30 March 2011

Instructors know anonymous discussion authors

A discussion forum or topic can be set up to allow authors to post messages anonymously. Other students cannot see the author of anonymous messages but instructors can. Next to the date and time of the post is a blue info icon. Click on that to see the author's name. The first and last name appear but not the username.

Anonymous messages cannot be assessed.

21 March 2011

Local storage for purged course offerings

After three calendar years, official course offerings are purged (permanently deleted) from the Los Rios Desire2Learn server. Official course offerings connected to the summer 2008 term will be purged prior to the beginning of the summer 2011 term, official course offerings from fall 2008 will be purged prior to fall 2011, and so on. While a single-file snapshot of a course offering that includes student data cannot be created, there are ways to store data locally. Local storage includes course components, discussion entries, discussion statistics, grades, quiz attempts, dropbox submissions, and content access statistics. [VIDEO DEMO]

Note that this policy does not affect development course offerings or course offerings used for clubs and organizations.

11 March 2011

Manage Dates

Adjusting the availability dates for items in a course offering after copying its material over into a different course offering for a new term is easy with the Manage Dates tool. This tool is available on the Edit Course page. [VIDEO DEMO]

Note that this tool does not change the dates for Submission Views for quizzes; those must still be adjusted manually.