We’ve collected a list of recent updates and changes to the online learning ecosystem for spring term. Updates are listed under each application. Updates are not exhaustive but rather focus on the items that are most important to instructors and students or have the most impact.

D2L Brightspace

Respondus LockDown Browser

You can now use Respondus LockDown Browser on specific quizzes to improve security during the assessment. LockDown Browser prevents visiting other websites or applications, printing, and copying and pasting during the quiz. This tool is being added to improve quiz integrity and combat the use of AI tools during your exams.

• Info for Instructors
• Info for Students

Discover available for students

Students can now find and self-enroll in courses that have been set up to use Discover. So far, we only have one class, Math Skills Videos, but anticipate more to come. Please do not add your credit classes to Discover for student privacy reasons.

Improvements to Gradebook Navigation

Small arrow buttons have been added to the gradebook to make it easier to navigate horizontally in large gradebooks.

Kaltura My Media

Adding Extended Audio Descriptions

You can now add Extended Audio Descriptions to your media entries in My Media.

Yuja Panorama

Winter term accessibility scores

The following departments had an average course accessibility score over 90!

• 9CWD
• 9PH
• ASL
• BA
• CADD
• CIS
• CJA
• COMM
• CS
• DA
• DH
• EC
• ED
• EMS
• ESR
• FN
• GD
• GER
• GRN
• HE
• HEC
• HIM
• HST
• IRW
• ITP
• J
• LIB
• MA
• MP
• MSD
• MT
• NAS
• OMT
• PE
• PHL
• RD
• SOC

Spring course scores are being collected and shared in preparation for the April 24, 2026 ADA compliance deadline. If you need support in your class, please reach out to dlhelp@pcc.edu or schedule an appointment with one of our ITS.

H5P

Interface improvements

H5P’s interface has been improved to make it easier to create and edit activities within Brightspace. The larger interface is a welcome improvement according to early adopters on the team.

H5P OER Hub

You can now search from a large library of H5P activities and share your own with the world with OER Hub. This new feature lives within the H5P interface and makes it much easier for you to share your activities with coworkers and the rest of the world alike. I’m really excited about this feature.

Learners can retry Fill in the Blanks after fully correct answers

Learners can now retry Fill in the Blanks questions even if their previous submission was fully correct, supporting active recall, reinforcing learning, and building confidence and mastery.

Other bug fixes

There are other fixes and updates in the .

VoiceThread

SSO update

VoiceThread single sign-on now uses the college’s EntraID platform for authentication. While few users log in to VoiceThread directly, those who do will now use the standard process for other PCC tools.

Private responses

On May 1st, VoiceThread will allow instructors to decide if they want to allow users to send private feedback to users. This can encourage engagement between students, between you and students, etc.

Zoom

Zoom 7.0 is coming. The interface updates will slowly roll out to users over the coming months. We don’t have very good information to share yet, so we’ll provide more information as we receive it. So far, is all we have to work with. It will have the biggest impact on admins and support staff who manage multiple tools, but we haven’t seen the actual updates yet. Sorry for the cryptic update.

D2L Brightspace

Quizzes – Hide Quiz Question Points (October 2025)

Instructors can now hide the point value for quiz questions to ensure learners focus on all questions equally, without the risk of inferring the number of correct answers based on point value.

Creator+/H5P – New content picker in Authoring tools menu (October 2025)

• Instructors now have direct access to H5P content types through a new picker in the Authoring Tools menu.
  
• Selecting H5P Interactives from the menu now opens a modal dialog in Brightspace, allowing instructors to filter, search, and select H5P content types more efficiently.
  

Announcements – Email a copy of an announcement to your Classlist (November 2025)

• When an instructor selects the new checkbox, the system emails the content of the announcement to all users in the Classlist on publishing.
• Users who are not subscribed to receive a notification for announcements will also receive an email, ensuring that important information contained within the announcement is delivered to every learner.
  

Grades – Bulk edit exclude items from final grade (November 2025)

• Instructors can now use the Exclude from Final column when bulk editing grade items in the Grades tool. Selecting this option excludes the grade item from the final grade calculation.
  

Discussion Due Dates (December 26, 2025)

• Discussions now feature true due dates, which can be added to new topics or existing topics! !
  

Quizzes: Zero-Point Questions (December 26, 2025)

• Make quiz questions worth zero-points. Applies to new and existing quiz questions. !
  

Yuja Panorama

As we work towards , Panorama is an essential tool in tracking our progress. We’re keen to see improvements over time more-so than specific scores. (Though we do see you faculty making significant updates! There were 98 courses in Fall term with a score of 100%).

