Effective Collaboration Practices in Brightspace

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by Brigette Connolly, D2L Success Coach

Students generally collaborate in a physical classroom by discussing their work with their peers or working in groups. You can accomplish the same goals in Brightspace whether you are in person, or online! The three best tools to use for collaboration in Brightspace are Discussions, Groups, and Activity Feed, and even if you are already using these tools, you may not have thought of the effective practice of using these tools to encourage collaboration. In addition to what you are already doing with these tools, there are many other effective practices for using these tools that encourage/foster collaboration in your classroom.

Discussions


The Discussions tool allows you to create different forums and topics for class conversation. Think of the Discussions tool like the filing cabinet, and the forum is a file folder that holds the topics and threads within the discussion. One way to set up discussion forums is based on units, or the big ideas you will be working on in your class. If you have a unit for “Poetry” in your English class, you can have different topics within that forum such as famous poems, spoken word poetry, and class poetry. Within the topic, you can add in dynamic descriptions using the Brightspace editor and can create video notes of you explaining the discussion, add in YouTube videos to provide content for students, or link to a different area of your Brightspace course. For students' individual responses to a discussion, they can either start a new thread, reply to a classmate, or both! Students also have the same opportunity to include videos and media in their responses. One exciting use-case of the Discussion tool is to have students debate within the discussion about an assigned topic, and record a 2 minute video response to the question, and record a 1 minute rebuttal to a classmate. Discussions can be used when students are learning online, but can also be used while you are in person as a common place to house collaborative student conversations and have students engage with the course, and each other. Also, you can assess a Discussion item, attach a rubric and standards if you need to!
See the Creating Discussions in Brightspace for the specific steps to setting up discussions.

Groups

The Groups tool in Brightspace is a great way to have students collaborate whether they are in person, or learning remotely. You can set up a group based on many different factors, but when using them for collaborative work, there are some specific steps you might want to pay attention to! If you would like to create a group assignment, title the group accordingly and choose whether you would like the groups to be based on the number of students in the group, or number of groups that you would like to have students enrolled in. Once you have the group set up, the last step is to choose how students will collaborate! You can create an assignment, or discussion for the group right away. By using Brightspace as your hub for collaboration, you do not need to worry about a student being away and missing a class discussion.
See the Creating Groups document for the specific steps to setting up groups, or the Group Self-Enrollment document for specifics on how students can enroll in the group of their choice for a collaborative assignment.


Activity Feed

Another fun way to encourage collaboration in Brightspace, is through the Activity Feed! Activity Feed can act as your virtual agenda, and you can also allow students to comment on the Activity Feed post and engage with you, and one another. Try posting a question for students to reply to on the Activity Feed and have them talk about it in the post! An Activity Feed post acts similarly to a social media post and allows students to connect right on the Homepage. You can choose whether to leave commenting on, or off for every post!
NOTE: parents can only see posts made by the teacher in the Activity Feed. They would not see the class discussion between students.

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