tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-72491621805986402792024-03-13T08:32:50.482-07:00Greg Desires2BlogThis blog is for faculty and staff using D2L. Type the name of a tool in the Search box to find relevant entries.Professor Beyrerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10921265660401177617noreply@blogger.comBlogger231125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7249162180598640279.post-31646232853816797382018-01-08T13:36:00.001-08:002018-01-08T13:36:03.859-08:00Goodbye D2LToday is the final day that D2L is available for Cosumnes River College, so I am writing a final post in my D2L blog. The calendar year 2017 was a transition year for my college, when our faculty could decide when to start using our new learning management system at a time that worked for them. This blog will no longer be maintained but will not be removed.Professor Beyrerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10921265660401177617noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7249162180598640279.post-20888249744363073212016-08-08T13:50:00.001-07:002017-05-16T11:01:57.671-07:00Create an Export FileIf you are planning a move to a new learning management system, it might become necessary to export course files from D2L so that they can be imported into the new system. Exported files do not expire.
The embedded video demonstrates the following steps:
On the Edit Course page, click on the link to Import / Export / Copy Components.
Select the option to Export Components (make sure the check Professor Beyrerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10921265660401177617noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7249162180598640279.post-35507503195484314722015-12-04T15:28:00.001-08:002015-12-04T15:29:03.803-08:00Use the event log to recover old gradesLet's say you change the points possible for a grade item from a higher value to a lower value. If the grade item is set so scores cannot exceed the points possible, the scores for students will be lowered to that new value. To see the original scores, view the Event Log for that grade item:
On the Manage Grades page, click the action menu for the grade item and click on Enter Grades
On the Professor Beyrerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10921265660401177617noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7249162180598640279.post-4083163793533445352015-11-09T12:43:00.001-08:002015-11-09T12:43:19.320-08:00Options for group discussion instructions
Making topic descriptions visible to students who have the Grid View option turned on for discussions is possible, as it is a setting for Grid View for instructors in a course. Unfortunately there is not a similar option for the forum description.
This becomes a challenge for forums that have multiple topics with the same description. For example, a class might be divided into dyads or triads Professor Beyrerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10921265660401177617noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7249162180598640279.post-47096491888580002752015-10-20T21:01:00.001-07:002015-10-20T21:01:47.335-07:00Excusing a Student's GradeThe option to drop ungraded items can be used to excuse a particular assignment from a student's grade in a class. The assignment still appears on the Grades page, but without a score it will be excluded from the final grade calculation.
The first step is to choose the correct option is chosen on the Calculation Options page, which can be accessed via the Settings link on the Grades page. In Professor Beyrerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10921265660401177617noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7249162180598640279.post-87346549523167069122015-08-25T15:53:00.001-07:002015-08-25T15:53:42.438-07:00One-on-one Groups for Private Conversations inside D2LGroups and discussions tools can be used to set up private conversations between instructors and students inside a D2L course offering.
The video demo shows the following steps:
Create a group category with 1 student per group
Set up the discussion forum and topics for private conversations
Write a thread starter for each topic and post it simultaneously to all private discussion topics
Add Professor Beyrerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10921265660401177617noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7249162180598640279.post-28024275804410064522015-08-24T16:04:00.002-07:002015-08-24T16:04:44.670-07:00The Pearson Widget and D2LIt is now possible to add a widget to connect your course offering in D2L with the MyLab product from Pearson.
The accompanying video shows the following steps:
Edit the homepage for your course offering.
Add the Pearson MyLab widget to one of the panels on your course homepage.
Save and close the edited homepage.
Click the link inside the widget to open a new browser window to connect your Professor Beyrerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10921265660401177617noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7249162180598640279.post-39424104373723588392015-08-12T20:16:00.000-07:002015-08-12T20:16:58.344-07:00My Courses Widget Includes All Roles and Semester
The My Courses widget includes an option to show "All Roles," which means that all course offerings currently visible to that user can be made to appear in that widget. The choice is persistent, so the system will remember the next time the user logs in. The widget also includes an option to limit the listed courses to a particular semester.