Here are a few highlights from fall term that we’ve also shared with deans and faculty department chairs:

• Over 300,000 course files were scanned
• Over 6,300 files were improved by faculty with Panorama
• Students downloaded over 3,200 alternate formats
• 1,300 courses show some level in improvement since week 3 of fall
• 1,100 courses now have a score of 90% or better

Bug Fixes

Bug fixes and updates to the PDF scanning and reviewing in November improved how well the documents compare to WCAG 2.1 AA requirements, but it also came with a decrease in the scores of many existing documents. The decrease in score is a bummer, but on the positive side, Yuja continues to spend significant effort on development, which may affect scores in the future as well.

AI for Alt Text

If you are in the WYSIWYG editor and launch Panorama, you can now use AI to help generate alt text on images. YMMV (Your mileage may vary) with the accuracy of the text. We still think you as the subject matter expert are far more capable of creating meaningful alt text. It does not currently work in the View Report tool and we’ve notified them of the discrepancy.

Improved Highlighting of Accessibility Issues on Documents/PDFs (Nov/Dec)

Accessibility previews now benefit from a more advanced matching approach that interprets document structure with greater resilience to format changes. The upgraded system aligns visual regions in a more context-aware way, producing bounding boxes that track the true location of issues far more reliably.

Turn Math Images in Documents into Accessible Searchable Content (October)

When converting documents to an OCR HTML Alternative Format, Panorama will now convert any images of math formulas to MathML, ensuring complex equations are accessible to screen readers and searchable for easier studying.

Zoom

Zoom version 6.7 includes some updates to the user interface (UI). The changes are fairly minimal, but we wanted to share a few screenshots.

Zoom Client

The list of tools now displays along the left side of the client window. You will see some updates to the list of tools as the college rolls out Zoom Phones.

In-Meeting controls

This update includes a simplified in-meeting toolbar that shows only essential features. Users can customize it by:

• right-clicking to pin frequent features
• Dragging items from More menu to toolbar
• Rearranging primary toolbar buttons
• The customizable More menu improves feature discovery.

The controls for some features like virtual backgrounds and video settings now show up on the side rather than a pop-up menu.

D2L Brightspace

• Updating Single Sign-On platform: We will be updating D2L to use IT’s newer authentication tool, Microsoft EntraID, on Wednesday, October 22nd. This is the same platform used for other enterprise tools like MyPCC, Zoom, Workday, and many more. The change will require Multi-factor Authentication for faculty and staff initially, and will be added for students at a later date.
• Add or remove Bulk Feedback on assignment and discussion submissions: Enables instructors to provide bulk feedback to learners directly within the Assignments and Discussions submission pages, and to retract feedback in bulk actions, too.
  • Add feedback in bulk on the Submission page
    
    
    • You can now draft, update, and apply feedback to multiple students at once—whether saving new comments, editing drafts, or updating published evaluations. Use “Add Feedback” for selected students or “Add Feedback to All” for the whole class. You’ll also get a warning if you try to save empty feedback that would overwrite existing comments.
    • When giving bulk feedback in Assignments or Discussions, you can use the Brightspace Editor’s Insert Stuff to add links to YouTube, Kaltura videos or other external resources like Google Docs.
  • Bulk Retract Feedback
    
    
    • The Bulk Retract Feedback option allows instructors to choose how many learners to retract published feedback from.
• Assignments – Flexible text or file submission options for enhanced learner choice. This update allows instructors to create a new assignment type that accepts submissions in the form of an uploaded file, text entered in Brightspace Editor, or both.
  

• Print Quizzes: This update provides instructors with a simple way to print an offline quiz that supports all native Brightspace quiz question types, shuffling and randomization options, question pools, multiple versions, and an Answer Key.
  

• Discover: Discover is a new self-service feature that allows course creators to make their courses “discoverable” to others. You can create courses that are available to anyone, or you can make them available to only certain roles, like other Instructors.
  • We have created documentation on how to make your OER course available with Discover so that other instructors can view a copy of your course to see if they want to adopt all or parts of it.

• Inactive Student Visibility in Classlist: Students who have inactive accounts are now visible in your Classlist, allowing you to synchronize your roster in MyPCC with D2L Brightspace Classlist more accurately.

H5P

H5P is now available for all D2L Brightspace users as part of the Creator+ suite! With our updated license, you’ll see additional features like more reporting on student activity, the ability for students to pick up where they left off, and even allow students to author content.

Create H5P Content with Creator+ in D2L Brightspace

1. In the Content tool, create a new content topic or open an existing content topic.
2. In Brightspace Editor, click Creator+ Authoring Tools > Interactives.
3. Click Add Content.
4. Select the interactive you want to create from the available list.
5. Complete the fields to configure the interactive.
6. Click Save and Insert to add the new H5P interactive.

Existing H5P Users

• Now you will see (pictured), instead of the previous Insert Stuff workflow.
• You can edit an H5P interactive that you have already inserted into pages.

Edit Existing H5P Activities

1. In Content, navigate to the interactive you want to edit.
2. Click Edit to open the editing interface.
3. Make the required changes.
4. Click Save.

