03 November 2011

Performing Repetitive Tasks

There is not an easy way to do a batch enrollment of the same user in multiple classes. Here is one way to do this efficiently:
  • From the D2L homepage, Ctrl+click on each of the course offerings where you want to enroll the same user (this opens each in a new browser tab)
  • Get the mouse pointer in position (over the Classlist link) and click on that link, followed immediately by typing Ctrl+Tab to get to the next browser tab, where the mouse pointer is ready to click on that Classlist link (repeat for each browser tab)
  • Repeat the above step for each part of the enrollment process (Add participants, add an existing user, type search string, click Search button, click in check box next to result, choose role, choose section, click Enroll Selected Users)
This same process can be used for any time you want to do the same thing across multiple courses or even multiple things in the same course. For example, you might want to make the same changes to the default submission view in all of the quizzes in a course offering. Things to watch out for:
  • Not all links in D2L are HTML links. This will not work with JavaScript links. However, any of the navbar links are HTML, so you could open several browser tabs to the Quizzes page in your course offering if you wanted to make the same change to multiple quizzes (or discussion board topics, or dropbox folders, etc.).
  • Even if they are all HTML links, not all links will be the same place on different browser tabs. One obvious example for the enrollment task is if the Classlist link is not on the same place of each course offering’s navbar.