Student

How can I collaborate with students on files in Brightspace?

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The teacher has the ability to create a place within the Brightspace course where students can work together in groups as well as share files with each other. 

  • To enable group work, the teacher can set up a Group Locker.  A locker is a digital storage facility, similar to Dropbox, where up to 1 GB of data can be uploaded and saved. You and your other group members can share different types of files (documents, images etc) with each other.
  • The teacher can also open a Discussion, where students can discuss, ask questions and consult.

Go to Administration > Groups to see whether you can access Discussions or Lockers.

  • Go to Administration in the navbar of your course.
  • Click Groups. You will be navigated to the groups homepage. Here you will find an overview of all groups you are a part of (through OSIRIS, the teacher, or self-enrollment in Brightspace).
  1. The column Discussions will show whether the teacher has created a group discussion for your group. Click the title to open the discussion.
  2. The column Locker will show whether the teacher has created a group locker for your group. Click Group Files to open the locker.

It is also possible to navigate to the discussions page via Activities > Discussions. If no discussion topics have been created for the course, an announcement will appear: ‘You don't have any discussion topics available to post to.’ 

More information about Discussions can be found in the following article: How do I use Discussions?

Locker

  • Navigate to Administration > Groups and click Group Files.
  • Click the second tab to open the overview page of the Group Locker.
  1. Click Upload Files to upload a file from your computer.
  2. Click New File to create a file in Brightspace. Give the file a name and add a description if desired. The description will be shown in the overview of files in the locker.
    Then you can use Edit contents to add text, videos, images, and links, among others.
  3. Use folders to manage the contents of the locker. Click New Folder to create a new folder in which you can upload files.
  4. On this scale you will see how much of the storage space has been used (the maximum is 1 GB).
  5. Click the name of the folder to open it.

The column File Name will show all uploaded files and created folders.
Behind the file name you will see the size of the file as well as when the file was last modified and by who.

It is not possible to collaborate with students on one file at the same time.

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