• We are also doing a new review of each of the activity types to (compliance with WCAG 2.1 AA) and with functional testing using assistive technology. We’ll update our documentation and training with the results.
• Smart Import now supports Single Choice Sets and “The Chase” activity types.
• Videos uploaded with Smart import will be automatically captioned.
• H5P has also released a number of .

Zoom

• Zoom is using PCC’s new Single Sign-on platform.
  • This is part of Information Technology’s larger Identity Management Strategy work, and will bring a few key improvements:
  • You will stop getting those pesky Status 400 Error pages that require clearing all of your browser data.
    
• Zoom AI Companion is available by request. If you’d like to explore using the AI companion to help with meeting summaries, please email dlhelp@pcc.edu.
• IT is rolling out Zoom Phones over the next several weeks. You’ll be able to place calls from your computer using the same app you use for meetings.

Yuja Panorama

Panorama is a critical tool for helping identify and fix accessibility issues with content in your courses. Make sure you check out our workshops and guides to make the most of the tool.

• Earlier this summer, the severity score for font sizes under 10 points was reduced to minor after consulting with AEDR. Overall accessibility scores should be improved from this change for affected files and courses.
• The “Fix Issues” button no longer removes the <head> section of an HTML page (which references style sheets, etc.)
• We can now do bulk course rescans. If you feel like your score isn’t updating, email dlhelp with the full course URL (or OU) and we can rescan it for you.
• on updates coming in the next week include:
  • Updates to scoring criteria affecting 10 HTML issues from WCAG rules, increasing our ability to comply with federal regulations.
  • Improvements to the interface: The accessibility issue remediation process’s redesigned workflow provides bulk remediation capabilities that can handle multiple issues simultaneously, and users can now navigate between issues using arrow buttons, and automatically advance to the next issue after each resolution, reducing the time typically spent on document accessibility compliance across both WYSIWYG content and files.
  • Improved Issue Highlighting Accuracy in Document Accessibility Reports: Accessibility issue highlighting in DOCX and PPTX files will now pinpoint the exact location of problems with improved coordinate accuracy. This eliminates cases where highlighting boxes appeared in incorrect sections, making it easier for users to identify and remediate specific accessibility issues within document previews.
  • Immersive Reader Will Display Only Link Text Without Raw URLs: The Immersive Reader will now display only the descriptive text of hyperlinks instead of reading both the link text and the full URL address, creating a cleaner reading experience by eliminating lengthy URL announcements that can disrupt content flow.

VoiceThread

• Stacked Assignments: Create an assignment that requires comments on a previous assignment.
• Create a stacked assignment in Content by clicking on the Existing Activities button, selecting VoiceThread, then selecting Assignment Builder.
• Voicethread provides more .

Kahoot!

Accessible Education and Disability Resources (AEDR) has shared some Tips for making your Kahoots! more accessible. These tips apply to almost any content tool, but there are also some great recommendations for when you are hosting a live Kahoot!

D2L Brightspace

Here are some noteworthy updates to the core learning management system.

Grades – Access Quiz Feedback

This update provides more convenience for students viewing quiz feedback: If a Quiz is associated with a Grade item, and their attempt has been graded and published, then students will see a “View Quiz Attempts” link in line with that Quiz’s entry.

Groups – Export group enrollment data.

Instructors can now see exactly when students are added to groups. This added transparency can help you identify and troubleshoot group-related issues more easily, especially in courses with complex group structures.

Unsubscribe from all Email notifications

Email notifications now contain an “unsubscribe from all” link to stop all email notifications from Brightspace to a user’s email. They can resubscribe within their Brightspace profile.

Quick Eval Improvements

Enables instructors to quickly iterate through their list of submissions in Quick Eval, even if those submissions are from different activity types or courses.

Bulk Feedback

This new feature enables instructors to provide bulk feedback to learners directly within the Assignments and Discussions submission pages. This is coming in late June!

• Add feedback in bulk on the Submission page: You can now draft, update, and apply feedback to multiple students at once, whether saving new comments, editing drafts, or updating published evaluations. Use “Add Feedback” for selected students or “Add Feedback to All” for the whole class. You’ll also get a warning if you try to save empty feedback that would overwrite existing comments.

• File Attachments with Bulk Feedback: When giving bulk feedback in Assignments or Discussions, you can use the Brightspace Editor’s Insert Stuff to add links to YouTube or other external resources (these links are saved in Manage Files). Insert Image allows you to upload images directly from your computer—those are also saved in Manage Files. However, file uploads from your computer aren’t supported through Insert Stuff.
  
• Retract feedback in bulk on the Submissions page: The Bulk Retract Feedback option allows instructors to choose how many learners to retract published feedback from.
  • Selective retraction is also supported — Instructors can select users by checking the box next to their names and then clicking More Actions > Retract Feedback.
  • The More Actions > Retract All option retracts feedback for all users, regardless of which users are selected.

