Intended Audience: Collaborative Instructors
This article pertains to courses taught by a local teacher as part of a collaborative partnership.
About
To provide a personalized welcome experience for students accessing your course for the first time, you can set up an intelligent agent to greet them automatically. This document outlines the steps to configure an intelligent agent that will send a customized welcome email to new student enrollments in your Brightspace course. It covers modifying default settings, creating the intelligent agent, setting up the criteria and actions, and manually running the agent if needed for existing enrollments.
Instruction
Setting Up a Welcome Intelligent Agent
To create an intelligent agent that greets new students when they access the course for the first time, follow these steps:
- First, tap Course Admin and then select Intelligent Agents within the Brightspace course.
- Next, tap Settings.
- Then tap the Set custom values for this course radio button and then enter the name and reply-to address.
- Finally, tap the Save button.
Creating the Agent
- First, tap New Agent from the Agent List page.
- Next, provide an Agent Name and Description.
- Then select the "Agent is enabled" checkbox.
- Next, continue to Scheduling.
Scheduling
- First, tap to expand the Scheduling section.
- Next, set the frequency to Daily and then set the dates this agent should run.
Note: This is the recommended selection for the Welcome Letter. Once selected, apply the additional prompts to set the scheduled time and dates.
- Then continue to Criteria.
Criteria
- First, tap to expand the Criteria section.
- Next, select Student and Instructor checkboxes within the "Role in Classlist" section.
- Skip "Login Activity."
- Then select the Course Activity checkbox within the "Take Action on Activity" section.
- Next, select the "User has accessed the course during the last _ day(s)" radio button and insert the number "1" in the field.
- Skip "Release Conditions."
- Continue to Actions.
Actions
- First, tap to expand the Actions section.
- Next, select the Take action only the first time the agent's criteria are satisfied for a user radio button under the "Repetition" section.
- Then select the Send an email when the criteria are satisfied checkbox.
- Next, populate the To, Cc, Subject and Message fields and incorporate the appropriate replace strings.
- Then continue scrolling to include the Welcome Letter (PDF) attachment.
Note: This step is not required if the Welcome letter was saved to Google Drive. In this case, the link may be included in the message area. - Next, ensure the "HTML" radio button is selected for Email Format.
- Finally, tap the Save and Close button to apply changes and exit the page.
Manually Run Intelligent Agent
If the course already has students enrolled, instructors have the option to manually trigger the intelligent agent. To do so, locate the agent in the list and click the drop-down button next to the agent name. From the menu, select Run Now. This will force the agent to execute immediately and send the welcome message to any existing students accessing the course for the first time.
With the intelligent agent now set up, it will automatically check every night for new students in the course. First time activities will receive the personalized welcome message. To review when and to whom the welcome message was delivered, navigate back to the agent list within Intelligent Agents and select View History for the specific agent. This will provide a log of the message delivery details over time.