Brightspace Course Tools Tour

Courses at UWSP are encouraged to use a standard navigation structure to ensure each of your courses looks the same and is easy for you to use, however your instructor may choose to create their own custom navigation for the course.

The Minibar

D2L has a standard navigation bar in a black band at the top of your screen. This gives you easy access to your D2L homepage, each of your courses, notifications, update and subscription alerts, your profile information, and your custom D2L settings.

Course Navigation

The bottom of the banner contains a row of links to the most commonly used tools. Here you’ll find the Course Home, Content, Discussions, Dropbox, Grades, Quizzes, and eReserves. The last menu item, Other Tools, contains links to less used items, including Online Rooms, ePortfolio, Groups, The Media Gallery, My Media, Calendar, Surveys, Chat, the classlist, and Rubrics.

Course home will bring you back to the course home screen. This is where your instructor will post news items. Updates for the course will appear here as well. There is a library search integrated into the page, and your instructor may add additional custom “widgets” to provide access to special resources.

Content is where the majority of your course content will reside. Instructors post course documents and readings, assignments, and video here.

Discussions is the class discussion board. Your instructor may post questions or discussion prompts here. Some instructors require discussion participation; some use it to give students a place to talk about the content of the course on their own.

The Dropbox (not to be confused with the online storage app) is where your instructors will collect assignments from you.

Grades is where you can see your grades for the course. Instructors may post grades as they are earned, or may wait to release them a few times per semester.

Quizzes is where you will go to take online quizzes, and review the results of quizzes you have taken.

eReserves links to the library’s eReserves site, a place your instructors may house copyrighted material for you to watch or read.

Online rooms (or Blackboard Collaborate) is a virtual classroom. Instructors may choose to conduct some or all of your class sessions through Collaborate. Collaborate allows synchronous voice and text chat, webcams, an interactive whiteboard and more tools.

ePortfolio allows students to share work with anyone they choose. It is often used to assemble the semester’s work into a final project, or can be used to highlight the work of your academic career at UWSP for potential employers or grad school applications.

Groups lets instructors subdivide a class into smaller working groups. Your instructor may set up group discussions, file storage, or dropboxes for your class.

The Media Gallery is a place for instructors to share video with the class. It may be items that the instructor created, or it may be work created by students to share with the class.

My Media is a place for you to see everything you have uploaded into Kaltura, the video storage and distribution system.

The Calendar allows you to see all of the set Due Dates and other important dates your instructors have indicated.

The last few tools in the other tools section (Surveys, Chat, the classlist, and Rubrics) are primarily there for instructors and are not used very often.