Work To Do Widget

The Work To Do widget displays all the overdue and upcoming learning activities across courses or within a course. Sometimes students have a hard time keeping track of what they need to get done. They may need to hop in and out of several courses to determine if there are upcoming assignments or projects with due dates in the near future (or even in the past!).

Now, with the Work To Do widget all quizzes, assignments, checklists, and so on, with due or end dates in the near future or past appear in one place on your homepage. Any overdue work will appear at the top of the list, and upcoming items appear below. If there are more than six items available, you’ll have a link to “View all work”, which takes you to a new page with all recently overdue work and all work for the upcoming year! Students will never again have to manually create a to-do list of assignments across your different courses.

Will the Widget Display Activities that Don’t Have a Due Date or an End Date?

No. The Work To Do Widget specifically displays learning activities with an overdue or upcoming deadline.

Does the widget display items that have been completed?

No. The focus of this widget is on actionable items, work to do, not work that has been done. With the exception of Modules, once an item has been completed, it will disappear from the widget. If you want a Module to disappear from the widget, we recommend adding an End Date.

 Does it always display activities across all Courses?

No. The Work To Do Widget displays activities across all courses except when it is placed on a Course Homepage. In this case, it is scoped to display only activities from that course, which allows you to zero in on the tasks at hand.

Does the widget display all Overdue and Upcoming items? How far back in time and how far into the future goes the widget go?

By default, it displays overdue items from the past twelve weeks and upcoming items in the next two weeks, with a maximum of 16 weeks.

Regardless of the time range, the widget will display a maximum of 6 items. If additional items are available, they can be seen in the full-screen view via the “View all work” button. On this page, all items with due/end dates for the upcoming year can be seen.

I marked a Module Not Visible to students, or I put a Release Condition on it, but an activity within that module still shows in the widget. What should I do?

Add the visibility setting and/or release condition to the individual activity in addition to the module. It is a current limitation that these settings do not cascade down from the module to the activities within it. These settings must be associated with the individual activity in order for them to be respected in the widget and other tools.

The widget appears out of sync with Content. (E.g.  A student has completed an activity, but it still shows in the widget. I’ve added a new items with a date, but it hasn’t appeared in the widget. I’ve updated the date on an activity, but my students are still seeing the original date.) What’s wrong?

Allow 2 minutes for updates to appear in the widget, or have students clear their cache to see updates immediately.

I know there’s an overdue item, but the students don’t see it. Why isn’t it showing up in the Overdue section of the widget?

There are three reasons an overdue item might not show in the widget. It’s either outside of the range set by the configuration variable (defaulted to 12 weeks in the past), it has been completed by the student, or its End Date has passed. If an item is overdue, but it also has an End Date that has passed, the item no longer appears as Work to Do. This is true for the End Date of the individual activity or the entire course.

Does the widget support Special Access overrides?

Yes. If a student has a different due/end date due to Special Access, the student will see their individual date in the widget.

What if there’s an activity due soon, but it’s start date hasn’t come yet?

If the course is active and started but the activity’s start date is in the future, the activity will appear in the Upcoming section of the widget, but it will not be clickable and it will have a label to indicate its start date until the date has arrived. If the entire course has not yet started, the activity will not appear in the widget.

What about Course due dates and end dates?

Course end dates do not appear in the widget, but courses with due dates assigned via Learning Groups do appear.

What’s the difference between this widget and how work to do is displayed in Pulse?

Pulse displays work to do in a more graphical week-by-week view, and it doesn’t explicitly call out overdue work. Also, Pulse includes Calendar Events in a separate tab, and Pulse allows users to add their own tasks to the work to do view. On Homepages, you’d need to use the separate Calendar and Tasks widgets for these items.

What’s the difference between this widget and other widgets like Updates and Calendar?

Each widget has its own unique benefits. For instance, the Updates widget includes items like ungraded assignments and quizzes, making it a more useful tool for instructors, whereas the Work To Do widget is geared towards students. The Calendar widget does not display course activities with due dates when on the Brightspace Homepage, but it does display activities with due dates when on the Course Homepage.​ So, the Calendar and Work To Do widgets can live in harmony on the Brightspace Homepage, but they may display some duplicate items when both widgets are on the Course Homepage.