When Instructors create a new announcement in a Course, they can now choose to send a copy to all users in their Classlist as an email, sent as if from the instructor themselves.

In the user interface for creating or editing an announcement, a new Send Email Copy checkbox now appears when an instructor creates or edits an announcement. 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.

For announcements scheduled to publish at a later date, clicking the Send Email Copy checkbox emails the copy to users in the Classlist at the time that the announcement is published.

With this release, Brightspace improves visual consistency and accessibility by updating progress bar indicators across several tools. These improvements enhance support for screen readers and assistive technologies.

Visual indicators have been updated in the following areas:

• Content - Upload a file
• Quizzes - Add Existing Question
• Import Quiz Questions - Upload a file
• Quiz Study Support  - Check if the quiz meets the study support requirements
• Generate Question  - Choose a file to generate a question
• Content Uploader - Upload a file
• Manage Groups - Export progress bar

Figure: An example of the progress bar updating

This enhancement brings key scheduling metadata, due dates, start dates, and end dates, to content pages within the Brightspace Pulse app. This functionality ensures a consistent experience between the Brightspace and the Pulse app, helping learners manage deadlines and plan their workload directly within the app.

This new functionality brings the following capabilities:

• Due dates on units and content pages.
• Start and end dates.
• Only defined dates are shown, nothing is displayed for unset dates.
• When clicking the three-dot menu on a content item, learners can view the availability dates.
• These values are pulled directly from the LMS.

Previously, due dates, start dates, and end dates on content were only visible on the web platform.

Figure: The Start and End Date details dialog displays the full availability range for a content item when learners tap the three-dot menu.

Instructors can now assign 0 (zero) points to a quiz question to collect non-graded information, for example, feedback or personal input.

This feature eliminates the need for workarounds such as assigning 0.01 points or manually adjusting scores after submission. Instructors can enter zero points in the points field for any question type within the quiz, ensuring that these questions do not contribute to the quiz's total points. This feature is especially useful for gathering additional information from learners during a quiz or for implementing an "Honesty Code" question at the beginning of the quiz.

Figure: Example of a quiz question displaying a statement on academic integrity with answer options for True and False, and the points field set to zero.

Instructors can now require learners to complete a quiz within a single Brightspace login session, helping maintain academic integrity. When this setting is enabled, learners cannot resume the quiz using another browser session. For example, if a learner starts a quiz on a laptop, they cannot continue the quiz on another device such as a smartphone or tablet.

Instructors can navigate to the Availability Dates & Conditions section while creating or editing a quiz and select Lock each attempt to a single login session.

Figure: From the quizs Availability Dates & Conditions section, select Lock each attempt to a single login session to restrict attempts to one active session.

Group assignments are now supported in Advanced Assessment, enabling instructors to collaboratively evaluate groups of learners in Brightspace using Co-Marking, Delegation, and Multi-Evaluator capabilities. This update leverages the existing Groups tool, allowing learners to submit work as a team and receive shared feedback and grades through Advanced Assessment.

The feature introduces the following key improvements:

• Seamless group evaluation: instructors can allocate evaluators to groups rather than individuals.
• Consistent experience: interface terminology and visuals have been updated to reflect group workflows:
  • References to Learners are replaced with Groups, such as Allocate Evaluators to Groups.
  • Evaluation and feedback panel text reflects group-based workflows.
• Improved workflow integrity: confirmation prompts prevent accidental evaluator setting loss when switching between group and individual assignments.

To enable group assignments, instructors must first create groups in Course Admin > Groups. Then, when creating an assignment, they must select Group Assignment under Submission & Completion.

Figure: Select Group Assignment under Assignment Type in the Submission & Completion settings to create a group-based assignment.

To trigger the Advanced Assessment workflow, select evaluators in the Evaluation & Feedback dropdown.

Figure: Click Select Evaluators under Evaluators in the Evaluation & Feedback settings to create an assignment.

Additionally, the following changes were made in the Manage Allocations table:

• New dropdown options are available to assign evaluators to groups.
• Group member names are displayed in a separate pop-out.

Figure: An example of group member names when viewed from the Manage Allocations dialog.

The Enter Grades page now offers improved horizontal navigation, making it easier to work with large gradebooks. Instead of relying on a horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of the page, instructors can use navigation arrows on either side of the gradebook, along with a scroll bar at the bottom of the grid, to navigate across grade columns.

This update also improves how dropdown menus behave, preventing them from appearing underneath other fields such as user names.

Figure: Use the left and right arrows to scroll horizontally and view additional grade columns in the Enter Grades table.

Previously, horizontal navigation relied on a scroll bar at the bottom of the page, which was not always visible unless users scrolled down.

With this release, user filters across multiple tools are updated to display Groups and Sections in separate dropdowns, improving navigation and scalability for courses with up to 1,000 groups per category.

Previously, the View By filter combined groups and sections into a single dropdown. In courses with many groups or sections, this resulted in long, difficult-to-navigate lists.

Figure: The previous View By filter shown in Classlist.

The updated filter is available in the following areas:

• Assignments:
  • Filtering by users on the Manage Evaluators and Manage Special Access pages
  • Filtering by users on the submissions page, and observed submissions page
• Attendance:
  • Filtering by users when viewing and entering attendance data
• Class Progress:
  • Filtering by users
• Classic Content:
  • Filtering by users on the Completion Summary tab
  • Filtering by users on the Content Reports pages
• Classlist:
  • Filtering by users
  • Emailing and filtering by users

Figure: The redesigned filter shown in Classlist.

• Competencies:
  • Filtering by users when grading an activity
  • Filtering by users when viewing competencies, or viewing rubrics statistics
• Discussions:
  • Filtering by users on the Statistics page
  • Filtering by users when viewing Topics
  • Filtering by users when assessing Topics
• Grades:
  • Filtering by users on the Export Grades page
  • Filtering by users on the Enter Grades pages

Figure: The redesigned filter shown inEnter Grades.

• Filtering by users on the Statistics page

• Quizzes:
  • Filtering by users on the Manage Special Access page
  • Filtering by users on theStatisticspage
• Surveys:
  • Filtering by users on theStatisticspage