Zoom

Starting June 17th, Zoom will now log in using PCC’s new EntraID platform. This is part of Information Technology’s larger Identity Management Strategy work, and will bring a few key improvements:

• You will stop getting those pesky Status 400 Error pages that require clearing all of your browser data.
• The Authentication process will be able to support additional profile updates like Department, Phone Number, Display Name, and eventually, Pronouns.
• Multi-factor authentication will not be on by default, but will be enabled for logins that trigger a higher risk factor, including access from untrusted networks or accounts that have been flagged.

This will not affect the D2L/Zoom integration, which most people will continue to use for class meetings. Zoom AI Companion is available by request. If you’d like to explore using the AI companion to help with meeting summaries, please email dlhelp@pcc.edu.

Kaltura

Kaltura (also referred to as My Media) is our streaming media platform. It integrates with D2L Brightspace and Annoto and contains tens of thousands of media items.

• We are working to archive and remove old media that has never been viewed. This process should have no impact to faculty or students.
• Our ITS team has reported an issue with viewing Kaltura media on iPhones. Opening a video in full-screen mode may lose some of Kaltura’s features, as Apple devices may switch from Kaltura’s media player to Apple’s built-in media player for full-screen video playback. Videos will still play, but features that may be lost until exiting full-screen mode include: the transcript panel, captions, and Annoto activities associated with your media.

Yuja Panorama

After feedback from faculty about font sizes in academic journals (footnotes, other types of attribution), we’ve discussed changing the severity score for font sizes under 10 points with AEDR. We’ve agreed to reduce the severity from major to minor starting for summer term.

We ask that you consider font sizes when creating content, especially in PDFs and Slides, where students may not be able to modify the size or zooming level.

Here are a few highlights from the June 2025 Panorama release, available in Brightspace now!

• Continuous Scrolling Eliminates Pagination in the WYSIWYG Accessibility Report
  The Review Issues section of the Accessibility Report now loads additional issues automatically as you scroll, removing the need to click “Next Page” when reviewing accessibility problems, enabling uninterrupted review of issues in the WYSIWYG editor.
• New ‘Undo’ Option Removes Manual Fixes
  You can now remove manual fixes from the Applied Fixes table using a remove button, giving you complete control over your remediation workflow. Once a fix is removed, the Fix button becomes available again, allowing you to reapply or modify the solution as needed
  .
• Streamlined Alt Text Review and Editing for Document Images
  You can now view all images in a document along with their existing alt text and edit descriptions directly within the accessibility report. This update includes options to generate or regenerate alt text using AI for images that lack descriptions or need improvement, with changes saved directly to the PDF.
  

H5P

We will soon have enterprise licensing for H5P! This means that all faculty can have a full H5P author account with support for SmartImport! It also means we’ll have access to drill-down reporting, and students will have accounts if you want to have them create activities as part of your course. We are also doing a new review of each of the activity types to verify the level of accessibility (compliance with WCAG 2.1 AA) and with functional testing using assistive technology. We’ll update our documentation and training with the results.

Hypothes.is

Image Annotation in Hypothes.is will be available starting June 17! !

VoiceThread

• For instructors using graded VoiceThread assessments, there has been a recent grading change that is triggering a pass/fail setup for grading when using a 2-point scale.
  • To avoid this issue, set up your VoiceThread assignment using a 3-point or greater grade value.
  • We are working with VoiceThread to better understand this change and will advise on future changes/workarounds

D2L Brightspace

• Navbar: We have added Annoto to the Instructor dropdown menu in the navbar. This will make it easier to use this exciting new tool that provides usage data on your media and allows you to create interactive conversations within the media. See more about Annoto below.
  • This update also replaces the Manage Dates link, which is only used once a term.
  • If you created a custom navbar, you may not see this update.
• Assignments: Assignment and Discussion evaluations are now synchronized with the Grade Book: The individual scores and feedback from Assignment and Discussion grade items are now synchronized with the grade book using the Update button regardless of whether a change was made. The Update button in Assignments and Discussions evaluations is always available to update, even when no changes were made. This feature also enables instructors to verify that the information between the grade book and the Assignment or Discussion tool is properly synchronized.

• Rubrics: Streamline grading with minimum or maximum score for ungraded rubric criteria: This feature updates the instructor workflow of evaluating a rubric and providing feedback to learners. Now, instructors can quickly assess all ungraded Rubric criteria and then go back through to add feedback where necessary. To provide a more streamlined experience for instructors using analytical-type rubrics for assessments in the Consistent Evaluation experience for assignments, discussions, and written response quiz questions, the instructor can automatically set ungraded levels to a minimum or maximum value.
  

• Quiz Evaluation Experience: Improved evaluation experience for instructors available to opt-in now!
  
