Fall Brightspace update

Oswego's Digital Learning Environment Team hopes that your semester is off to a great start and offers these Brightspace updates.

Spring 2025 semester courses

Spring 2025 courses were set to inactive, but instructors have the option to make them active if they wish. Students with incomplete grades still have access to these inactive courses.

Recent Brightspace updates

Quizzes: Print a quiz

If needed, instructors can now print quizzes for offline use. This new feature supports all native Brightspace question types, including question pools, and allows for shuffling and randomization options for sections, questions and answers. Instructors can also print multiple versions of a quiz and an answer key to help with grading.

The following knowledge articles provide detailed information concerning this new functionality:

Groups: Import enrollment

Instructors can use the Group import feature to efficiently manage student group enrollments. Rather than manually adding students one by one, instructors can use a CSV or TXT file to bulk-enroll or un-enroll students. This feature is particularly useful for courses with a large number of students. The process involves downloading the student list and a group export file, adding group, category, and student Brightspace numbers, and then re-uploading the file to automatically create groups and enroll students. The feature is also flexible, as it supports updating existing group enrollments throughout a course.

Lumi Pro

CTS and the Division of Extended Learning have been working with SUNY Online to integrate a new AI tool called Lumi into Brightspace. Lumi is now available for all faculty to use.

Lumi is designed to assist faculty in creating engaging content for their courses. Faculty can use it to quickly generate ideas from existing module content (pages, assignments, discussions and most files, including PDFs). It can also generate quiz questions.

Per SUNY’s agreement with Desire2Learn, users will not represent that output content is human-generated when it is not. If you choose to use Lumi, it is recommended to add a statement in your course syllabus such as: AI tools have been leveraged to organize or generate quiz questions, discussions and/or assignments.

You can get started using Lumi by reviewing the Brightspace Lumi Overview page.

D2L Educator in Residence grants

The D2L Educators-in-Residence initiative provides a unique opportunity for SUNY scholars to engage with and contribute to the latest research in teaching and learning. This initiative supports innovation in pedagogical and curriculum development approaches and is designed to create a community of scholars who inspire critical and analytical thinking while addressing academic challenges for students. The goal is to create a dynamic and forward-thinking initiative that connects professionals with advances in teaching and learning.

This is a grant opportunity for faculty to research how Brightspace features can be used to improve student learning. Four faculty projects across SUNY will receive a total of $5,000 each (provided through D2L and SUNY). These grants will be awarded directly to the researchers involved in the project. The funds will be distributed at the conclusion of the project.

The program is outlined in the Frequently Asked Questions document. Proposals are submitted through the online proposal form and are due on Sept. 30.

If you have any questions, please contact the Campus Technology Services (CTS) Help Desk.

-- Submitted by the Digital Learning Environment Team
Kathi Dutton
Theresa Gilliard-Cook
Douglas Hemphill
Carrie Mocyk
Greg Ketcham
Sean Moriarty
Rameen Mohammadi
Nicole Decker
Jill Pippin