Create a Single News Feed for Multiple Course Offerings

Desire2Learn does not have a way to create a single News item and share that with all of an instructor's course offerings. Instructors therefore have to create an item in each course offering or create it once and then copy it into each course offering. A workaround is to use a custom widget with a Twitter feed. The widget would have to be added to each course offering but it would allow an instructor to post something once (in Twitter) and have that appear many places (inside the Twitter widget on each course offering's homepage). The challenge will be for us to fit important information into fewer than 140 characters. ;-)

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]

Edit the Course Homepage and Create a Custom Widget

The default homepage for course offerings can be edited. Widgets can be removed and added, and custom widgets can be created.

Course Homepage and the Course Selector

The Desire2Learn course homepage includes several widgets that provide useful information to students and instructors. The persistent minibar allows easy navigation between course offerings and can be organized to make it more efficient.

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.

Use Google Docs to Create an Image Rotator

You can use a Google Slides presentation to create an image rotator for your course. For example, your students might submit photos to you and you want them to be displayed on your course homepage.

External Links on the Course Homepage

The bookmarks in D2L are generated by students as they opt to bookmark content topics. They are created individually, so each student can decide what to add to their Bookmark widget. Bookmarks cannot be links to outside web pages (though the content topic that they link to can be a quicklink). There are three ways to add a link yourself to the course homepage:

1. Create a News item and include a quicklink in the item's content. If you do not set any calendar restrictions on the item and keep it at the top of your news widget, it will always be visible.
2. Create a custom widget and add to your course homepage.
3. Create a custom navbar link. This has the advantage of always being visible, no matter where students are in your course.