how to create a google assignment in brightspace

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Using Google Tools and D2L’s Brightspace Platform Together

• Jun 15, 2021

If you’re a teacher reading this, chances are high that you’ve either interacted with or heard about Google learning tools or software for educators. Many of you are already familiar with Google Classroom™, Google Drive™, or Google Docs™ and have achieved student success and satisfaction by incorporating them into your teaching and learning.

We’re here to tell you that you can use the Brightspace platform without having to say goodbye to these tools because Brightspace and Google integrate seamlessly in multiple ways! We know that choosing the right online learning tools can be challenging, but we strive to make teaching and learning easier by helping you use the tools you’re already comfortable with, while also exploring new and exciting features in Brightspace.

With this powerful integration, you can discover the best combination of Brightspace and Google for your own teaching and learning circumstances—use what works, leave what doesn’t. Let’s start with a brief overview of a few ways to use Google tools directly within Brightspace.

• 1. Insert files from Google Drive™

Do you love keeping your teaching resources organized in Google Drive™, but (understandably) cringe at the thought of downloading and re-uploading everything to share it with your students? Fortunately, Brightspace integrates with Gmail™ and Google Drive™! That’s right, you can access your email account and stored files without ever having to leave Brightspace.

Conveniently add files from your drive into the Content tool for students to consume as they progress through your class materials. Or, do so in the course Activity Feed when you need to highlight important or time-sensitive information right on your class homepage.

Students can submit work from their own drives, sharing work with teachers quickly and efficiently. They can also add documents into their Portfolio, allowing them to track and share their progress, reflections, and learning experiences.

And if you’re looking for easier access to your Google tools, you can add our Google Workspace widget to your class homepage!

• 2. Stay connected with Google Meet™

Staying connected with your students and building a collaborative digital community is important, especially when face-to-face interactions aren’t an option. You can easily set up a virtual meeting using Google Meet™ directly in Brightspace (in any place that uses Quicklinks!) to promote more engaging conversations with your learners.

For example, you can create and insert a Google Meet meeting into a Brightspace Announcement or an Activity Feed message to provide your students with easy access to virtual meeting links. They’ll be able to view the link and click to join the meeting without having to navigate away from the class homepage. Best of all, you can do all of this with the click of a button.

• 3. Integrate with Google Assignments™

We know that Google Assignments™ are widely used, and Brightspace allows you to create new Google Assignments ™ without leaving the LMS. As a result, your students will be able to access assignments in the Content area of your class (via an LTI link), where they will be sent to a Google interface to view assignment instructions and select a file to submit. Then, enjoy familiar Google features like assessing, grading with rubrics, and viewing plagiarism scores.

As you can see, you can make the Google tools that you know and love even better by integrating them with D2L’s Brightspace learning platform for flexible, personalized learning. For more information on the above integrations, check out this Google integration article in the Brightspace Community.

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Table of Contents

• Help Center
• Assignments
• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Service
• Submit feedback

• Learning Management System Support >
• Guides for Instructors >
• Assessment and Grading in Brightspace >

Assignments in Brightspace

Create assignments in Brightspace to promote student interaction and learning progress in your class. 

Assignments often make up a large portion of student interactions within a course. They can include  active learning ,  group work ,  formative assessments , culminating projects and much more.   

Brightspace’s Assignments tool offers robust features to customize instructions, submissions and assessment type. Tools that complement Assignments include Content, Rubrics, and Grades. As always, ensure any embedded multimedia or attachments are accessible for all students. 

For additional support beyond this page, visit Brightspace’s Create an assignment  webpage.

On this page:

Preparing an assignment.

There are several considerations to make before creating an assignment. Although assignments can be edited later on, it will be more time efficient to plan ahead.  

General Preparation

Before creating an assignment, it is helpful to have some information upfront such as the assignment name, description and point value. If your syllabus is finalized, you may also want to include the due date while creating the new assignment.

Adding a due date to an assignment will enable it to populate in the course schedule.

