.
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Expected to be so productive today but #vertigo has derailed me. Meds are helping and maybe some coffee will too.
#3goodthings
1. Blood sugar is good #diabetes
2. No classes today
3. Got a good deal on some #fiestaware on eBay.My weekend will be mostly grading student work and wrestling with #Brightspace
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One thing I like about #BrightSpace: I can import a calendar of events for a class/module, and if I change something, delete everything and reimport in a few clicks.
Pattern: manage your data outside the web app, import easily, remain in control.
All it needs is a calendar program outside that can export ICS format (and do it programmatically for a defined subset).
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I upload HTML files to #Brightspace to have more control over my content (writing it in #Emacs #orgmode). It mostly works, but yesterday I discovered BS was corrupting my code examples by applying MathJax indiscriminately.
I think I have a solution, using Javascript to disable MathJax on a per-file basis.
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Oh FFS! #Brightspace is fucking up my #Julialang teaching materials for tomorrow by being too clever.
It can interpret latex code and show formula. Brilliant.
It just can't not do it, so my regular expression example of
r"\([0-9]+\)") is showing up as below, and I can't turn it off. Anything bracketed by \( and \) gets interpreted, even if it's in <pre></pre> tags, if it's HTML that's created outside BS.
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Need to talk to your students about AI ethics this fall? I've uploaded a course module for the AI IMPACT RISK framework, with interactive website, video, infographics, and quiz, that you can import into your own courseware
This imscc file can be imported directly into Canvas/Brightspace/Blackboard, or you can cherrypick resources directly from the IMPACT RISK website. Also new: SVG versions of all graphics
#AIethics #AIinEducation #OER #Canvas #Brightspace #Blackboard
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Hoping those familiar with #LaTeX can give me some advice here. I've started using it to create my assignments for school. I'm not writing technical papers yet, but I find using LaTeX with #Zotero in #VSCode more #accessible with a #ScreenReader than most other setups I've tried.
Since my discussion posts have to follow #APA style, I’m using LaTeX for those as well as full papers. That part is going well—but I’m running into trouble when I need to actually post what I’ve written.
My school uses Brightspace, which allows discussion posts in either rich text or #HTML. I have #Pandoc installed, so I tried converting my LaTeX source to HTML and pasting the code. But Pandoc didn’t include my references section in the output.
I also tried copying from the PDF, but that stripped all formatting.
Does anyone know how I can get a clean HTML version of my work—with references included—that I can paste into Brightspace?
Here’s the command I’ve been using:
pandoc main.tex \
--bibliography=references. Bib \
--csl=apa.csl \
--standalone \
-o main.html
It creates the HTML file, but the references section is missing.
Any tips?
#Accessibility #AssistiveTech #Pandoc #APAstyle #Brightspace #EdTech #AcademicWriting #InclusiveTech #BlindTech #HigherEd #CitationTools #OpenSource #WritingWorkflow -
#brightspace is still a massively overpriced, barely-functional, heavily-enshittified prototype of the principal-agent problem, in case anyone was wondering.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem
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Delete/Replace is 100% necessary for #BrightSpace's odd webdav implementation.
Replacing the file is not enough. Even with different size and timestamp it is not recognised as changed.
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OK, if the file is open locally it won't update. Not ideal but not insane.
And a tip: delete then replace on the remote location, rather than just update.
(Since I'm using a Makefile to update the remote file(s) that's easy to automate. It's a trick that also works with #webdav, eg on #BrightSpace.)
#oneDrive -
#Brightspace is a series of missed opportunities and profit-based shortcuts masquerading as an #LMS. Its gradebook has significant, inexplicable (in light of 20 years of web development) shortcomings. Naturally, many people want to just use #Excel.
Well... good luck.
#educorporate #enshittification #teaching #professor #highered
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#Brightspace has to be a prime example of #enshittification
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Student looking at "D2L" in big letters on LMS page: "My class is down to... luck?"
(probably)
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More things #brightspace can't do: negative numbers.
The formula editor in the gradebook is already a horrorshow of bad 1990s web design. And now this.
There's probably a workaround.
OK, I just realized that I said "there's probably a workaround" for the problem of a software system used by education systems all over the world that can't handle negative numbers.
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More things #brightspace can't do: change a quiz question grading in a way that allows all attempts of that question to be regraded. Apparently, it can only change future attempts. If you want to fix (or update or give more credit for) a particular question after the quiz has started, you can go fuck yourself and then go edit a few dozen individual quiz responses.
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More #brightspace #badDesign so I can have a record of it:
When grading items like this, you can't get a keystroke or even clicky rhythm going. You're grading 60 exams/quizzes and you enter an adjusted grade in the box, then hit Tab-Tab <enter>... great. It saves your work,
UNLESS you're on the last student record for that question, in which case Tab-Tab <enter> clicks "Go back to questions" and DOES NOT save your work.
As with so many other things in this software embodiment of complacency and missed opportunities, there is no flag that this has happened, no warning. You just notice... someday... maybe... that you didn't regrade that item.
