Create assignments in Brightspace to promote student interaction and learning progress in your class.
Assignments often make up a large portion of student interactions within a course. They can include active learning, group work, formative assessments, culminating projects and much more.
Brightspace’s Assignments tool offers robust features to customize instructions, submissions and assessment type. Tools that complement Assignments include Content, Rubrics, and Grades. As always, ensure any embedded multimedia or attachments are accessible for all students.
For additional support beyond this page, visit Brightspace’s Create an assignment webpage.
On this page:
Preparing an Assignment
There are several considerations to make before creating an assignment. Although assignments can be edited later on, it will be more time efficient to plan ahead.
General Preparation
Before creating an assignment, it is helpful to have some information upfront such as the assignment name, description and point value. If your syllabus is finalized, you may also want to include the due date while creating the new assignment.
Adding a due date to an assignment will enable it to populate in the course schedule.
Advanced Preparation
Some more advanced assignment considerations you may want to think about while creating assignments include:
Rubrics: Consider how this assignment will be graded. If grading with a rubric, it is best to first create the rubric and then attach it to the assignment.
Grade Categories: You may want to create weighted categories within the Grades Tool before creating assignments. This will allow you to categorize assignments as they populate the grade book.
Assignment Category: This category is separate from the grade categories. It serves more as a grouping and organization system. For example, this can be used to categorize items such as homework, presentations or to provide more granular detail.
Release Conditions: You may choose to limit access to this assignment until a specific date or after completing a prerequisite task such as a quiz or discussion post. Create the first task prior to creating the assignment.
Group Assignments: In order to assign collaborative assignments, the groups must already be created.
Special Access: Special access permissions allow you to set different availability dates and times for specific users. For example, you could extend the deadline for users who require remedial help or who are submitting work beyond the original scope of the assignment. Learn more about Special Access.
Where to Build Assignments
There are several ways to develop and access course assignments.
From an existing module within the Contents tab (Upload/Create and then New Assignment).
For the purposes of this page, we will focus building from the Assignments tab as this pathway provides the most support resources and overall functionality. If you choose a different method, scroll through the parts of this page that are relevant for all assignments.
Creating an Assignment
Use the Assignments tool to create and edit assignments, view student submissions, track the grading progress of an assignment, associate assignments to rubrics and learning outcomes and return submissions with grades and feedback.
On the navbar, click Assessments and select Assignments.
Once in the Assignments tool main page, select New Assignment. Fill in the corresponding information.
Name of assignment.
Grade Out Of to establish establish a numeric point value to the assignment or leave the assignment ungraded.
In Grade Book option: choose to edit or link to existing grade category or grade item, not put the assignment in the grade book or reset settings to make the assignment ungraded.
Add a Due Date.
Add Instructions.
Upload files, add links, Record Audio or Record Video.
In the right-hand column you will find the following categories:
Availability Dates & Conditions:
Set the assignment to be always available or establish a start/end date of visibility.
Set release condtiions.
Set special access.
Submission & Completion:
Set the type of assignment (individual or group),
Set the category the assignment will be placed under in the grade book,
Set the submission type (file, text, on paper submission or observed in person).
Set the submission restrictions (students can upload only one file or an unlimited files).
Set the type of file that can be uploaded.
Set a notification email to be sent out when an assignment is submitted.
Evaluation & Feedback:
Add a rubric.
Describe which learning objectives this assignment is related to.
Allow for annotation tools.
Allow for anonymous marking of assignments.
Manage Turnitin settings.
Select Save and Close when you are done with creating the assignment. This will bring you back to the Assignments area. Or select Save to stay on the page and continue working on creating/editing the assignment.
Adding a Grade Out Of automatically adds this item to the grade book. If you have already set up categories in the grade book, you can select the category by clicking the drop-down under Category in Submission & Completion
Editing an Assignment
On the Assignments main page, you will see a list of all your existing assignments.
Locate the assignment you want to change and select the chevron icon [⌵] to the right of the assignment's name.
Here you can edit, copy or delete the assignment. You can also edit the assignment within a module. Please note that this functionality is limited.
Placing Assignments in Modules
Within the Content tool, locate the module in which you would like students to access the assignment.
After selecting this module, click Existing Activities, then select Assignments.
Select the assignment you would like to add, searching by name if necessary.
Then drag the assignment so that the order/placement within the module is correct.
Adding Restrictions and Rubrics to an Assignment
You may want to set additional conditions to an assignment, such as availability, release conditions, rubrics and/or special access.
Locate the Evaluation & Feedback category in the right-hand column and expand the section.
Select Add Rubric and choose an existing rubric or create a new rubric.
Click Save and Close.
Using a Rubric
First, select the submission you would like to assess. The rubric will populate on the righthand side of each submission under the Evaluation and Feedback header. Open the associated rubric and select the performance level for each of the criterion. Use the preassigned feedback or customize sections as desired. If the rubric uses points or percentages, the grade will calculate automatically, however, you can manually change category scores, total score and overall score. When finished with the rubric, select Close.
Grading an Assignment
There are several ways to grade in Brightspace. If grading submissions from a single assignment, locate it within the Assignments tool. If grading submissions from several assignments, you can use the Quick Eval tool.
If using the Quick Eval tool, all submissions that need grading will populate here including assignments, quizzes and discussions. Therefore, if you are looking to grade a specific assignment, it will likely be more efficient to do so from the assignment itself within the Assignments tool.
Annotating an Assignment
While grading students’ submissions, you can digitally insert notes, highlight text and write directly on the document to give meaningful feedback.