Notifications and user settings
Warning: As of May 1, 2024, SMS (text message) notifications are no longer available. Read more about this change.
D2L Brightspace: SMS Notifications ended May 1, 2024
If you previously enabled SMS notifications (text messaging) to keep informed of activity in your courses in D2L Brightspace., please note that as of May 1, 2024, D2L Brightspace has ended its SMS notification service and will no longer share course updates via text messaging.
Additional information regarding these changes can be found on the What’s New page on the TMU Brightspace website.
Why will SMS notifications no longer be available?
Many wireless providers are deprecating the service that D2L has been using for SMS notifications. There have been frequent service disruptions, rendering these notifications unreliable.
Do I need to do anything?
If you wish to receive notifications from your Brightspace courses via email, you will need to enable them in your Brightspace account. Please find instructions above, in the section called "Email notifications".
You do not need to make any changes to your SMS settings - they have ceased automatically on May 1.
What will happen to stored phone numbers after this?
When D2L disabled this service, your phone number was permanently deleted from the Brightspace system.
Questions?
If you have any questions about these changes, please contact the Computing and Communications Services (CCS) Help Desk via the IT Help portal, or help@torontomu.ca
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.
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.
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".
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".
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.
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.