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.

Character limit for various text fields

The various identifying fields inside Desire2Learn have limits on the number of characters (including spaces) allowed:

Tool	Item	Field	Limit
News	Item	Headline	400
Content	Module and Topic	Title	150
Discussions	Forum and Topic	Title	250
Discussions	Message	Subject	150
Dropbox	Folder	Name	128
Quizzes	Quiz [Properties and Submission Views and Reports]	Name	256
Quizzes	Quiz [Restrictions]	Password	20
Quizzes	Question Library  [Sections and Random Sections]	Name	256
Quizzes	Question Library [Questions and Information]	Title	256
Quizzes	Question Library [Question Images]	Description	1791
Grades	Grade Item and Category	Name	127
Email	Compose New Message	Subject	256
Attendance	Register and Session	Name	128
Attendance	Session	Description	128
Calendar	Event	Title	128
Chat	Chat	Title	150
Chat	Chat	Message	400
Checklist	Checklist and Item	Name	128
Groups	Category and Group	Name	128
Groups	Group	Code	50

Manage Dates

Adjusting the availability dates for items in a course offering after copying its material over into a different course offering for a new term is easy with the Manage Dates tool. This tool is available on the Edit Course page. [VIDEO DEMO]

Note that this tool does not change the dates for Submission Views for quizzes; those must still be adjusted manually.

Adding a Course Event to Calendar

There are two ways to make a course event in the calendar. One is to click the box "Display in Calendar" when an item has a date restriction set. This makes an event that will appear automatically in the calendar of all students enrolled in that class, and the event will be a link to that particular item.

A second way is to create a new event and make it a course event. At the bottom of the New Event page is an option to choose the Event Access. Choosing the course name makes the event appear automatically in the calendars of all students enrolled in that class. The description can include anything, including quicklinks to course material.

In both cases, the calendar widget on the course home will show a date in bold type if there is a course event on that day.

Renaming Automatic Calendar Events

Thanks to Markus Geissler for sharing this discovery: When you click the check box to "Display in Calendar" when you add a date availability restriction to an item, the name of the event in the calendar is not dynamically updated if you change the name of the original item. To change the event name, you have to uncheck that box, save changes, and then re-check that box.

Inserting a Quicklink to a Calendar Event

Thanks to Mark Springer for sharing this discovery: If you want to add a quicklink to an event in your calendar, select the date of the event and then click the "Refresh Event List" button to see the events for that day in the calendar. You can attach a quicklink to an event that you created manually or to one that was created when you clicked the check box to "Display in Calendar" when you add a date availability restriction to an item.

Calendar Visibility for Course Items

For a course item to be visible in the calendar, the course offering must be active. Events in an inactive course are not visible to enrolled students and enrolled instructors. Instructors can see an item's calendar visibility by editing the item.