  All quiz questions are now included in this release, including
  • Arithmetic
  • Matching
  • Ordering
  • Multi Short Answer
  • Significant Figures

• Template 8: The team has completed a new set of HTML templates that you can use to make your course look great, mobile-friendly, and accessible. If you’d like a copy of the template or learn how to apply it to your course, schedule a one-on-one appointment with an Instructional Technology Specialist.
  

• Removal of old courses: Over the break, we will be archiving and removing courses from before 2016. We will be doing this to align with college data governance practices and to improve Brightspace’s overall maintenance and performance.

• • See our Data Retention and Content Archival practices.

Panorama

We have two upcoming Panorama training sessions in April if you’d like to learn more about how to use the tool to improve the accessibility of your course materials.

• When you fix a document using Panorama, the file will now be updated in the D2L Content area, and it will be copied to new courses.
• We are still tracking a bug for when some files do not successfully update. You will get a notice if Panorama fails to update the file in your D2L course. It will also tell you how to upload the updated file.

• Thanks to the (and Rondi Schei), we have added the PDF Max remediation service to Panorama. This addon allows you to:
  • Tag and organize PDF documents in Panorama without needing to download the file and fix it in Adobe Acrobat.
  • We still highly recommend that you update your source document and share that instead of PDFs.
• Institutional reporting now lets us view the overall accessibility of all courses and summarize them by department. We are sharing this information with pathway and program deans to help plan for compliance with the ADA Title II requirements by April 2026.
  • PDFs are still the least accessible file type for all of winter 2025. Here is the average accessibility score by document type.

TL;DR: Use HTML, Word, or Google Docs instead of PDFs unless absolutely necessary.

Zoom

• New Essentials training for Zoom: This session introduces faculty to essential Zoom tools for teaching. Learn how to access Zoom through different platforms, schedule and manage meetings, and utilize key in-meeting features like screen sharing, chat, and participant controls. We’ll also cover best practices for using Zoom within D2L Brightspace and ensuring secure, engaging class sessions.
• Account consolidation: On April 15th, people using their PCC email address for a non-PCC managed Zoom account will be required to move their account into our domain. This is being done to help prepare for the Zoom Phones project with IT. Our team has directly notified affected users.

• Whiteboard Integration: You can now launch a Zoom Whiteboard from within Brightspace and have it recognize your students based on their D2L accounts. This also allows you to link to a whiteboard that can be used asynchronously instead of during a meeting. It’s a compliment to the Whiteboard tabs option, which lets students author in their own tab much like folks did with Jamboard (RIP).

Annoto

Annoto provides a variety of interactive options for media, including notes, commenting, analytics, and more. We have been piloting the tool for the last year and are excited to make it available to everyone.

• Now available to everyone!
• How to get started with Annoto
• Check out the training options for Annoto

Hypothes.is

This social annotation tool has been popular for a variety of disciplines. Here are a few updates to the tool

• The new allows you to see who has submitted comments and annotations on your assignments.
• See our many Hypothes.is resources

VoiceThread

• VoiceThread is hosting a that may be of interest to folks using the tool or interested in adding more media and interactivity to their classes. It’s a great resources for languages and speech classes. Some of the topics include
  • Voicethread Accessibility and Universal Design for Learning (Apr 1, 10am)
  • Voicethread Advanced: Skills and Ideas (Apr 8, 10 am)
  • Using Voicethread in D2l/Brightspace (May 13, 10am).

Other / New

• We have a new student-facing Accessibility Statement & Guides page that provides info for students about how to get support with the various supported (and unsupported) instructional tools.
• Check out the new chatbot from Virtual Services, supporting students reaching out on Enrollment Services, Student Accounts, and the Learning Technology Help Desk.
  
  • This AI-assisted bot will attempt to answer common questions from our website and curate responses.
  • If it cannot answer you, it will connect you with a person via live chat (if someone is available) or email.

D2L Brightspace

Navbar

We have restored faculty access to edit and customize the navbar, but recommend against doing that. Using the PCC default navbar provides predictability and consistency to students between classes. If you must customize your navbar, we ask that you modify a copy of the default navbar.��

We will be adding Attendance to the Course Info link group based on the feedback collected in October. This change will take place on Monday, December 16th. We will be turning off the attendance tools or fall classes so it will not be visible by default. However, you may need to turn it off for your winter course.��

Discussions

When posting to long forums, the user experience has been updated to include a ‘New Post’ options at the top and bottom of the page, helping users to avoid unnecessary scrolling.

New Quiz Evaluation Experience

The New Quiz Evaluation Experience provides a unified experience for instructors within their evaluation areas of their D2L Brightspace courses.��

Before the experience rolls out to everyone, instructors can opt-in to !

Creator+

D2L engineers squashed some bugs and made improvements to Practices for sequencing and sorting activities. Users should see better performance when creating and editing Practices and workflow improvements for stacking/scrolling activities.

