Intended Audience: Collaborative Instructors
This article pertains to courses taught by a local teacher as part of a collaborative partnership.
Introduction:
Follow the instructions below to set up an intelligent agent in your course that will send a welcome message to students after they access your course for the first time.
Change Default Settings
- First, open one of your courses in Brightspace.
- Next, go to Course Admin.
- Then click Intelligent Agents.
- Next, click Settings located at the top right of the "Agent List".
*Note: you will need to adjust these settings for each class, only once.
You may choose to use the system defaults or you may choose to personalize your settings by adding your name and email in the “Name that emails come from” box (recommended).
Click Save.
Create an Intelligent Agent
- From the Agent List page, click New Agent.
- Next, determine the type of agent you want to create and name the agent. Provide a description of the agent you created and then check the box Agent is enabled. If desired, you may also add a category for your agent. You may create categories by tapping Add Category.
- At this point, set the criteria for the agent based on the image below. (Ignore the Login Activity and Release Conditions sections.)
- Next, set the actions for this agent based on the image below. Note that the strings used in the To: and Cc: fields will pull the student and mentor data. It must be entered exactly as shown in order for the intelligent agent to work properly. You can click the link below the address fields to copy and paste it.
- {InitiatingUser} = student
- {InitiatingUserAuditors} = teacher/mentor
- Now, compose a message to welcome students to the course.
Note: You can use replacement strings in your message as well to personalize. For a list of strings, click the link under the subject field. - Next, upload and attach a PDF of your welcome letter. Alternatively, you may add a link in the message area.
- Then ensure HTML is checked.
- Next, in the Scheduling category, choose the checkbox to "Use Schedule". Choose the Update Schedule button to set up the frequency that the agent should run.
- Now, apply schedule settings as noted in the image below. Schedule dates will be the start and end dates of your course. Click Update.
- Next, tap Save and Close.
Additional Information:
If you already have students enrolled in your course, you may do a manual run of the intelligent agent to get it started by clicking the drop-down menu next to the agent name and choose “Run Now”.
Now that your intelligent agent is set up, it will check each night to see which new students have accessed the course and send them your welcome message. You can view the history of who the message has been sent to by returning to the agent list and choosing “View History” for the agent.