If the current choice makes more than 50 course Professor Beyrerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10921265660401177617noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7249162180598640279.post-86352779565818130262015-08-03T10:22:00.001-07:002015-08-03T10:24:34.699-07:00Broken Insert Stuff for YouTubeYouTube changed its settings for allowing other web services to search and embed videos, and as a result we are currently unable to use the YouTube tool in the Insert Stuff dialog. D2L is working on a fix but it will not be in place before spring 2016.
The workaround is to copy the embed code from YouTube's page and paste that into the Enter Embed Code tool in the Insert Stuff dialog. Here are Professor Beyrerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10921265660401177617noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7249162180598640279.post-17873461290253188932015-05-22T12:58:00.002-07:002015-08-26T13:19:07.630-07:00Audio Files and D2LLike video, music and audio files are best made available via a streaming media server and not uploaded directly to a D2L course offering. They can then be embedded directly into a D2L web page (including quiz questions and answers, content files, news items, and grade feedback). A good option is 3C Media Solutions.
The first step is to create an account on the 3C Media Solutions Professor Beyrerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10921265660401177617noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7249162180598640279.post-16861504779050393832015-03-24T17:04:00.000-07:002015-03-24T17:04:50.677-07:00D2L Email, Outlook, and Regular Effective ContactEmail is one of the tools that instructors can use to conduct regular effective contact with students in their online classes, but it can be harder to document the use of that tool for that purpose as emails sent from inside D2L are not easily tracked. A rule in Outlook as well as the consistent use of keywords in emails sent from inside D2L can make this tracking easier.
The following steps areProfessor Beyrerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10921265660401177617noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7249162180598640279.post-51246974330002575442015-02-25T10:21:00.000-08:002015-02-25T10:22:33.661-08:00From where did students complete a quiz?
You may want to know from where students completed a quiz, and you can get some of this information through the show IP address option on the Quizzes Event Log page. To see this, view the quiz attempt and click on the link to the Quizzes Event Log.
This page show the time the quiz attempt began, when each question was saved, and when the quiz was completed. There is a check box to show the IP Professor Beyrerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10921265660401177617noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7249162180598640279.post-10385863506266621472015-01-06T15:12:00.000-08:002015-01-22T11:15:51.325-08:00Bring back the Grid View in discussionAfter listening to feedback from its clients (including Los Rios), D2L has reintroduced Grid View for discussions. This was removed in the update that was applied in Los Rios in summer 2014. Faculty who grade discussion participation were most likely to express concern about the removed feature. Now that it has returned, we are again able to choose personally how we view discussion and can manageProfessor Beyrerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10921265660401177617noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7249162180598640279.post-5922955232454148402015-01-01T10:52:00.000-08:002015-01-01T10:52:18.318-08:00Dropbox Due Date and End DateThere are two "closing" dates that can be set for a dropbox folder:
The Due Date is the date when submissions are due (this is the date that appears automatically in the course calendar)
The End Date is the date when the dropbox folder is no longer accessible to students (this date does not appear in the course calendar)
Both dates are optional, and the system will not allow anProfessor Beyrerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10921265660401177617noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7249162180598640279.post-30269606110984911132014-12-16T10:40:00.001-08:002014-12-16T10:40:11.282-08:00See what a particular student sees on the Grades pageTo see what a particular student sees when that student clicks on the Grades
link, follow these steps:
Go to Grades and click on the Enter Grades link.
Click on the name of a student - this will show you all of the grades for
that student in an editable format, so you could provide feedback for that
student.
Click on the action menu next to the student's name and select Preview - a
new Professor Beyrerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10921265660401177617noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7249162180598640279.post-58436899200849542152014-12-16T08:49:00.001-08:002014-12-16T08:49:50.209-08:00Rubrics, Dropbox, and GradesRubric assessment does not carry through to the grades tool. The score does (and comments can) if you use it as a scoring rubric but not the rubric assessment data. So linking the same rubric to a dropbox folder and its associated grade item *will not* automatically the rubric data from the dropbox folder to the associated grade item. Students can see rubric data but they have to look at the Professor Beyrerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10921265660401177617noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7249162180598640279.post-36196307426604979272014-12-15T12:01:00.001-08:002014-12-15T12:02:06.248-08:00Another Way to Do a Letter Final GradeThough you can create a grade scheme that displays the total points earned as a letter grade instead of a percentage, you may want to allow for another way to allow for the "Smith factor" besides creating additional hidden grade items or changing extant grades as described in this post. You can also create a second grade item that is solely for the course's letter grade.
