As exam season approaches, here is a quick guide to some of the tools available on Brightspace that can facilitate revision by keeping those communication lines open and helping to build student understanding.

The following topics are covered in this week’s online LT drop-in sessions. You can view a recording of today’s session online or read through the following tips which includes links to our ‘how-to’ guidance.

Developing an online presence is a critical part of remote teaching. Staying connected with your students and remaining ‘close at hand’ can be achieved through the use of some of the communication tools on Brightspace.

• Record a VideoNote to communicate with students. A short talking head of up to 30 minutes, VideoNotes provide a personalised experience for relaying information. Use them regularly in Announcements to put a human face to your messages.
• Post frequently to an FAQs Discussion board. Regular posting by academics has been shown to prompt better engagement with discussions by students.
• Run a Virtual Classroom session focusing on key revision topics or as an FAQ discussion arena. Keep it interactive by restricting to small groups and letting the students dictate the content of the session.

Capture the student voice around the subjects and topics that they would like to cover.

• Create a short one question survey asking which topic students would like to cover in next week’s online session. Give them a list of options to choose from.
• Provide a checklist of tasks with dates e.g. watch the revision lecture recording, complete the revision quiz etc. Students can use this as an aide memoire and are responsible for ticking off each element as they complete them.

Help to keep students on track with their revision by creating learning pathways or tracking student engagement with learning materials:

• Use release conditions to release content and learning materials in stages. You can restrict content to only be available after a specified topic has been completed. Or you could send out an Announcement only to those who haven’t yet viewed a piece of content or attempted a revision quiz.
• Set up an intelligent agent to monitor who is accessing key revision learning materials. Send automated reminders to those who have not yet viewed a lecture recording on a key topic, attempted a revision quiz or participated in a discussion board.

Chunking up learning into smaller pieces makes content easier for students to digest and will help them to build their knowledge.

• Use Panopto to create bitesize video recordings of key topics. Or break up existing Panopto recordings by adding quizzes within the presentation that students must complete to proceed.
• Create a short Brightspace quiz to test knowledge and reinforce key learning points before or after viewing content or other learning materials on the unit.

Use iterative learning to aid with revision.

• Set up a revision quiz that pulls from a large question bank, randomising questions so that students get a different experience each time they take it. Set the number of attempts to unlimited so that students can have repeated attempts to reinforce their learning.
• Populate the feedback field in quiz questions so that students will receive feedback with each question they answer. Or change the Submission View to show all the incorrect responses with the correct answers.

No one solution will suit everybody but these are some of the tools that you can utilise on Brightspace to help students with revision preparation on your unit.

Further guidance

Further guidance can be found on the Brightspace Staff Resources area

View a short recording on Brightspace tools for exam revision preparation