Grades

Instructors can now enable automatic zeroing on missing submissions for Grading within their D2L Brightspace courses!

To get started, learn more about how the .��

Removal of old courses

Over the break, we will be archiving and removing courses from before 2016. We will be doing this to align with college data governance practices and to improve the overall maintenance and performance of Brightspace. See our Data Retention and Content Archival practices.

Zoom

Minimum Version Enforcement

Zoom will be enforcing a new minimum version of the client software by February 1st, 2025. It is currently . We will notify users who are using a legacy version prior to the update. Computers managed by PCC will be automatically updated well in advance. You can download the newest version now at .

Automatic Captioning in Meetings

Automated Captioning is enabled by default: Automated captioning (machine captioning) is turned on by default for all meetings at the request of Accessible Education and Disability Resources. This means any participant can turn on automated captions without needing to request that the instructor make any changes.��

Kahoot! Integration: ������Ǵdz�’s has been enabled for all current Kahoot! account holders. It is not necessary to use the two apps together.

New Tools, Updates, and Previews

Annoto

Annoto is now available in D2L Brightspace, offering a seamless way to integrate comments, quizzes, and interactive features into your Kaltura, YouTube, or Vimeo videos, transforming passive viewing into an active learning experience.��

Additionally, Annoto offers in-depth analytics to monitor and understand student engagement with your video content. Visit the following webpage to learn how to get started with Annoto in your course.��

If you are interested in delving further into Annoto, you can view a previous workshop training on Adding Interactive Elements to Video with Annoto  (59:17) to learn how to set up the tool in your course and discover some of the instructional use cases.��

Hypothes.is

The new Hypothes.is LMS came out early Fall 2024 and is available to faculty who are using Hypothes.is now.

Auto-grading features for Hypothes.is became available on December 4, and interested instructors can learn more about

Panorama

Improvements to content issue severity scoring in your courses/accessibility reports to come next week, Monday, December 16. This is intended to improve and align the severity settings better with the college’s Accessible Technology Policy and federal laws.

As we finetune the tool for user experience, we will be conducting regular multi-stakeholder reviews to adjust for the best student and faculty experience.

Yuja is continuously improving Panorama’s experience and performance and working on feedback from experiences shared with us during the last five months with Panorama in our courses!

If you have fixed content in your courses, please into your new course for the upcoming term.��

Other / New

Chatbot

Check out the new chatbot from Virtual Services, supporting students reaching out on Enrollment Services, Student Accounts, and the Learning Technology Help Desk. This AI-assisted bot will attempt to answer common questions from our website and curated responses. If it cannot answer you, it will connect you with a person.

Instructional Support resources

We have completely updated the Instructional Support website to improve the organization of resources, training, and accessibility guidance. This was the final project that was part of the Bold, Innovative Growth initiative.

Navbar

On June 17th, Online Learning will roll out the new standardized navigation bar (navbar) in D2L Brightspace! We are very excited because this new navbar is the result of over a year of research, prototyping, user testing, and collecting feedback from both faculty and students. For more details, see our Navbar 2024 project updates page.

Primary Needs:

• Students: Consistent navigation between courses.
• Faculty: Ability to provide links to course-specific resources.

Rollout Plan

On June 17th, we will be replacing the current default navbars used in the majority of courses with the new navbar. This will not require any action from most instructors. We will not lock the navbar until fall term so you have time to collect links and update any documents you have with custom instructions.

1. Courses with custom navigation will also be updated to the new navbar for fall term.
2. For those with custom navigation bars, you will need to:
   • Add your custom links to the Links tool.
   • Optional: Turn off the tools you don’t use

To provide feedback, you can use the “Send corrections or feedback” link in the Help menu from the navbar.

Assignment Annotations update

The assignment annotation tool has been updated with several minor interface updates and should address a number of minor defects. One note is that it will not work with older versions of Safari (15.4 and earlier).

Grades & Feedback

Feedback files are now available in Grades for Assignments, Quizzes, and Discussions! If you attach a file with feedback for your students, it will be available in the Grades area. This makes it even easier for students to see/access your feedback.

Manage Dates includes Intelligent Agents

Intelligent Agents can now be updated as part of your term to term Manage Dates workflow. For power users, this is an excellent update. If you haven’t used Intelligent Agents, check out our intro documentation.

Zoom

Quarterly Minimum Version Enforcement

Zoom will be enforcing a new minimum version of the client software by August 1st, 2024. We will notify users who are using a legacy version prior to the update. Computers managed by PCC will be automatically updated well in advance. You can download the newest version now at .

Zoom Workspace aka v6.x

Zoom has made a fairly major update to the client software. It allows some customization of the interface for your preferences. One new feature that has taken some adjustment is that the menu options collapse as you shrink the Zoom meeting window:

AI Companion

Zoom’s AI companion feature is still under review. We want to ensure adequate security and privacy measures for our students and faculty/staff.

