Intelligent agents allow instructors to generate reports and communicate with students in regards to various tasks and activities completed on a Brightspace course site. Intelligent agents can track criteria such as log-in activity, course activity, and any options offered by release conditions (Learn more about Release Conditions from our Release Conditions in Brightspace documentation). While this can be helpful for keeping track of student activity in a large course, intelligent agents should not be misconstrued as a way to monitor student engagement within a course.
In this article…
Creating an Intelligent Agent
The Intelligent Agents area can be accessed by clicking Course Tools on the navbar, and selecting Intelligent Agents from the drop-down menu. From here, new Intelligent Agents can be created for the course site.
Click the New Agent button.
Choose a name for the agent, most likely something to do with what you will have the agent checking.
Add a description and give the agent a category at your own discretion. Both are optional and used for organization purposes.
Enable the agent by checking the checkbox under Status.
Under Scheduling, choose whether the agent will run on a certain schedule, or have no schedule (the instructor chooses when to run it).
Select the criteria required for the agent to follow. Options are explained below:
Select the Actions that the agent will take. There are options to set whether the agent records users who repeatedly meet the criteria, or whether it only tracks the first time someone meets the criteria, as well as the option to send an email to the user when the criteria is met.
CPI does not recommend allowing Intelligent Agents to send emails to users. Depending on the frequency the agent is run (as well as the number of agents being used) this could lead to far too many notifications being sent to students, discouraging them to check their emails for other important information.
Click Save and Close to complete the agent.
Manually Running an Intelligent Agent
Instructors have the ability to create an intelligent agent that they can run at their own discretion as opposed to setting the agent to a particular schedule. Additionally, agents that run on a schedule can be called upon to run whenever from the Intelligent Agents area, found by clicking Course Tools on the navbar and selecting Intelligent Agents in the drop-down menu.
Select the drop-down arrow next to the agent that will be run.
Select Run Now, this will send a request to run the agent. It can take a few minutes for the agent to run depending on server load, connection, etc.
Upon refreshing the page after a few minutes, the agent will have run and generated a report, which can be selected under the Results of Last Run column.
Viewing a History of Reports
The history of reports generated by an intelligent agent are accessible from the Intelligent Agents area, found by clicking Course Tools on the navbar and selecting Intelligent Agents in the drop-down menu.
Select the drop-down arrow next to the agent.
Select View History, this will open a list of all the previous times the agent has run. The reports can also be exported from the drop-down menu by clicking Export History instead.
Intelligent Agents and Engagement
While Intelligent Agents can provide helpful information to instructors for how students are interacting with the course site, this should not be misconstrued as a method of tracking user engagement with a site. For example, an intelligent agent can check to see if a user has clicked on a certain content item, but it does not know how long the student spent looking at that item, or what their takeaway from it was. Please keep this in mind when using intelligent agents. Please reach out to cpi@brocku.ca with any questions about engagement resources or to discuss with us.