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Desire2Learn Upgrade

DePaul’s Learning Management System (Desire2Learn, otherwise known as D2L) was upgraded to a newer version. FITS has sent out notification of the upgrades new enhancements (which I repeat here):

Email Notifications from Discussions
For those of you who missed this feature from Blackboard you will be excited to know that you can now subscribe to discussions in D2L and get new notifications sent directly to your email.

subscribeemail

To enable, simply click Subscribe to Topic after clicking on a topic heading. As an added convenience you get to decide how often you receive notification – e.g. once a day, upon posting, etc.

Course Names not Numbers
DePaul heard from many faculty that course numbers were confusing and hard to navigate so a change was made to show the PeopleSoft Course name on the My Homepage. For example, an accounting professor will now see Financial Accounting as their course offering name instead of Accounting 500. Course numbers and course names will now appear inside the course as part of the Default Navigation (see below for an example).

coursename

Attendance Tool
Need a convenient way to keep attendance for your class? The Attendance tool is now easily accessible in D2L. Use of this tool allows you to keep track of students who are present, absent, excused or late. Teaching Commons has more information on how to use the tool.

New Navigation Bars Available
DePaul has
listened to feedback and have heard from faculty and staff that the default course navigation includes more links than they really need or not the ones that they want. To make things easier faculty can now pick from 2 additional navigation bars shared from the University.

  1. Basic Navigation Bar: The basic navigation bar comes populated with links to Content, Classlist, Grades, and Attendance
  2. Collaboration Navigation Bar: This navigation bar comes populated with all the links in the Course Default as well as links to Chat and Groups for those instructors wanting to integrate collaborative tools in their classes

To use either of these navigation bars (in place of the Course Default), click on Edit Course and then Navigation and then Change. For more information about Navigation bars, including how to make your own, can be found here.

When you are ready for your students to view your course content, please remember to make your course active so your students have access to it. Here is a link to the documentation on making your course active.

For those of you working on building your course, there are a number of open labs scheduled on both the Loop and Lincoln Park campuses. These labs are a fantastic way to build your course with support. Simply reserve your spot and bring your course materials (and questions) and get help from one of the FITS trainers. Additional training sessions on Collaboration, Quizzes, Assessments and Personalization have also been scheduled. For dates and times as well as registration information please go here.

And don’t forget that print documentation and video tutorials can be found here. In particular you may find the Desire2Learn: Short, Short Version a good starting place.

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