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.

Broken Insert Stuff for YouTube

YouTube changed its settings for allowing other web services to search and embed videos, and as a result we are currently unable to use the YouTube tool in the Insert Stuff dialog. D2L is working on a fix but it will not be in place before spring 2016.

The workaround is to copy the embed code from YouTube's page and paste that into the Enter Embed Code tool in the Insert Stuff dialog. Here are the steps:

1. On the web page for a video in YouTube, click the Share link and then Embed.
2. The embed code is automatically selected, so you can copy it.
3. In D2L, click the Insert Stuff button in the toolbar for a text box (news item, content file, etc.).
4. Choose the Enter Embed Code tool and paste your copied embed code.
5. Click the Next button to preview and then the Insert button.

Audio Files and D2L

Like video, music and audio files are best made available via a streaming media server and not uploaded directly to a D2L course offering. They can then be embedded directly into a D2L web page (including quiz questions and answers, content files, news items, and grade feedback). A good option is 3C Media Solutions.

D2L Email, Outlook, and Regular Effective Contact

Email is one of the tools that instructors can use to conduct regular effective contact with students in their online classes, but it can be harder to document the use of that tool for that purpose as emails sent from inside D2L are not easily tracked. A rule in Outlook as well as the consistent use of keywords in emails sent from inside D2L can make this tracking easier.

From where did students complete a quiz?

You may want to know from where students completed a quiz, and you can get some of this information through the show IP address option on the Quizzes Event Log page. To see this, view the quiz attempt and click on the link to the Quizzes Event Log.

This page show the time the quiz attempt began, when each question was saved, and when the quiz was completed. There is a check box to show the IP address for these events.

What do the numbers mean? Each computer, cell phone, or tablet that connects to the internet has a unique address, and you might be able to use various web pages to look up which service provider has that number and where that connection is located. It does not point out the street address for that connection. The block of numbers that begin 165.196.x.x are computers that are on the Los Rios network, so you can be confident that any events that took place at an IP address that begins 165.196 were done using a Los Rios network computer.