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Brightspace Student Support

Notifications

In Brightspace, you'll be alerted to important changes by the icons in the 'minibar', which displays in the top-right hand side of the screen. You'll see a bar like this:

minibar menu

Here is a brief explanation of what the updates symbols mean:

message notification icon

Message alerts

Displays instant messages that you have received on Brightspace, or emails received through Brightspace.

subscription notification icon

Subscription alerts

Displays updates for discussion forums that you have chosen to subscribe to.

updates notification icon

Update alerts

This icon will display a notification when a wide range of actions take place in any of your modules, such as new topics being created, or feedback being released.

 

Enabling email notifications

If you'd prefer, you can set up email notifications for some or all of the notifications that you'll get via the icons in the minibar. To do this:

  1. Select your avatar or name (to the right of the updates icons) in the minibar
  2. Choose 'notifications' from the dropdown menu.
  3. Under 'Instant Notifications', tick the boxes for the types of notifications for which you'd like emails.
  4. Select 'save'.

To see where this is in the video tutorial, along with the explanation of the above icons, view the 'Navigating Brightspace' video from 0:43 onwards.

Turning off Notifications

You might find that you are receiving notifications for areas which aren't your normal academic modules, these can be from academic support sites like Learning Services or institution wide events such as Careers Week events. If you find that you are recieving these notifications and you are not interested in a particular area you can switch off notifications for those specific modules.

Please note, you should NOT turn off notifications for your course modules, as you may miss important information relevant to your studies. 

The step-by-step guidance below will show you how to turn off notifications for certain modules within Brightspace. 

If you find that you are not receiving notifications for your course modules please speak to your course team in the first instance.