Create and manage Intelligent Agents in D2L Brightspace

Overview

The Intelligent Agents tool helps you to monitor your course to find activity that matches criteria that you set. The criteria that the agents search for are log in activity, course activity, and release conditions in Brightspace.

Example uses for agents include:

• Emailing users with grades below a certain level
• Checking for users that have not logged in within a specific number of days
• Checking for users that view a specific content topic

Tour of Intelligent Agents tool

1. Create a new agent, create and edit categories to group related agents together, and select More Actions for more options.
2. Enable, Disable, Delete or Bulk Edit existing agents.
3. Use the table to select agents, edit agents, and review information about agent run dates.
4. Use the drop down menu to filter agents.
5. Customize email settings related to Intelligent Agents.

Create an Intelligent Agent

Review the Sample Intelligent Agent Template file in this article for samples to try out.

1. Click New on the Agent List page.
2. Enter a name in Agent Name.
3. Select the Agent is enabled checkbox.
4. Determine the scheduling you want to run the agent.
   • If you want the agent to run on a schedule, select a schedule option (such as daily, weekly), repetition, and schedule time and dates.
     Note: Intelligent Agents can be scheduled to run before the course start date. Scheduled intelligent agents stop running and are automatically disabled if the course is inactive, past its end date, or deleted. You can still set up a practice run or a manual run of an agent at any time in a course with a passed end date.
5. Determine who to send the agent to using Role in Classlist > All users visible in the Classlist or Users with specific roles (such as only Students).
6. Determine the criteria the agent looks for by selecting one of the following options:
   • If you want the agent to search for course activity, select Course Activity checkbox and choose which of the course activities you want to monitor.
   • Click the Attach Existing or Create and Attach to select or create release conditions for the agent to monitor.
7. Select one of the Action Repetition options to set whether the agent takes action once or every time the conditions are met. The Action Repetition setting determines how many emails an agent might send to users who satisfy its criteria.
8. Enter {InitiatingUser} in the TO field, so it identifies and contacts the student who met the criteria.  You can add additional emails in the CC and BCC fields.
9. Enter a Subject. You can use special replace strings in these fields.
10. Enter the body of the email in the Message. You can use special replace strings in these fields.
    Note: The Message field has an unlimited character length.
11. Choose whether to add an attachment to the email.
12. Select HTML for the email format.
13. Click Save and Close.

Try a Practice Run for an Intelligent Agent

For an intelligent agent, you can do a practice run to report a list of students who met the specified criteria.  Students identified in a practice run are not notified or emailed.  A practice run does not count as an action.  The practice run option works on enabled or disabled agents.

1. Select Practice Run from the agent’s menu.
   
2. Click on the <number> users identified link under Results of Last Run.
   
3. Review the results of the practice run to identify who met the conditions of the intelligent agent.