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.

"Grade All" Applies to Withdrawn Users

When using "grade all," the grade override also affects any withdrawn students for the course offering, even though the confirmation dialog only counts currently enrolled students. A withdrawn student who does not have a score for that grade item does not have the "grade all" score applied. This is a problem especially for course offerings that use the option for grading attendance mentioned in another blog entry. 

Using the Role Select for My Courses

Some users are enrolled in course offerings in different roles. For example, at CRC all of the faculty are enrolled as Member in a course offering used to conduct elections for the academic senate. Those who also use D2L for teaching will therefore also be enrolled as Instructor in other course offerings. Another example is the Prior Term role, which instructors are encouraged to use so that they can de-clutter their homepages.

In the My Courses widget, only course offerings for one role display at a time. If you have different roles in different course offerings, you can select another role by clicking on the Role select menu and choosing another role. The system remembers your role from the most recent course offering you visited. It is easy to forget that you last visited a course offering in which you are enrolled as Prior Term, for example, and then return to your homepage and wonder where your current-term (Instructor) course offerings are.

If you only have one role that you are using (this applies to most students), then the Role select menu does not appear.

Class Progress Overview

I found a video on a new tool in Desire2Learn: the Class Progress tool. It is linked from the Edit Course page, and this video from Ralph Mayer at Midlands Technical College does an excellent job covering the tool:

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]