User Progress

Desire2Learn automatically records a variety of data on activity associated with its various tools. In general, this data can be accessed from three areas:

1. The tool itself (e.g., View Reports for the Content tool)
2. Each student's View Progress link from the Classlist
3. The View User Progress link on the Edit Course page

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]

Color Codes Used on CRC Course Offerings

Here are the color codes to match the defaults in CRC's course offerings:

Color	Code	Where Used
	#1B207E	Navbar text, widget titlebar, CRC logo
	#7097FC	Bottom of page background
	#C14E01	Navbar links (hover color)
	#C9D1DE	Background behind navbar links
	#E2E7EE	Background behind course homepage and name
	#FE7C17	CRC logo, border at bottom of navbar

Link to a Course File from the Navbar

You can link to a course file directly from the navbar. This is a useful way to make an important file to students always available, no matter where they are inside your course offering.

The file must first be in your Manage Files area. If you uploaded it as a content topic, it is already there. If not, here are the steps:

1. Go to Edit Course and then the Manage Files page.
2. Click the upload button to select a file from your local computer to add to this page.

Once a file is in your Manage Files area, you can add a link to it on the navbar:

1. Go to Edit Course and then the Navigation page.
2. Click the name of the currently active navbar for your course. Note: The default active navbar for CRC courses is called "CRC_brand_NavShell (Go Hawks!)."
3. Click on the Links tab.
4. Click the Actions button of the navbar (Bottom Left, etc.) where you want to add the file link.

5. Click on Add New Custom Link.

6. Type in the Name you want the navbar to display (this is what students will click on to activate the link).
7. Click on the Insert Quicklink icon.

8. Choose the Category of where the particular file is located, then under Content select file and click the Insert button.
9. Select if you want the link to appear in the Same Window with Navbar, Entire Window or New Window then click the Save and Close button.
10. Refresh your page and the new link should appear in the navbar.

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.

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]

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.

Remove Course Offerings

The process for removing course offerings is the same regardless of its creation process:

• Make the course inactive
  On the Edit Course page, select Course Offering Information, uncheck the box indicating the course is active, and click Save.
• Change your role within the course to Student
  On the Classlist page, select your name, click the Change enrollment button, change your role to Student on the following page, and click Save.

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.

Restore My Edit Course Link

If you remove the Edit Course link from your navbar, you might think you have lost the ability to access the tools linked from that page. You can restore this link by clicking on the pencil icon in the upper-left corner of the navbar.

Click this to go to the edit navbar page, and you can restore the Edit Course link to any of the navbar locations. (The default location for Edit Course is the bottom right.)

The Edit Course link is not visible to student users enrolled in your course.