My 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 offerings appear, the user will need to use the course offering search. All course offerings that a user is enrolled in and can see are always available via the "Select a course..." drop-down menu on the minibar.

Using the Role Select for My Courses

Some users are enrolled in course offerings in different roles. For example, at CRC all of the faculty are enrolled as Member in a course offering used to conduct elections for the academic senate. Those who also use D2L for teaching will therefore also be enrolled as Instructor in other course offerings. Another example is the Prior Term role, which instructors are encouraged to use so that they can de-clutter their homepages.

In the My Courses widget, only course offerings for one role display at a time. If you have different roles in different course offerings, you can select another role by clicking on the Role select menu and choosing another role. The system remembers your role from the most recent course offering you visited. It is easy to forget that you last visited a course offering in which you are enrolled as Prior Term, for example, and then return to your homepage and wonder where your current-term (Instructor) course offerings are.

If you only have one role that you are using (this applies to most students), then the Role select menu does not appear.

Managing My Courses

Once a user's enrollment exceeds 50 courses with the same role, Desire2Learn no longer can safely display all of them on a single page and the "Last 10 accessed courses" box appears. You can search for a course by name and term code. This is the four-digit code that identifies a term and is part of the course offering code. Here is the syntax:

1. First digit is always a 1
2. Second third digits are the last two digits of the calendar year
3. Fourth digit is 3 for spring, 6 for summer, and 9 for fall.

For example, the term code for summer 2013 is 1136. Note that the term code is not included in the course offering code for a developmental course offering. Those include the string _dev_, so you could type that to find all of your development course offerings.

You can also move any of your course offerings to another tab in your My Courses widget by changing your role within each course offering. Desire2Learn creates a new tab in this widget for each role. This is helpful also if you  no longer want to see course offerings from previous terms (think of it as "de-cluttering" the widget). There is a role called "Prior Term" that has the same privileges as the Instructor role. [VIDEO DEMO]

Links to Course Offerings Disappear

If a link to a course offering does not appear on your homepage, it is possible that part of the course organization menu has been collapsed. This video shows how to use the collapse/expand button to manage the appearance of links to course offerings.