Here are the steps:
Professor Beyrerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10921265660401177617noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7249162180598640279.post-81440748269326182302014-12-12T10:50:00.001-08:002014-12-12T10:50:24.855-08:00Copying course material and notificationsBe aware that when copying material into a course offering that is active, any users in that course offering who subscribe to notifications will receive notifications as appropriate for the new materials as soon as they appear. This can confuse students if you copy a News item, for example, that includes information about upcoming class events or due dates and you plan on editing those dates Professor Beyrerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10921265660401177617noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7249162180598640279.post-26463409240273612132014-12-02T11:36:00.001-08:002014-12-02T11:36:27.532-08:00Bonus grade items in a weighted grading systemWhen working with a weighted grades system, any bonus items that are not part of another category should be standalone items and not part of a category (i.e., do not create a category that only contains bonus items). This is because each category in a weighted grade system must have a weight. For standalone bonus items, the weight should be the maximum amount of grade weight you want changed if Professor Beyrerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10921265660401177617noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7249162180598640279.post-50878794335628738262014-10-29T14:53:00.002-07:002014-10-29T14:53:35.476-07:00Training videos from D2LEarlier this semester D2L released free all of their training videos on how to use their various tools. The videos are captioned, effective, and listed alphabetically by tool title on the following web page:
https://community.brightspace.com/resources/videosProfessor Beyrerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10921265660401177617noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7249162180598640279.post-47790244604485417852014-10-22T14:42:00.001-07:002014-10-22T14:42:45.779-07:00Attendance and GradesI have found the following steps to be a good way to use the Attendance tool and the Grades tool. Unfortunately data from the Attendance tool cannot be pushed directly to the Grades tool. Here are the steps I take in my face-to-face history class:
Create a grade item that covers multiple class meetings (in my case I do two, one for each half of the semester).
Create attendance registers Professor Beyrerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10921265660401177617noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7249162180598640279.post-33720099776232035452014-09-22T09:36:00.002-07:002014-09-22T09:59:54.591-07:00View Grade for Dropped StudentsThe grades for students that were dropped from a class cannot be exported from a class but are available on a student-by-student basis. To see them, click on the Enrollment Statistics button on the Classlist page.
Then click on the action menu for the student and then View Grades.
The attempts for quizzes and dropbox folders are not visible unless the student's user is enrolled in the Professor Beyrerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10921265660401177617noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7249162180598640279.post-20968524349557742702014-09-18T12:14:00.000-07:002014-09-18T12:14:27.225-07:00Grading DiscussionThe summer 2014 update to D2L introduced some changes to the discussion tool that affect grading. No longer can discussion be graded in context and can only be done by looking at all of the posts for a user via the Topic Score dialog.
The embedded video shows the process that I now use to make things a little bit easier. It involves periodically switching between the Grades and Discussion Professor Beyrerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10921265660401177617noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7249162180598640279.post-90862571206551501452014-09-16T09:23:00.000-07:002014-09-16T09:23:05.659-07:00Grading Matching QuestionsI found a helpful web page that included this succinct explanation of how the grade options work for matching questions:
NOTE: In the Choices section, be sure to choose a grading option.
Equally weighted (Recommended)
The points for the question are divided evenly among all the matches.EXAMPLE: If a matching question worth 5 points has five matches, and a student correctly matches three Professor Beyrerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10921265660401177617noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7249162180598640279.post-1098916129580366622014-09-11T10:40:00.000-07:002014-09-11T10:40:24.333-07:00Exclude a grade item for a particular studentThe points possible for the final grade in a course offering is the same for all students, as it is a sum of the points possible for all items that do not have the box checked to "Exclude from Final Grade Calculation." If you want to exclude a particular grade item for certain students, there are a couple of ways to handle this:
Drop Ungraded Items
On the Calculations Options page is a radio Professor Beyrerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10921265660401177617noreply@blogger.com0