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Just a quick #brightspace #hatepost:
1. In at least a couple of multiple-select dialogs, choices down the page FUCKING RESET all choices previously made up-page. With no flag, no warning, etc.
e.g., for accommodation overrides for students on a quiz, you choose dates, extra time, other conditions, etc. Then at the bottom of the page (actually a 20-line window within a page, so what you already did scrolls up and out of sight) you choose the subset of students this applies to.
And as soon as you do, everything else you have done resets to default values--that is, Very Wrong Values, without any indication this has happened. There you are, looking at the "save" button, unaware that brightspace just fundamentally fucked something up that will take back-and-forth emails, frustration, and crying/angry students to notice or fix.
While I'm at it...
2. Half the "enter URL" fields when adding links to external content are pre-populated (hard version) with "https://" and the other half aren't. If you get into the wrong habit when creating your content, you get broken links.
3. Half the "insert an image" fields for content (e.g., for quiz questions, handouts, etc.) accept drag-drop from a desktop file manager. The other half don't, requiring a sequence of 3-5 button hunts and clicks, then (in a subset of these) searching through your computer's filesystem.
Is it so wrong to want my job not to be made harder because a billion-dollar company can't be bothered to do basic shit?
#badCoding #badDesign #UserAntagonistic #basic #lms #highered #frustration #fuck #capitalism #educorporate
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Sobering moment: diving into the #Brightspace "community" site. Figured out the odd little workaround to get into the place where feature requests can be made.
Over 10,000 feature requests. One directly related to a post I recently made was first submitted in 2013. It's been over a decade.
You can search through these by status and some broad categories but not by "number of upvotes" and not by "date submitted." No way for me (right now?) to know how quickly BS gets critical issues fixed, which would be useful to gauge whether I want to spend my time on their community portal.
Right now I'm going to do a bit of upvoting/requesting but mostly try to restructure my teaching so I don't need Brightspace.
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Absent #Brightspace features:
Keyboard shortcuts. There are very few and they are not sufficient (in testing so far) to complete any of the tasks I use an LMS for (e.g., grading, gradebook, creating content, editing content, etc.)
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Things #brightspace can't do:
Create/administer/grade group-based assessments.
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More things #brightspace can't do:
Import most quiz questions from #moodle
(I already complained about this, but I decided to try to list all the issues with the same prompt and maybe tags)
Seriously, who in #SUNY greenlit this?
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...and clicking any of those links (while logged in) takes me to an unfamiliar, different login screen that doesn't recognize the username and password I had to set up just to be able to see others' questions and their or the devs' answers.
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Things #brightspace can't do:
- create quizzes, questions, or question banks ("question libraries") accessible from multiple courses.
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I know I'm on a "#Brightspace is annoying and lacks features" kick (bc I'm in the weeds with it right now), but just one more thing: My #IT team here at #SUNYFredonia kicks all the butts. Brightspace wasn't their choice but they're managing faculty issues with amazing speed, grace, and (most important) expertise. IDK if any of them are on #mastodon, but I see you and I appreciate the amazing work you're doing.
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#SUNY declared #Brightspace the only allowed #LMS & set up a single instance for 32,000 instructors. No customization possible. Iffy setup decisions. Massive duplication of effort for many of us.
Brightspace has big limitations. Several basic things just can't be done. It feels like BS polished up a beta product, sold a lot of subscriptions to managers, & made forums to tell frustrated faculty to submit feature requests.
Centralized inefficiency.
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Pointlessly duplicated effort is not my favoritre thing. My school's #LMS (#brightspace) is set to prohibit having multiple sections of the same course in one LMS shell. I teach 2 sections of #stats. This means creating all quizzes twice, posting all announcements twice, uploading every document twice, constantly checking and tweaking the two course shells to keep them synched, etc.
Of course the decision to adopt the LMS was made without significant input or testing from the people who would use it. Of course #SUNY legal's opinion that allowing any student to potentially see which section another student might be enrolled in is a "FERPA violation" was made without faculty input (and I think without checking with any FERPA experts).
Brightspace employees say it's dead easy to separate sections completely, to satisfy SUNY's interpretation of FERPA. However, there is ONE INSTANCE of Brightspace at SUNY (apparently), running at 56 separate colleges and universities. One instance for thousands of courses at dozens of schools.
The SUNY sysadmin for Brightspace (who controls everything b/c one instance) says the Brightspace people are wrong. He doesn't explain why, hasn't responded (so far) to several schools asking him to implement this, and to the Brightspace documentation and employees specifying which settings need to be set at the instance level to make it happen; he just says "that can't be done".
Tens or hundreds of thousands of wasted hours of work, and probably a few cases of #RSI because someone at the top of an #authoritarian system has an idea he won't check out because (and now I'm guessing) it doesn't affect him, just a few thousand other people.
I'm getting closer to my goal of just abandoning my LMS entirely, except maybe for posting midterm and final grades. We've all been told that no other "online platform" can be used, meaning definitely no other LMSes but (at my school, anyway) several other platforms, like Discord and Slack. The prohibition seems to be driven by student complaints (i.e., if a student complaints something is "confusing," the dean or provost will declare that it is prohibited).
Yeah, getting closer to ditching all LMS use. Maybe I'll try this next fall.
#frustration #highered #professor #online #education #authoritarianism