Notifications and user settings
Notifications
Would you like to be notified by text message or email when there are changes to your courses?
Notifications is a tool that allows you to enable an email alert or text message when there are new items in your course! You can set up a notification to alert you about new content items, news/announcements, and even posted grades!
Each user is responsible for setting up notifications for their courses - it is not something Instructors will be able to do for them.
Note: You will still be able to receive emails sent from instructors despite any changes made to your notification settings.
- In the top right corner of the minibar, under your name, click Notifications.
- Notifications will always go to the email address associated with your account in Brightspace. For Ryerson students, faculty and staff, this will be your @torontomu.ca email address.
- Summary of Activity
- This option will email you a summary of all activity for each course, as opposed to an instant email for each notification item.
- Select how often you receive an email notification: Never (turns this option off), Daily (set an appropriate time), or Weekly (set an appropriate day and time).
- Instant Notifications
- Review and select any area you would like to receive Email notifications
- Customize Notifications
- Review the options and select any that you would like.
- Exclude some courses
- You may choose the courses for which you don’t want to receive notifications.
- Click Save to save your changes.
How do I set up mobile notifications?
Disclaimer: We do not support the mobile notifications, due to the various mobile carriers' technical aspects. We recommend the use of email notifications, as well as checking your courses in a supported web browser (Firefox or Chrome) for any course updates.
Please note that D2L does not ask for any information via SMS. If you receive any suspicious messages, we recommend you to go to my.ryerson.ca to check your D2L course directly.
Before you can receive text notifications, you must register your mobile phone for this service. Note that this is an optional feature you can use at your own discretion as you will be entering your mobile number into D2L Brightspace. (Ryerson is not responsible for any additional fees your mobile carrier may charge for SMS messages.)
- In the top right corner of the minibar, under your name, click Notifications.
- Under Contact Methods, you’ll see a link to Register your mobile. Enter the required fields, including your phone number.
- A confirmation code (4 digits) will be sent to your phone.
You may receive a message stating that you are not subscribed to email to SMS service. In which case, you will be prompted on your phone to text “yes”. Then, you need to click “resend your code” in D2L before you follow the instructions on your phone to be texted a 4 digit code from noreply@torontomu.ca.
Note: If your carrier is Freedom Mobile (previously WIND), you will first need to activate your email to SMS service before you can set up mobile notifications from D2L Brightspace. To do this, send an SMS message from your cell phone to the short code of 4000. (More information about this from Freedom Mobile's website (external link) .) You may need to click “resend your code” in D2L to be texted a 4 digit code from noreply@torontomu.ca before you follow the instructions on your phone.
- Set the Max number of messages per day you wish to receive per day.
- Under Instant Notifications, click on the SMS checkbox for any items you wish to receive an SMS message when there are notifications in D2L.
- Click Save.
- You can delete your mobile number at any time to stop receiving SMS notifications by clicking the trash bin beside your Mobile Number.
What is a "summary of activity"?
This is a scheduled email (either daily or weekly) that contains a list of updates from a specific Brightspace shell. If enabled, you will receive an email for *each* shell that you currently have access to, except for those you have added to the exclusion list.
Please note that users cannot control which areas of the course are included in the email summaries. The list of items with checkboxes are only related to Instant Notifications, and not summaries.
To enable a scheduled email summary, simply select "Daily" or "Weekly" from the menu and follow the on-screen prompts.
What is included?
The following are among the items included in an email summary:
- Unread discussion posts
- Content updates
- Quizzes not attempted
- New assignment submission files
There are times when you are receiving too many notifications from a Brightspace shell that you aren't actively engaged in. You may choose to exclude these shells from your Notifications.
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Scroll to the bottom of the Notifications tool, to the "Exclude some courses" section.
Click the link "Manage my course exclusions".
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Click the "X" to the right of any course you wish to exclude from the notifications. This will change the "X" to an arrow. Click "Close" to complete the change.
If you have many Brightspace shells, you can use the search box at the top to locate a specific shell.
To restore notifications for an excluded shell:
- Locate the shell in the list, and click the arrow icon to the right of the shell name. This will change the arrow back to an "X".
- Click "Close" to complete the change.
Alternatively, you can click "Restore excluded courses" to restore notifications for ALL shells that were excluded.
There are a number of user-specific settings that can be used to optimize your experience with Brightspace. This is often most useful when using assistive technologies.
Here are a few highlighted settings that you may find useful.
Locate these settings by clicking on your name in the upper-right corner, then "Account Settings".
Font Settings
Control the readability of the text in Brightspace by selecting an appropriate size.
Reading Content
Some tools automatically mark content as read as you scroll it into view. If you use an assistive technology such as a screen reader then you may wish to disable this feature by checking the box "Do not automatically mark items as read as the page scrolls".
Video Settings
This setting ensures assistive technologies can detect videos. As a consequence, videos will overlap menus. It does not influence the accessibility of specific players.
To enable, simply check the box "Optimize video presentation for programmatically-driven assistive technologies".
Be sure to click the "Save" or "Save and Close" button, found at the bottom of the page, to save any changes you make.
The "Email" settings allow you to customize your email experience in Brightspace.
Please note that this only impacts the emails you send from inside D2L Brightspace. The emails you send from another email application, including GMail, may have different settings enabled.
Locate these settings by clicking on your name in the upper-right corner, then "Account Settings".
Click the "Email" tab in your account settings page. Here, you can:
- check to "Send a copy of each outgoing message to ..." your email address
- set your email signature
Did you know that you can generate a web address for your Brightspace calendar, so you can view the entries from another calendar application (like Google Calendar)?
The following steps outline how to generate that address. Please follow the instructions in your calendar application for displaying an external calendar.
Locate these settings by clicking on the name "Calendar" for the calendar module on your Brightspace homepage.
On your D2L Brightspace homepage, locate the "Calendar" module and click the name "Calendar", displayed at the top of the module.
This will open your D2L Brightspace Calendar tool, which aggregates all of the calendar items from your various Brightspace shells, as well as any personal calendar entries you may make.
In your Brightspace Calendar, click the "Subscribe" button in the top-right corner.
On the resulting pop-up, you will see the URL for your calendar feed displayed.
- Copy the URL for your Brightspace calendar feed
How do I add this calendar feed to my calendar application?
Each calendar application is different, so we can't provide instructions for how to do this. Start by searching your application's help section for more information. Since we support Google Workspace for Education at Toronto Metropolitan University, we have linked to those instructions below.
How do I create a feed for just one course's calendar?
By default, this is set to include "All Calendars and Tasks". To change this, simply click where it says "All Calendars and Tasks", and select a different calendar from the drop-down menu.
* Please note that you can only have one calendar feed at a time, so if you generate a feed for the calendar in a specific course shell, you cannot have a second one for a different course shell.
At this time, we do not have the Brightspace User Profile enabled, as it does not meet the university's user information privacy standards.
We will continue to re-assess this feature as changes are made.