Assignments Get a Button, Quizzes Get a Workaround: Brightspace's Missing-Work Tools, Audited by Activity Type
Here is a thing most Brightspace teachers discover by accident, usually in a hurry, usually the night before a deadline.
Open an assignment, and there is a button that says Email Users Without Submission. One click, and Brightspace drops every non-submitter into the BCC line of a fresh email. It is the single most useful button in the product.
Open a quiz and look for the same button. It isn't there. Open a discussion topic and look for it. Also not there.
That asymmetry isn't a setting your administrator forgot to switch on, and it isn't a permissions problem. It's how Brightspace is built. This article maps exactly where the coverage starts and stops across the four tools teachers are usually pointed at — Email Users Without Submission, Quick Eval, Class Progress, and Intelligent Agents — for the three activity types that actually generate missing work: assignments, quizzes, and discussions.
The four tools, and what each is actually for
Email Users Without Submission is a button on an assignment's submissions page. It identifies everyone with no submission and opens an email addressed to them, with addresses on the BCC line so students can't see each other. It is scoped to one assignment, and it exists only for assignments.
Quick Eval is a cross-course marking queue. D2L describes it as a single location to view all learner submissions awaiting evaluation, drawn from assignments, quizzes, and discussions. It has a Submissions view (organised by student) and an Activities view (organised by activity).
Class Progress is a per-course dashboard showing each learner as a row against progress indicators — available indicators include Assignment Submissions, Quiz Performance, Discussion Participation, Grades, Content Completed, Login History, and several more, though only four can display at once. Clicking any row opens that individual's User Progress page.
Intelligent Agents is the automation engine. You define criteria — login activity, course activity, or a release condition — pick a schedule, and Brightspace emails everyone who matches when it runs. Release conditions can be negated, which is what makes "has not submitted" targetable.
The coverage matrix
The question each column answers is narrow and specific: can this tool tell me who has not done this thing, and let me contact them?
| Tool | Assignments | Quizzes | Discussions |
|---|---|---|---|
| Email Users Without Submission | Yes — one click | No equivalent | No equivalent |
| Quick Eval | Submissions only | Submissions only | Submissions only |
| Class Progress | Aggregate indicator | Aggregate indicator | Aggregate indicator |
| Intelligent Agents | Yes — via setup | Yes — via setup | Yes — via setup |
Two rows in that table deserve explaining, because both are easy to misread in opposite directions.
Why Quick Eval can't answer "who's missing"
Quick Eval looks like the answer. It covers all three activity types, it works across every course you teach, and it lives one click from the minibar. Teachers are pointed at it constantly.
But read D2L's description of it closely: it lists learner submissions awaiting evaluation. Everything in Quick Eval is work that exists. A student who submitted nothing has produced nothing to evaluate, so they generate no row — they are invisible by construction, not by oversight.
This is worth stating plainly because the failure mode is quiet. Quick Eval showing an empty queue for an assignment does not mean everyone is done. It means everyone who submitted has been marked. Those are very different facts, and the tool presents the first one in a way that reads like the second.
Class Progress has a milder version of the same problem in reverse. It genuinely does track assignment submissions, quiz performance, and discussion participation per learner — but as progress indicators across the whole course, not as a filterable answer to "who missed this quiz." It's built for the question "who is falling behind generally," which is a real and useful question, just not the one you have at 9pm on a Thursday.
What you actually do, activity type by activity type
Strip away the tool names and here is the real workflow for each — getting the list, and then contacting the people on it.
| Activity | How you get the list | How you contact them |
|---|---|---|
| Assignment | Open the assignment's submissions page and filter by users without submissions | Email Users Without Submission — one click |
| Quiz | Quizzes → dropdown beside the quiz → Grade → Users tab → Show Search Options → restrict to users who have not taken an attempt → run an empty search | No button — build an Intelligent Agent |
| Discussion | Discussions → Statistics → Users tab, then read the rows with zero threads and zero replies (exportable to a spreadsheet) | No button — build an Intelligent Agent |
Both non-assignment paths do work. That matters, and anyone telling you Brightspace "can't" show quiz non-submitters is wrong — the filter exists, it's just buried five clicks deep inside a grading screen, and it hands you a list rather than an action. The discussion path is worse: Discussion Statistics reports how many threads and replies each learner contributed, so "hasn't posted" is something you infer from a zero rather than something you filter for.