New Tools & Previews

Ally to Panorama

Ally, the accessibility reporting and mitigation tool we’ve had for the last several years is being replaced with Panorama. The software is provided through a consortium license paid for by the Oregon Community College Distance Learning Association. The changes for users should be fairly minimal.

Rollout plan

We will be switching from Ally to Panorama on June 28th to ensure students have access to alternate formats during the first week. Documentation for the tool for students and faculty is available.

Annoto

Annoto is now fully available for users and out of pilot stage! This tool integrates with D2L Brightspace and Kaltura, so you can allow students to comment on videos in your class! You can have students submit videos in Assignments and you can respond in-context to the student using text, audio, or video.

Learn more about Annoto.

Kahoot!

Kahoot! has moved out of pilot stage and is widely available to PCC users! This tool serves as a polling tool with Zoom sessions for your remote courses.
Learn more about Kahoot!.

Voicethread

An is available and will be the default starting June 17th. The new interface should improve the overall use experience with VoiceThread and not really create any challenges. The new interface has been available to faculty for several months and we’ve not heard of any complaints.

Learn more from Voicethread.

Website updates

The Online Learning website is about to get a face lift thanks to our BIG-funded web designer position. The website will better present Online Learning support based on roles (student, faculty, dean/fdc) and the technical content will be moving over to the Instructional Support site.

D2L Brightspace

• Creator+ is a content styling and activity creation tool built in to the HTML editor in Brightspace. It allows you to add style elements like accordions, simple “check your understanding” activities, and other neat options to make your content more engaging without requiring any knowledge of scripting or coding.
  • If you’re interested, for May 17, 2024
• Course Crosslisting/Merging Improvements
  • A bug that prevented crosslisting for courses with really long names (primarily in Welding and Math) has been fixed. This might be more exciting to our admin team, but it also was a nuisance for some faculty.
• New course template
  • The team has been hard at work creating a new course template that merges the exciting features of the Columbia template used by our Instructional Designers, and the standard accessible and mobile friendly template that takes advantage of the new Creator+ elements. You can learn more from our ITS workshop on May 3rd, 2024.

Zoom

• Zoom will be requiring a new for meetings on April 15, 2024. Our team will reach out to users who are connecting with an older version. Users will be required to upgrade before they can join a meeting after April 15th. You can also from Zoom.
• Community Education courses
  • Thanks to funding from LT&I, we’ve been able to develop a custom tool that handles bulk Zoom meeting creation. This allowed Community Education to schedule meetings for over 200 classes in less than 10 minutes. It also provided Community Ed staff access to all the meeting details to help students who cannot access the meeting links.
• Zoom will be launching , the major version 6 update, in late April. The major update includes interface improvements as well as better integration with other platforms like Google Workspace. While the new version is very AI-focused, we will be reviewing the AI-based features with our Information Security team before those are released. Look for more updates soon!

New Tools & Previews

Annoto

• The ITS are working with faculty to start piloting an interactive video platform called Annoto. It allows you to add time-based comments and discussions into videos right in your courses. It’s similar to Hypothes.is’s social annotation concept but designed specifically for video. We’re excited at how this can help improve interaction in lectures, support authentic assessment, and just make videos even more fun.
• For more information please visit the Annoto Pilot information page.

D2L Brightspace

• New Navigation Experience
  • We will be standardizing the course navbar in Brightspace for Summer term. This change will help provide students with consistent and predictable navigation between courses and is a common practice for course design. We’ve known for years that students strongly prefer consistent navigation so they spend less, and have learned from many other schools that they do not (or cannot) customize navigation between courses.
  • Our team has spent the last year collecting input from faculty and data from Brightspace usage to develop and test a few different navigation layouts. We then tested these different layouts with students in usability studies during winter term. After all this feedback, we arrived at a final design that we will be testing with a handful of courses over the spring term for additional input.
  • The navbar attempts to consolidate common activities by type to streamline and de-clutter the interface for students.
  • A links option has been added to allow instructors to provide access to external sites and resources that are not part of the Brightspace toolset.
  • The Content tool is still the preferred place to organize content and activities in modules to help students organize their weekly activities.
• Self-Merge Tool
  • We’re exploring a tool that would allow faculty to merge their own courses (like crosslisting, but not in Banner). During Spring, our team will be validating this new tool with the hope for launching for the summer.
  • Crosslisting is incredibly time-consuming for our admin team, especially when there are course changes, new instructors, cancelations, etc.

H5P

• Game Map
  • Improvements to the functionality of the Game Map content type in H5P. New finish stages can be added by the author during creation that serve like waymarkers and achievements that can be earned during the activity.
• Smart Import
  • allows authors to generate new activities automatically from content sources using ChatGPT 4. Early feedback is incredibly positive
  • The ITS team will be providing training for H5P in Spring term

Kahoot!

