Blog

Synchronous quizzes will be introduced in the next regular update to D2L / Brightspace update on September 29. Synchronous quizzes are an optional type of quiz where students take their attempts simultaneously. They may be convenient for in-class sessions and can provide an online quiz-taking experience that is similar to the traditional on paper test setup.

On July 28 the New Quiz Experience will become permanent in Brightspace. We have updated our documentation to reflect the new Experience.

Additionally the update on July 28 will also change some of the behaviours around quiz timing.

D2L is changing the user interface for creating and editing quizzes. Much of the functionality of the existing quiz experience is present, but may be found in a different place or be worded differently.

ChatGPT has been a major topic in learning technology discussion for the past few weeks. It introduces a web-accessible, friendly, interface to the existing GPT system which is created and maintained by the OpenAI corporation.

Several people have written on ChatGPT, particularly in the context of higher ed. Several of those are gathered here.

Zoom does occasionally suffer from a problem which prevents you from logging in or connecting to a meeting. Often these problems are solved quickly, but Microsoft Teams is available as an alternative.

Over the winter semester all of our core learning technologies added some features which should help improve instructors’ and students’ experience using these tools.

In December, Dr. Corey Flynn shared some of the ways instructors might easily record their in-person lectures at the Science Teaching Forum. The session was recorded and uploaded to the campus video hub https://yuja.ucalgary.ca.

The update to Brightspace/D2L that will happen at the end of this week has a few major changes that may be important for instructors.

Here are some of the updates to our learning technologies that happened during October that may be relevant to instructors.

Here are some of the updates to our Learning Technologies that happened during September.

Here are some of the changes and updates for learning technology that may be helpful for instructors to know about.

D2L has made some changes to the was assignments work in Brightspace, particularly to how assignments are created and evaluated. Both of these new experiences are intended to streamline how we create and grade assignments by making sure that most of the things we have to do are now all found in the same place, rather than having to click through multiple tabs. 

The text editor in Brightspace/D2L is changing. The new editor modernizes a few things, makes the editor a easier to use and makes sure that the editors in all the areas of D2L work the same way (for students and instructors) and will be turned on August 20.

Here are some of the updates to our learning technologies that happened in July that might be of interest to instructors.

Updates to eLearn and changes in how names and genders are handled in Zoom.

Live Auto-Transcription was recently added to Zoom. This allows participants to see a text transcription of the speaker’s words, either as subtitles at the bottom of the screen, or as a transcript to the side. There are a few things you can do which may help live auto-transcription to produce a clearer transcript for your session.

A summary of changes to University of Calgary learning technologies and tools that happened during May 2021.

February had a small number of updates to our learning technologies, notably the new accommodation tool in D2L Brightspace and Live Auto-Transcriptions in Zoom.

New interface for adding Multi-Select (Multiple choice, multiple answer) questions to quizzes and surveys