Advanced Preparation

• Rubrics : Consider how this assignment will be graded. If grading with a rubric, it is best to first create the rubric and then attach it to the assignment. 
• Grade Categories : You may want to create weighted categories within the Grades Tool  before creating assignments. This will allow you to categorize assignments as they populate the grade book. 
• Assignment Category : This category is separate from the grade categories. It serves more as a grouping and organization system. For example, this can be used to categorize items such as homework, presentations or to provide more granular detail.
• Release Conditions : You may choose to limit access to this assignment until a specific date or after completing a prerequisite task such as a quiz or discussion post. Create the first task prior to creating the assignment. 
• Group Assignments : In order to assign collaborative assignments, the groups must already be created.
• Special Access:  Special access permissions allow you to set different availability dates and times for specific users. For example, you could extend the deadline for users who require remedial help or who are submitting work beyond the original scope of the assignment. Learn more about Special Access.

Where to Build Assignments

There are several ways to develop and access course assignments.

• From an existing module within the Contents tab ( Upload/Create and then New Assignment ).
• From a placeholder using the Course Builder tool . 
• From the Assignments tab.
• From the Course Admin page.

For the purposes of this page, we will focus building from the Assignments tab as this pathway provides the most support resources and overall functionality. If you choose a different method, scroll through the parts of this page that are relevant for all assignments.  

Creating an Assignment

Use the  Assignments tool to create and edit assignments, view student submissions, track the grading progress of an assignment, associate assignments to rubrics and learning outcomes and return submissions with grades and feedback.

How to Create an Assignment

• On the navbar, click Assessments and select Assignments .
• Name of assignment.
• Grade Out Of to establish establish a numeric point value to the assignment or leave the assignment ungraded.
• In Grade Book option: choose to edit or link to existing grade category or grade item, not put the assignment in the grade book or reset settings to make the assignment ungraded.
• Add a  Due Date .
• Add Instructions .
• Upload files , add links , Record Audio or Record Video .
• Set the assignment to be always available or establish a start/end date of visibility.
• Set release condtiions. 
• Set special access. 
• Set the type of assignment (individual or group),
• Set the category the assignment will be placed under in the grade book,
• Set the submission type (file, text, on paper submission or observed in person).
• Set the submission restrictions (students can upload only one file or an unlimited files).
• Set the type of file that can be uploaded.
• Set a notification email to be sent out when an assignment is submitted.
• Add a rubric.
• Describe which learning objectives this assignment is related to.
• Allow for annotation tools.
• Allow for anonymous marking of assignments. 
• Manage Turnitin settings. 
• Select Save and Close when you are done with creating the assignment. This will bring you back to the Assignments area. Or select Save to stay on the page and continue working on creating/editing the assignment.

Adding a  Grade Out Of  automatically adds this item to the grade book. If you have already set up categories in the grade book, you can select the category by clicking the drop-down under Category in Submission & Completion

Editing an Assignment

• On the Assignments main page, you will see a list of all your existing assignments.
• Locate the assignment you want to change and select the chevron icon  [⌵]  to the right of the assignment's name.
• Here you can edit, copy or delete the assignment. You can also edit the assignment within a module. Please note that this functionality is limited.  

Placing Assignments in Modules

• Within the Content  tool, locate the module in which you would like students to access the assignment.
• After selecting this module, click Existing Activities , then select Assignments .
• Select the assignment you would like to add, searching by name if necessary.
• Then drag the assignment so that the order/placement within the module is correct.  

Adding Restrictions and Rubrics to an Assignment

You may want to set additional conditions to an assignment, such as availability, release conditions, rubrics and/or special access. 

Add Restrictions to an Assignment (Video)

Adding Rubrics to Assignments

Before attaching a rubric, ensure it is complete and its status is set to published . 

• Create or edit the assignment (see above).
• Locate the  Evaluation & Feedback category in the right-hand column and expand the section.
• Select  Add Rubric and choose an existing rubric or create a new rubric.
• Click Save and Close.

Using a Rubric

First, select the submission you would like to assess. The rubric will populate on the righthand side of each submission under the Evaluation and Feedback header. Open the associated rubric and select the performance level for each of the criterion. Use the preassigned feedback or customize sections as desired. If the rubric uses points or percentages, the grade will calculate automatically, however, you can manually change category scores, total score and overall score. When finished with the rubric, select Close .   

