Instructor Support for Educational Systems

September 2026 - 18/09/2026

Updated on

The new Brightspace release is available from 18 September 2026 10:00.

New Content Experience – Assessable activities are only displayed inline

Assessable activities, including Assignments, Quizzes, Discussions, and instructor LTI links, now display inline by default. The option to have LTI links open in a new tab for students is still available through the Edit menu.

New Content Experience – Enhanced Table of Contents

The Table of Contents has been updated with the following improvements:

  • Support for unlimited module and topic hierarchy depth.

  • Improved accessibility and keyboard navigation to make restructuring course content easier.

  • Expand and collapse modules without navigating away from the page.

  • Open content items in a new browser tab from the context menu.

  • Condensed display for smaller screens.

This update also introduces student completion progress indicators for topics and modules. These will indicate whether a topic or module has been viewed or assignment completed and will set the relevant content topic of module to the Completed status.

When opening an external tool (such as FeedbackFruits, Pitch2Peer, Ans, etc) as a student the content item may be automatically set to completed even though the assignment in the external tool might still be due.

Instructors can change this behaviour by setting the Mark as complete setting in the Edit page from Automatically when opened to Manually by learner.

When the Mark as complete setting is set to Manually by learner by the instructor, students will be able to click the Mark as Complete button to mark the activity as completed. Once clicked, the button cannot be unclicked!

New Content Experience – Removing the Preview as a Student option (Instructors only)

To provide a more accurate representation of the student experience, the Preview as a Student option is removed.

Previously, the Preview as a Student option was available in Content, but it did not accurately reflect the student experience. This preview had several limitations. For example, it did not correctly apply availability dates and release conditions, and it displayed the instructor view instead of the student view for Assignments, Quizzes, and Discussions.

To view your course from a student's perspective, use the View as Student option in the account menu.

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