Make a Course Offering Active

Are your students complaining they cannot see your course offering on Desire2Learn? It may be that your course offering is not active. By default, all new course offerings are inactive. This means that enrolled instructor users can see them but enrolled student users cannot.

You can easily tell if your course is inactive. On your D2L homepage the word "inactive" appears in italic type following the name of the course. you will see a gray icon next to the course link, this means your course is inactive.

To change this status, take the following steps:

1. Click on the name of the course offering to enter it.
2. Click on the Edit Course link to go to the Course Administration page.
3. Click on the link for Course Offering Information.
4. On the Course Offering Information page, there is a check box to make the course active. Click in this box and then click the Save button at the bottom of the page. Your course offering will be visible immediately to any students whose user accounts are enrolled in your Desire2Learn course offering.

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]

Change Name of Course Offering

Change the name of your course offering by clicking the Edit Course link and then Course Offering Information. The default name includes information collated from PeopleSoft, and you can change or remove anything that is there by default. Remember that students see this name on their home pages.

Request a Development Course Offering

The PeopleSoft site (Faculty Request Interface or FRI) that you use to request course offerings can also be used to request a "development" course offering (i.e., one that is not linked to a class and will therefore not have students enrolled). Here are the steps:

• Log in to the FRI (https://ps.losrios.edu/emp/signon.html)
• Click on the link D2L Development Course Requests - Faculty
• Type a name for your course and click the Tab key Note: The word "Dev" and your last name will appear automatically at the beginning of the course name - remember that you can change the name of a course offering inside Desire2Learn
• Click the Add row button if you want to create more than one development course
• Click the button Submit Request and your development course offerings will be created in Desire2Learn tomorrow morning - at that time, there will be a Y in the column "Site Created"

Inside Desire2Learn, your development course offerings will be associated with a semester called "Training and Development." Any content you create there can be copied into any of your other course offerings.

Has My Course Offering Been Created?

It normally takes one day for requested course offerings to be created, as the process runs early each morning. There are two ways to check if your course offering has been created:

1. Log in to Desire2Learn - you will see the course offering grouped by semester and college
2. Log in to the Faculty Request Interface - you will see a "Y" for the course in the "Site Created" column

Remember that enrollment starts five days before the start date for each class.

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.

Export vs. Copy Content

One of the challenges in selectively copying content from one course offering to another is the requirement to choose the appropriate Course File in addition to the specific Content items in your copy. You may find it more efficient to export the content from your source course offering and then import the content into the destination course offering. It requires you do store the export file on your local computer and therefore does not take place entirely on the server (as the copy function does). However, the export tool can automatically include all related Course Files. Note that the Course Files copied are those that are content topics, so any files that are quicklinked within a content topic are not included. [VIDEO DEMO]

Grouping Classes Together

Employee Self-Service (ESS) includes four different ways to group classes together in the same course offering in Desire2Learn:

1. Cross-listed classes are grouped automatically. When an instructor selects either of the cross-listed classes, the other(s) are also selected. Cross-listed classes cannot be grouped with other classes, so you cannot group your Law and Society (BUS345/SOCSC360) with your Business Law (BUS340). You can group one set of cross-listed classes with another set of cross-listed classes by selecting the same XList number for each class.
2. Science lab/lecture classes are grouped automatically. The instructor who is assigned to the lecture (graded component) is the only one who can request a D2L course offering, and it will include all lab sections within the course offering. ESS only shows the lecture section, and this can be grouped with other classes in a multi or special group.
3. Classes that share the same session, subject, catalog number, and mode can be grouped into a Multi course offering. To do this, change the section under the "Grouping" column to "Multi#" for each class that you want to include in the same course offering. It is important that all of the classes share the same number at the end. This way you can have more than one multi course offering. [VIDEO DEMO]
4. If you want to group classes that do not have the same session, subject, catalog number, and mode (and want to "break" the rules allowed for a multi), use the SpGrp option under "Grouping." Like multi classes, the number at the end must be the sale for all of the classes you want to group into a special grouping. When you select this option, an additional icon appears under the column "Spcl Notes" to add any notes you want your coordinator to see. A special grouping class must be approved by your LMS coordinator before the course offering is created. Coordinators do not know about special grouping requests automatically, so you are encouraged to let your coordinator know about your request.

Whichever option applies to your course offering, students will be grouped automatically into sections based on their enrollment. So each of your lab sections will be a section within your course offering, each class in a multiple-enrollment course offering, etc. You can use release conditions based on section enrollment to limit access to course material based on enrollment. One likely example is your syllabus, which might be different for your classes in a multiple enrollment class. How to do that is explained in another blog entry.

Export/Archive Courses and Grades

Instructors can export courses from Desire2Learn for archive purposes:

• From the Edit Course page, select Import/Export/Copy Components
• Choose the Export Components option and click Next
• Choose the components you want to export and click Next
• Click Next to confirm, then Desire2Learn generates a .zip file for you to download. Click on the link to download your file.
  
  
  

This file can be imported into any Desire2Learn course offering, so this is one way you can share course components with other instructors. Course offerings remain on the server for three years, so they will be immediately accessible to you during that time.

No student data is included in an export, so this is a poor way to archive class grades. To do this, get to the User List page by clicking Enter Grades on the left side of the page. This page has a button to Export Grades. Click this, and on the following page choose options and click Export to CSV. This creates a file to download that provides the quickest access to grade information for this course offering.

Course Creation and Enrollment

You will request a new course offering for each class for each semester that you want to use D2L. That means that no students will be linked to your current course offerings. When the request process is ready (about two months before the term begins), you will be able to request course offerings for your classes. Those will be created  overnight, and then you can copy the components over.

The request process takes place via the Employee Self-Service web page. Online help is available on that page: http://www.losrios.edu/ess [VIDEO DEMO]

The copy process is very easy. Select the Edit Course link on the navbar and then Import/Export/Copy Components. Stick with the default option (Copy Components from another Org Unit) and then click the Next button. You can choose any other course offering you are teaching from the "Existing Offering" pull-down menu. The page will refresh, showing you how many items are associated with each component. There is a check box to "Select All Components" and a Next button. (You can copy only certain components if you wish.)


The copy process takes a short amount of time (a few seconds to a minute or two). Once finished, you can edit the components in the new course offering. Any changes you make in the new course offering will not affect the components in the old (source) course offering.

By default, all new course offerings are not active, which means student users cannot see it. On your My Home page, any inactive courses are indicated by italic text (Inactive). To change a course offering's active status, choose the Edit Course link on the navbar for that course and then Course Offering Information. On that page is a check box to change the course offering's active status. [VIDEO DEMO]

Enrollment happens automatically, beginning seven days before the start date for that class. Students who add your class will appear on your classlist the day following their official enrollment in your class. Student users will also be dropped the day following their official removal from the class. Grade information for dropped students is not removed and will reappear if they are added again to the classlist.