Instructor FAQs

Course sites in Brightspace are set not visible to students upon creation. The toggle to make your site visible to students is located on the course home page.

The open dates for the semesters is as follows:

Fall September 1
Winter January 1
Summer April 1

The start date of your Brightspace site can be adjusted by navigating to Course Tools-> Course Admin-> Course Offering Information

No, there is no capacity for Brightspace to be used to proctor assessments.

YuJa Video Platform, YuJa Panorama, Leganto, Mobius (Nursing) and Mobius (Math) are available in Brightspace.

To evaluate a potential integration with Brightspace, a security, legal, contractual, and technological review needs to be completed. This process can take a semester or longer. Consultation with other University departments is likely required. To being the process, open a Brightspace service request, and attach the following documents:

• HECVAT/HECVAT Lite (demonstrates IT security/cybersecurity protocols the vendor has in place to assist us in evaluating institutional risk.) 
• VPAT (confirms a level of accessibility a system meets. Public websites must meet a certain level of accessibility according to Ontario law.)
• Contact at the company that you have been working with
• Preferably contacts at other schools that have used this software

Please review the Requests for LMS Customizations and Integrations policy for further details.

An announcement created when a course is set as "Inactive" will be saved in the Announcements tool and will appear in the Announcements widget (if used), but will not be emailed. See more information about activating your course.

Announcements created before the start date or after the end date of the course also do not get emailed. See more information about the course start and end dates.

If you create an announcement before the course is active and/or before the start date of the course, set the start date of the announcement to a date when the course will be active and after the start date of the course and an email will go out on the start date of the announcement.

While selecting students to email or to release grades to, if you select all the students on a page in the Classlist or Gradebook, only those names that appear on the page get emailed or grades released. Students on other pages do not get selected. To ensure all students are selected, go to the bottom of the screen and select "200 per page" so that all students are displayed on the page, and then select the check box in the column header to select all the check boxes. Once all the checkboxes are select, send or release. If you have more than 200 students, repeat the process for all pages. 

The best way to send an email to the entire class list, is to use the Email Classlist button found near the top of the page of the Classlist tool.

You will receive a Brightspace formatted txt file with your Scantron results. The text file will have a default title of Scantron. If you have have an existing column where you would like the results added to, you will need to edit the text file and change Scantron to the title of your existing column.

To import the results:

• Click on Grades in your course navbar, and select Import
• Attach the Brightspace txt file you were provided. You can check the box if you would like a new column created for the results.
• The wizard will alert you of any student numbers not in your class. The wizard will also walk you through creating a new column if it was selected earlier.
• The wizard will confirm the grades being added.

When a window pop-up appears asking you to save/confirm something, the button to do so might not appear if your screen is small or if you are zoomed in. To be able to see the missing button or scroll bar, zoom out. If this does not work, restart the process you started as your session may have timed out. If neither of those work, try using a different browser.

Any instructor starting a new employment contract at the beginning of the term will not normally have access to their UWin Account prior to the start of the term and as a result will not have access to their Brightspace course site until the term starts.  However, early access to their UWin Account, systems, training, and their course site can be provided so they can prepare for the start of the term, but the request must come from the instructor’s supervisor or the departmental administrative personnel.

To request this early access, submit a UWin Account Creation service request ticket at:

https://uwindsor.teamdynamix.com/TDClient/1975/Portal/Requests/ServiceDet?ID=9521

You will need the new employee’s start date and either the employee number or end date to complete the request.

It is recommended that the request be sent at least four weeks in advance of the semester starting so that the account, course sites, and necessary Brightspace access and training can be provided before the start of classes.