• We are piloting Kahoot! with over 60 faculty and staff. This will help us determine if it meets the polling needs of in-person and remote (or likely to be online with live meeting) courses.
• If you’re interested in participating in the pilot, please complete the .

Voicethread

• A new user interface coming in June 2024! The interface should simplify the current experience for students and should not cause any disruption.

Faculty and Student Help Desks

As part of our Bold, Innovative Growth initiative, we are merging the student and faculty help desks to provide a single source for support with our instructional toolset. Staff are currently training so they can provide everyone excellent support, and we’ll be able to expand our hours for faculty support later in the evenings and on weekends. Look for more news soon!

D2L Brightspace

• Chat Tool – End of Life
  • D2L has disabled the chat tool due to lack of use and features. We notified the six instructors who were using it last December about the upcoming change.
  • We recommend looking at for a classroom chat tool. It’s already part of our college license and used extensively.
• SMS/Text Notifications will go away some time in 2024. The exact date is unknown.
  • Students should utilize the Pulse app instead.
• New Discussion Create Experience is now the default experience in the new year. This work flow is similar to the new assignment and new quiz work flow.
  
• Creator+ is available to enhance your pages and content in Brightspace. Creator+ for D2L Brightspace is an eLearning authoring tool that helps you easily create engaging course content directly within your Brightspace environment. It does this by providing:
  • Ready-made templates: Save time and effort by building content from pre-designed layouts.
  • Interactive elements: Add quizzes, polls, games, and other engaging activities to enhance learner participation.
  • Consistent design: Maintain a unified look and feel throughout your courses with global styling options.
  • Training for faculty will be coming in the winter term.
    

Kaltura and My Media

• We are updating the default media player for new Kaltura videos on January 3rd, 2024. The new interface includes an interactive transcript pane that highlights the spoken text and allows you to search the transcript.
  
• We will update older videos to use the new player for the spring term. If you’d like to use it on older videos sooner, you can re-insert your video in your course.

Zoom

• We are evaluating some of the new Zoom features before enabling them in our environment. These include:
  • Linking from D2L to an enhanced whiteboard
  • AI Companion for summarizing meeting notes
  • Clips – a simple editing tool for chopping up videos into smaller pieces
  • Kahoot! Integration (we’re piloting Kahoot with a small group of faculty. More info below)

Hypothesis

• New easy assignment creation in “Existing Activities” just pick “Hypothesis LTI 1.3”
  (No more having to copy/paste lti link manually!)
  
• Hypothesis auto-grade creation when Instructor scores student in Hypothesis grader bar
  
• Also, the default score is now 100 points, not 10.
• If the Instructor does not want the Hypothesis activity to have a grade column/item – they just don’t score any of the students.
• Get .

Piloting new tools!

Kahoot!

We have received a number of requests for a college supported polling solution. The ITS have evaluated a number of different vendors and have selected Kahoot! to pilot with ~50 people to make sure it works well and meets instructional needs. If you’re interested in participating in the pilot, please complete the .

Annoto

We’re seeing increased interest in different tools for supporting authentic assessment and ways to use video to support learning. The team has evaluated a number of products and has selected Annoto to pilot to see if it meets faculty and student needs. While there’s an obvious opportunity for languages, communications, interpreting and other disciplines, we expect it may have much wider interest.

The Annoto tool integrates with Kaltura so you can allow students to comment on videos in your class, you can have students submit videos and you can respond in context to the student (with text, audio, or video). We’re really excited to see how this works and if you’re interested, please fill out the .

Techquity Grants are available!

Do you have an idea for an innovative practice or technology that you want to try? Consider !

I mean, I get it. There’s a difference between what you do with the Brightspace application and the content presented within it. If people have designed their courses to be aesthetically pleasing in the standard interface, inverting colors could have serious and/or unpredictable implications – both cosmetically and accessibility-wise.

But we recently learned of a Google Chrome browser hack that allows you to force dark mode on all sites. Again, this is a hack, not a recommended configuration change.

Enable Auto Dark Mode in Google Chrome

1. In Chrome, type chrome://flags into the address bar and hit Enter.
2. This will open the Experiments page. In the Search flags box and type “dark”.
3. You’ll see an option labeled Auto Dark Mode for Web Contents.
4. Select Enable (you can try different configurations) and Relaunch
5. Click Relaunch to restart the browser with the new dark mode applied.

A few caveats

Hopefully, our use of the word “Hack” and there being a caveat section indicate that this is not a supported or recommended approach. In fact, this may actually be a horrible idea. It affects all pages in Chrome, which you probably don’t want. And it doesn’t meet or ADA compliance for color contrast. But based on feedback from a few folks, we thought we’d share it. If you try it and like it, let us know!

Darkspace

Your Mileage May Vary. I for one, need to pick an avatar with a transparent background.