An Intelligent Agent is an automated notification system that activates whenever a certain criteria is met. When that happens, the Intelligent Agent will send a specific email to the user(s) that met the defined criteria. It can be set, for example, to send the students a reminder to access course content if they have not been active in the last 7 days. This could help both the student, to be more engaged in the course, and the instructors, to know about irregular activity among the students.

Intelligent Agents work well with release conditions, but there are many other useful uses. You can set up an Intelligent Agent that activates, for instance, when:

• A student has not visited your course in Brightspace for some time
• A student has not shown activity in your course in Brightspace for some time
• Reminder students about a deadline

An Intelligent Agent sends emails using email addresses or replace strings.

You can decide to run the Intelligent Agent manually or automatically.

• Use Intelligent Agents with moderation. If the students receive too many emails from Intelligent Agents they are less inclined to look at them closely. Consider other ways of communication, such as an Announcement or a personal email, depending on the situation.
• The bigger the group of students, the more useful Intelligent Agents can be.
• As a teacher, you are the only one who can see the name and description of Intelligent Agents. Therefore, it is possible to number them, and include in the description when, to whom, and why the Intelligent Agent sends an email.
• Consider in advance whether the intelligent agent should work automatically or whether you want to run it manually.
• Consider in advance who will receive the email: the students, you, or both:
  • If you expect a lot of emails back, then set up a rule in the inbox to place emails of the intelligent agent directly in a separate folder
  • Students can reply to the email sent by an Intelligent Agent. In Settings, you are able to fill in a name and email address of the sender
  • In View History, it is possible to see to whom the emails are sent

Below, an example situation in which an Intelligent Agent is used. All steps to take when creating an intelligent agent can be found in the article How to create an Intelligent Agent.

Example: No course activity

• Why: to see which students are not active in the course
• When: weekly check (or less often)
• How: set as criteria the number of inactivity days after which the student will receive a notification
• What: this intelligent agent will send an email to you or the student when he/she has not accessed the course for the set time period

Now you know more about what is an Intelligent Agent!