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.

Embed SWF Videos

If you are working with small video files (<30MB) that have an .swf extension, the best way to use them is to embed them within a web page inside Desire2Learn. However you create the web page (a new news item, a quiz question or answer, or a new content topic - new file), use the Insert Stuff button on the advanced formatting toolbar to embed the video. In addition to providing the correct embed code automatically so that the video plays without any scripting errors, this also allows you to type instructional context for students to read before they watch the video.

Shared Google Docs and D2L and Internet Explorer

Adding the domains *.losrios.edu and https://docs.google.com to the trusted sites in Internet Explorer will ease the display of shared Google Docs within D2L. However, the shared Google Doc must be set up as a content topic (quicklink) to open in a new browser window. This should not affect when a Google Doc is embedded within a content topic (new file).

Thanks to Jena Bills for sharing her discovery.

Questions Copied from Quizzes to Surveys

Questions can be copied from the Quizzes tool or the Question Library into a survey. If those questions have hints they are retained but are neither editable by the instructor nor visible to students.

Performing Repetitive Tasks

There is not an easy way to do a batch enrollment of the same user in multiple classes. Here is one way to do this efficiently:

• From the D2L homepage, Ctrl+click on each of the course offerings where you want to enroll the same user (this opens each in a new browser tab)
• Get the mouse pointer in position (over the Classlist link) and click on that link, followed immediately by typing Ctrl+Tab to get to the next browser tab, where the mouse pointer is ready to click on that Classlist link (repeat for each browser tab)
• Repeat the above step for each part of the enrollment process (Add participants, add an existing user, type search string, click Search button, click in check box next to result, choose role, choose section, click Enroll Selected Users)

This same process can be used for any time you want to do the same thing across multiple courses or even multiple things in the same course. For example, you might want to make the same changes to the default submission view in all of the quizzes in a course offering. Things to watch out for:

• Not all links in D2L are HTML links. This will not work with JavaScript links. However, any of the navbar links are HTML, so you could open several browser tabs to the Quizzes page in your course offering if you wanted to make the same change to multiple quizzes (or discussion board topics, or dropbox folders, etc.).
• Even if they are all HTML links, not all links will be the same place on different browser tabs. One obvious example for the enrollment task is if the Classlist link is not on the same place of each course offering’s navbar.

[VIDEO DEMO]