And in both cases the list is where it ends. To actually message those students you leave the page, go to Course Admin, and build a scheduled automation — for one reminder, about one quiz, this week.
This is a known gap, not a misconfiguration
It's worth knowing that this is well-trodden ground in D2L's own community, because the instinct when you can't find a button is to assume you're the problem.
In October 2023, an instructional-support staffer posted asking how a teacher could quickly see who hadn't done a discussion or a quiz, noting they couldn't find the non-submitter filter they were used to from assignments. D2L's answer laid out exactly the two workarounds above — the quiz Grade-page filter, and Discussion Statistics — and then, for contacting anyone, recommended setting up an Intelligent Agent. The thread is one of the most-viewed in its category, which tells you something about how often the question is asked.
In January 2025, an instructor asked the same question more pointedly: why do assignments get a simple button while quizzes require navigating Intelligent Agent setup? The reply, from a community moderator, was that it seemed like a genuine improvement to make — and suggested filing it on D2L's Product Idea Exchange. That's an honest answer, and also a confirmation: as of this writing the quiz-side button doesn't exist, and the official route to one is a feature request.
So if you've been hunting for the quiz equivalent of that assignment button, you can stop. It isn't hidden. It hasn't been built.
Is that actually a problem?
For a lot of teachers, no — and this is where honest auditing means resisting the urge to inflate a gap into a crisis.
If you run a handful of courses, set your quizzes up once a term, and are content with a scheduled Monday-morning reminder going out automatically to whoever hasn't attempted, then Intelligent Agents genuinely solve this. Build the agent, let it run, move on. It's included with Brightspace, it costs nothing, and it handles the repetitive baseline better than any human remembering to check.
The gap bites in three specific situations. Volume: agents are configured per course and per scenario, so the setup cost multiplies across courses and gets re-done each semester. Immediacy: an agent tells you at its next scheduled run, which is the wrong latency when a parent is standing in front of you. Audience: Intelligent Agents email students inside Brightspace, and for younger students the person who needs to know is a parent, on a channel Brightspace doesn't have.
If none of those three describe your week, the built-ins are fine and you should use them. We'd rather say that than pretend otherwise.
Where ClassWatcher fits — and where it doesn't
Since this site is published by its maker, here's the placement, stated as plainly as we can manage.
ClassWatcher is a Chrome extension that scans assignment and quiz pages and shows who hasn't submitted, treating both activity types the same way in a single scan — which is really just declining to reproduce Brightspace's own split. It shows marks alongside the missing-work list and gives one-click access to a student's mark history, and it sends a message to a parent by text or email from that same screen, written by you rather than by a template. Contact history is kept and exports to Google Sheets.
It does not cover discussions. The scan handles assignments and quizzes; discussion participation is not something it reads. If discussions are where your missing work lives, the Discussion Statistics route above is still your answer, and this isn't the tool for that job.
Two other limits worth naming: texting is one-way, so a parent's reply comes back to you by whatever channel they choose rather than into the app, and it's Chrome-only — it runs in desktop Chrome, not Safari or Firefox. Seeing who hasn't submitted is free and needs no account; paid plans start at $8 CAD per month for messaging and exports.
Brightspace's missing-work coverage is genuinely uneven, and the unevenness is real rather than imagined: assignments get a one-click button, quizzes get a filter buried in a grading screen with no way to act on it, and discussions get a statistics table you read sideways. Quick Eval does not close this gap — it only ever shows work that exists, which is the opposite of what you're looking for. Intelligent Agents do close it, for all three activity types, at the cost of per-course setup and scheduled rather than immediate delivery. If that trade is acceptable to you, take it; it's free and it works. If it isn't — because you teach too many sections to configure agents for all of them, or because you need to know now, or because the person who needs the message is a parent with a phone — that's the gap a tool like ours was built to fill, for two of the three activity types above.
Related: ClassWatcher vs. D2L Intelligent Agents goes deeper on the automation trade-off specifically, and Missing Work in Grade 3 vs Grade 11 covers why the right answer changes with the age of the student.