Providing feedback on student’s submissions to assignments can be a time-consuming task. This article is meant to help you speed up the process by showing the most efficient ways of providing feedback while simultaneously offering Instructors tools to provide the best possible learning value for students.
Brightspace allows multiple areas to provide feedback on student’s submissions to assignments. These areas are:
To add feedback to an assignment
- Click on Assignments from the top bar of your course.
- Select the Assignment to be evaluated.
- In the Submission overview screen, select Evaluate for the submission you would like to evaluate.
- Add your feedback to the ‘Feedback’ field at the bottom of the right-hand side of the screen
- Select Publish to immediately share the feedback with the student or select Save Draft to publish the feedback later (this can be done in bulk).
In the top left corner, the student’s name is displayed. When hovering over a student’s name or profile picture/initials, the student’s user profile card appears. The profile card contains quick links to email, instant message and user progress.
- Go to the Grades-menu of your course and find the assignment you would like to provide feedback to.
- Click on the drop down arrow next to the Assignment’s name and select Grade All
- Select the pencil icon on the right-hand side of the screen to enter feedback
- The pop-up screen is divided into two sections
- Feedback: Enter your feedback for the student here
- Private comments: Text entered here is only visible with grading permissions for this course and is generally used for notes on agreements, etc.
- Select Save to save your feedback and/or notes
- The feedback is shared with students immediately
If you are not familiar with Rubrics, please refer to this page.
- Go to the Submissions Overview screen of the assignment you wish to evaluate.
- Click on the title of the submission you would like to evaluate.
- In the evaluation panel, select the name of the Rubric you would like to use to evaluate the submission.
- Select Level for the criteria and give if needed adjust the score.
Although Rubrics here are used to score and provide feedback on the assignment simultaneously, it is possible to only add feedback here and score later.
= - To add feedback, select the Add feedback-button and type your feedback.
- When finished adding feedback, select the Close-button
Brightspace allows Instructors to process and evaluate assignments in bulk. This is a great time save when dealing with large cohorts. In short, this feature condenses all student’s submissions into a .ZIP file. Instructors open the file, add their feedback, save the file and upload the ZIP file back to Brightspace. The evaluated file will become an attachment to the student’s submission.
Steps involved:
- Go to the Submissions overview screen of the Assignment you would like to evaluate.
- Make sure the Users tab is selected.
- Select all Submissions by checking the boxes under the Download-icon.
All student’s submissions should now be selected. - Click on the Download-button. A new screen opens and the download is being prepared (this might take a while).
- Click the link in this new screen to download the .ZIP-file
- Extract the . ZIP-file to a location of your choice
- Open the .ZIP-file and start evaluation
It is very important that no filenames or extension names are changed!
- Once done with evaluating, make sure all changes are saved to the files and create a .ZIP-file of the folder.
- In the Submissions Overview screen, select the Add Feedback Files button
- Upload the .ZIP-file in which the evaluated submissions are saved.
When uploading a ZIP-file, the file names within the ZIP-file should not exceed 128 characters (including the file extension). You will be able to upload the files, but the file-names cut-off at 128 characters and the extension is stripped. Without the file extension you are not able to open the file. When uploading a single file you get the error below, but when uploading a ZIP-file this error is not presented.
- Optionally select Overwrite Duplicate Files.
Currently the overwrite functionality is not working. If you wish to upload new feedback files after you have already done so previously, please remove the previously uploaded feedback files per submission first.
- Select the Add button. Brightspace will now upload all evaluation files and them to each student’s submission as an attachment.
- Select the button Add feedback files
Evaluating an assignment in bulk does not allow grading to take place in bulk, although this can easily be done in the submission overview screen.