Audio Recordings

Users can record and attach audio files in Dropbox (students and instructors), Discussions (students and instructors), and News (instructors). A Record Audio button appears next to the Add a File button in the Attachments section of the page.

The user must have a sound card and a microphone connected to the computer, so students will not be able to use this from most on-campus computers. The user is prompted to allow Flash to access the system's microphone. Since Flash is required, iOS devices cannot use it. :-(

It records in WAV format, and the limit is 1 minute. The recording is not embedded but is attached to the news item. For discussions, multiple recordings can be added to a single message. For those dropbox folders limited to a single file per submission, the audio recording counts as that file so for those dropbox folders students should be warned not to use the audio recording.

Weighted Grade Categories and Distributed Points

In the weighted grading system, categories now have the option to distribute weights by points across all items in the category. This means that Desire2Learn calculates and adjusts the weights for each item within the category according to the items' points. [VIDEO DEMO]

Grade one question at a time

Quizzes can be graded one question at a time. To do this, click on the grade icon for the quiz, then the Questions tab. Turn on the option for Blind Marking and then click on the question name.

On the page to provide numerical and text feedback are buttons marked "Save" and "Save and Continue." Clicking the Save and Continue button records your grade and advances the page to the next submission.

Note that if the option to set attempts as graded immediately upon completion has been turned on for this quiz, the attempts must be marked as ungraded and then graded again to push feedback for questions graded one a time to the grades page. This can be done by viewing all attempts (click on either the Users or Attempts tab) and clicking the select/unselect icon, the Update button, the select/unselect icon again, and the Update button again.