July 2021 Updates for UCalgary Learning Technologies

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

Brightspace / D2L

In July, there were a few changes to quizzes. In particular, the “Introduction” field has been phased out. Older quizzes have had their introductions and descriptions merged, so no data has been lost. Additionally, the Reports Setup has been moved from the quiz editor and can now be accessed from the drop-down menu for each quiz in the quiz page.

If you are using the New Assignment Creation Experience, you’ll notice that categories have returned to the experience. Earlier you had to manage assignment categories from the bulk-edit tool for assignments, but now you can add a category when you create or edit the dropbox / assignment.

It is now possible to assign Text, Formula and calculated grade items to categories in the gradebook. This is only for organization, they can’t be included in category calculations or the final grade.

D2L has their own notes for July.

Zoom

Zoom has introduced a few new features, in addition to addition of pronouns in your Zoom profile and the ability to allow meeting participants to change their names (in the host’s meeting security menu) which was included in the June update post.

The most notable change is that you can now control who people in chat are allowed to message. There were some differences as this was released, but now that should default to Everyone and anyone directly, which was the original default. You can change this setting by clicking on the three dot menu in the in meeting chat. You can restrict chat altogether, only allow participants to chat to you, only allow participants to chat to the general chat, or allow participants to chat to the general chat and direct message each other. You can change your default for this setting in your zoom settings.

Zoom has also added an emoji button to the chat window and the “Temporarily Away” coffee cup reaction has been brought back. Additionally if you use immersive view, you can now record that view locally.

You can read Zoom’s client updates from July 19 and August 2.

YuJa

YuJa has made a number of updates to both the Enterprise Video Platform (that’s our yuja.ucalgary.ca) and to the recording tools for both Windows and MacOS.

The subtitle and captioning tools have been updated so that now when captions are still being generated a message is shown letting people know that captions will be available soon. You can also move the subtitle bar anywhere in the video window.

The less frequently used video configuration options are now hidden in the “More Options” section of the Edit Video dialog, this should hopefully make the frequently used options easier to find. Additionally buttons have been added to quick copy the link and embed code for the video and you can edit the embed code from YuJa (if you need to control the size of the video, for example).

On the Video Capture side, they’ve made some minor interface updates to the Windows version of the Video Capture tool. On the MacOS version they’ve added the ability to capture multiple monitors and made it easier to switch been video sources.

YuJa has a unified updates page for all their products, but it does include the video capture updates and the enterprise video platform updates.