Page Comparison

As instructors within Brightspace, it is important to keep in mind the different forms of student personal information that you Instructors have access to . A lot several forms of student personal information in Brightspace, including (but not limited to) student names, emails, ID numbers, and grades are easily accessible to instructors. This information should not be shared to other students lightly, and should always be done with student consent.CPI recommends consulting Brock University’s Privacy and Records Management Brightspace site for any questions regarding . While the same information is accessible in other systems (namely BrockDB), Brightspace has options for easy sharing that should be approached with caution.

The majority of this information is readily available to an instructor through a site’s Classlist, which is restricted from student view in Brock’s instance of Brightspace for reasons of personal privacy (and said restriction can only be managed institution-wide).

Some student information should never be shared and steps should be taken to ensure that no sharing happens without consent. None of Brightspace’s collaborative features (Discussions, Groups, Email, etc.) will share student contact information, but be mindful when facilitating group work or encouraging discussion and pay attention if gathering names and contact information to share.

This page includes the recommendation to export student names and emails via the Grades page, which is the tidiest and most manageable method for sharing student contact information.

Consent

Students should be made aware of what personal information the instructor wishes to share, and to whom. There should also be a chance to give/revoke consent before this information is shared. Instructors must then work with students to create alternative pathways to successallow the student to complete the related work.

Instructors should strive Strive to share the least amount of information possible to complete their a task.

Reasons for

In most cases, instructors will want to share student contact information such as emails or usernames for the purposes of facilitating group discussion. Instead of sharing information and having students discuss independent from the instructor, CPI recommends either making use of a Course Teams channel, or a Discussions area in the course.

sharing student information

There are several common reasons that necessitate the sharing of student contact information, including group work and project planning, class discussion, peer evaluation, and study groups. Much of this functionality can be achieved through use of the Brightspace Discussions area, the Groups tool, and/or a Course Teams channel, although there may be benefits were this to happen externally and in private.

Keep in mind this information exchange would typically happen in-class and between students, where both parties have consented to sharing said information. Providing this automatically ignores that step.

That said, the best way of creating a text list of all student names and email addressing is through Grades and not Classlist. Instructions for doing so are outlined below.

Instructors may sometimes wish to share student grades as a means of celebration, encouragement, or discussion. This is not recommended beyond informal or anecdotal mention, but care should be taken to anonymize any data before sharing. While Grades can be exported with identifying information removed (see below), the Assignment and Quiz feedback areas cannot be made presentable in any way. If that is necessary, use carefully cropped screenshots and utilize the blurring options that many freely available image editors include.

Collecting and Disseminating Student Info in Brightspace

The easiest way to acquire student information efficiently is through the Grades tool.

1. Select Grades on the course navbar.

2. Navigate to the Enter Grades tab, which is normally the default landing page for Grades.

3. Select the grey Export button in the top-left of the Grades area (in the Enter Grades tab).

4. From the Export area, instructors can personalize what information gets exported to an excel file. They also have the ability to exclude grades entirely should they so choose.

5. Once the desired settings are chosen, select Export to Excel at the bottom of the page to generate an excel file for download.