Creating Release Conditions in Brightspace

Release conditions allow instructors to guide instruction by providing rules and conditions for students to follow in order to access content and activities. You can also create learning paths in your course which personalize and optimize the students' learning experience, ultimately improving their engagement and satisfaction. The following guide provides with you the steps to incorporate release conditions into the flow of your course.

When adding availability restrictions or release conditions to content, activities and assessments in your course, be mindful of the implications to accessibility and inclusivity requirements. For example, some students may require a greater level of flexibility accessing and/or submitting assignments and assessments or may be completing your course from a distant geographic location such as Singapore whereby they are impacted by time zone differences. Brightspace allows you to account for students' unique needs by creating exemptions. Likewise, Brightspace users can adjust their location and time zone settings through the "Account Settings" in the minibar at the top of the screen.

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Create Release Conditions

Availability Restrictions

Brightspace provides several ways to monitor your students’ progress throughout the course. You can use completion tracking to look at the big picture progress your students are making, examine an individual student’s engagement and even drill down to the statistics of a particular content item. You can choose if you want to monitor activity automatically, manually or not at all. Additionally, you can enable intelligent agents to automatically congratulate or thank a student for their work or send reminders about upcoming deadlines to just those students who have not submitted an assignment. The class progress tool is also available to students, so they can see what they have completed and what’s left to do.

Items in your course, like content, can be locked until a user has met a specific condition. These items are locked using release conditions. Release conditions are one way to create learning paths in your course and can be action, enrollment or role based. Note that students cannot see release conditions, so they may not realize materials are hidden from them or they may think there is a technical problem. Additionally, items with release conditions do not populate the course schedule with their availability. Communicate to your students that you use release conditions in your course. 

Types of Release Conditions

Brightspace highlights the following situations where release conditions might be useful to you: 

Release Condition Option Reason Action Result
Visited Content Topic
Students need to read a Frequently Asked Questions page before accessing course content. Create a Frequently Asked Questions page as a content topic in the first module. Next, create and attach the Visited Content Topic/ Frequently Asked Questions topic release condition to the other modules in the course. Now, all users will have answers to key questions before progressing through the course.
Not visited content topic
You recognize a few students have not viewed the Frequently Asked Questions page and want to remind them that this is important. Create an announcement reminding users to visit the topic and then attach the Not Visited Content Topic/ Frequently Asked Questions topic release condition to the announcement. All users who have not visited the content topic will see an announcement prompting them to do this. Users who have visited the topic will not see this announcement.
Visited all content topics
Students need to respond to a survey at the end of the course but you do not want them to see the survey until all of the content has been visited Create a course survey and then create and attach the Visited All Content Topics release condition to the survey. As soon as users have visited every content topic, they will be able to access the survey and provide feedback.

Creating Release Conditions

You can set release conditions for nearly every item in Brightspace by following the steps below.

Additional Release Condition Resources