How to do common tasks with BrightSpace

Treat this page as Wikipedia. The information may be useful, but also dead wrong. If you notice errors, omissions, ambiguities, feel free to edit this.

How do I get user information (i.e. email addresses, group info?)

Administration → Grades → Enter Grades: then Export

Select the fields you want. The Org Defined ID and Username seem to be identical (both are basically the student number with a hashtag in front), so just pick one.

Under Grade Values, do not select anything that has a (?) behind it.

Under User Details, just tick everything.

Then select, under Choose Grades To Export, any grade items you might want as well.

Then hit Export to CSV or Export to Excel.

How to enter many grades at once?

Follow the steps in the previous question, enter the grades in the spreadsheet, then:

Administration → Grades → Enter Grades: Import

NOTE If you use a .CSV file, you need to modify the column names, or Brightspace will not accept it; you need to remove the stuff between angle brackets (i.e. <Numeric MaxPoints:...>). Strange.

How do I download multiple assignments as a single zip?

Activities → Assignments; click on the assignment you want.

The difference between the Users/Submissions tabs are minor: the latter allows you to select individual submissions whenever a user has submitted multiple ones --- which seems to me to be a very uncommon use case, as it is possible to instruct BrightSpace to only keep the most recent submission.

Select the users/submissions you want to download the submissions from, then hit Download

NOTE: Selecting 'All students' will only select those shown; so make sure to also select 200 per page on the bottom of the page. For courses with more than 200 students, there is no way to download them all at once. :(

FUN FACT: A unique userID (i.e. student number) is not part of the folder names used in the .zip file that you get. Let's hope you don't get too any Daan De Jong's or Jan Jansen's in your course!

FUN FACT 2: the student name in the folder is apparently stored somewhere in UTF8, then interpreted as CP866. This causes mojibake. One work-around on Linux is use 7zip (7za) instead of unzip to unpack the zip.

How do I give feedback to multiple students at once?

Re-zip the directory structure you downloaded (in the previous step), after making sure that it contains everything that you want to have sent back to the student.

Activities → Assignments; click on the assignment you want to provide feedback

Hit Add Feedback files. Drop the .zip in there.

NOTE: Giving feedback is distinct from entering grades. Read above on how to do that.

NOTE: For some reason, if a submission already has a grade, that grade gets removed when uploading feedback for that submission. Perhaps there is some way to include a grade in the feedback package so that it doesn't get removed but instead gets set to that new grade? For now, it seems that the feedback package should be uploaded first and the grades CSV second.

IMPORTANT: This will put the feedback into "Draft" status. To make sure your students see the feedback, you need to press Publish feedback as well. However, after that point, re-uploading a .zip will not change the feedback for students for whom feedback has already been published; to edit feedback for those students, need to go to the individual Submission folder for those students and Retract or Update the feedback, which is a more intensive manual process.