Grading an Assignment

There are several ways to grade in Brightspace. If grading submissions from a single assignment, locate it within the Assignments tool. If grading submissions from several assignments, you can use the Quick Eval tool.

If using the Quick Eval tool, all submissions that need grading will populate here including assignments, quizzes and discussions. Therefore, if you are looking to grade a specific assignment, it will likely be more efficient to do so from the assignment itself within the Assignments tool. 

Grade Submissions in Assignments (Video)

Annotating an Assignment

While grading students’ submissions, you can digitally insert notes, highlight text and write directly on the document to give meaningful feedback .  

Use Inline Annotation in Brightspace (Video)

Additional Resources

Brightspace Support

Linking your Assignment to the Gradebook

When you create an Assignment in Brightspace, you may want to link it to the Grades tool. This guide will explain how to link your assignment to a  grade item that has already been created, as well as provide other important information about associations .

Association or Link – these words are used to describe when an activity in Brightspace ( ex. Assignment, Quiz, Discussion response ) is connected to a Grade item in the Grades tool. When the activity is assessed by the instructor, the grade will automatically transfer into the Brightspace gradebook.

• Link an Assignment to a new Grade Item

Link an Assignment to an existing Grade Item

• Change or remove a gradebook association

What if I don’t want the assignment to affect the final grade?

Created Fall 2020

Link an Assignment to a New Grade Item

Unlike Brightspace’s previous Assignment tool, creating a new assignment will automatically create a grade item unless you manually link it to an existing one.

To do this, give your assignment a point value but do not make a gradebook selection.

• In this example, the gradebook ( Course Admin -> Grades ) already has a Homework Category  and two Homework assignment Grade Items .

• Now, you should go to the Assignments page. Begin a new assignment, or go to edit your already existing assignment. Give it the same title as your Grade Item , and give it a corresponding point value. These should match your gradebook. In this case, “Assignment 1” is worth 10 points.

• Click on Not in Gradebook  and select Edit or Link to Existing .
• A small window will open asking you to either Create a new grade item or Link to an existing grade item . Choose the Link to an existing grade item option, then select the Grade Item you want to link with your assignment. Make your selections, click OK , and click Save and Close on the Edit Assignment screen. The assignment and Grade Item are now linked.

Change or Remove a Gradebook Association

You can change or remove a previous association with the same tool you used before.

• Choose a different Grade Item
• Remove the association, so the assignment is no longer linked to the gradebook at all.

If you want to grade an assignment, but don’t want it included in the final grade there are two options.

• Remove the association from the gradebook as described above. In this case, the student can see their grade in the Assignments area, but not in the gradebook.
• Keep the association, but select Exclude from Final Grade Calculation when editing the Grade Item. Students will see the grade in both the Assignments area and the gradebook.
• Make an ungraded assignment. Students will not receive a grade for their work, but can read any feedback you may have provided.

How do I make assignments visible to learners?

Brightspace , Instructor Help

This article will talk about Assignment Visibility – how to make assignments visible to students.

There are a few points worth noting about Visibility.

1. When creating a new assignment, the Visibility (highlighted in red) is set as hidden by default.

2. The visibility determines whether an assignment is “published,” along with the Start and End Dates chosen by the instructor from the Availability Dates & Conditions setting.

3. An instructor may choose to keep the Visibility as hidden and save the assignment or change it to visible. Below is a list of assignments which are all hidden from learners, and therefore “unpublished.”

4. It is recommended that you only publish assignments when you are sure that they are ready. By doing so, you can avoid any potential confusion and misunderstanding by learners.

To make your assignment visible to students, there are 2 options.

1. After creating a new assignment, if you are sure that it is ready for publishing, simply click on the highlighted button for toggling visibility on or off.

Alternatively, you can make them visible in bulk.

1. To make all these assignments visible, and therefore publish them collectively, select them all by checking the top-most left box in the assignments list.

2. Then select the More Actions menu and click Make Visible to Users .

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