31 January 2012

Managing a Course Offering with the Calendar

You can use the Calendar tool to manage your course offering. Follow this link to learn more.

This comes from Desire2Learn's new section in its Community site called Recipes, which includes documents focused on accomplishing a particular task.

23 January 2012

Embed SWF Videos

If you are working with small video files (<30MB) that have an .swf extension, the best way to use them is to embed them within a web page inside Desire2Learn. However you create the web page (a new news item, a quiz question or answer, or a new content topic - new file), use the Insert Stuff button on the advanced formatting toolbar to embed the video. In addition to providing the correct embed code automatically so that the video plays without any scripting errors, this also allows you to type instructional context for students to read before they watch the video.

20 January 2012

Shared Google Docs and D2L and Internet Explorer

Adding the domains *.losrios.edu and https://docs.google.com to the trusted sites in Internet Explorer will ease the display of shared Google Docs within D2L. However, the shared Google Doc must be set up as a content topic (quicklink) to open in a new browser window. This should not affect when a Google Doc is embedded within a content topic (new file).

Thanks to Jena Bills for sharing her discovery.

04 January 2012

Questions Copied from Quizzes to Surveys

Questions can be copied from the Quizzes tool or the Question Library into a survey. If those questions have hints they are retained but are neither editable by the instructor nor visible to students.