D2L Migration

Tools and Training

Desire2Learn has essentially the same set of tools as Desire2Learn and so any work you do incorporating learning technologies into your courses for the fall and winter will be transferable to the new system when the time comes. There are many long-sought improvements with D2L, including a more intuitive gradebook and better performance. Later in the summer we will have demonstration courses available, as well as an open house, for people to take a look. We will expend every effort to assist instructors and make the process as painless as possible, with a variety of support mechanisms.

Collaboration Tools
Peer collaboration is a valuable source of learning that significantly enhances the online learning experience. The Learning Environment facilitates interaction and collaboration through group management integrated into a range of advanced learning tools. Group discussion areas enable group members to share knowledge and insight; group lockers provide users with a shared workspace; group dropbox folders make it easy to submit and receive feedback on group assignments.

Discussions
Course discussion areas offer a valuable forum for user interaction. The discussion tool enables users to rate one another’s message postings, offering participation incentives and empowering users to call out key contributions. Discussions can be graded or using the Learning Environment’s industry-leading competencies tool, assessed using rubrics. In addition, individual topics can be locked to end a discussion without taking away a valuable resource, and moderate discussions to ensure a positive learning atmosphere.

Locker
The locker tool provides storage space inside the Learning Environment, enabling access their files from any computer, from any location. Group lockers enable users to easily share files with group members and collaborate on projects.

Dropbox
The dropbox provides a convenient way to submit individual and group assignments from a computer or directly from the locker tool. Submissions can be managed, feedback can be provided and assignments can be graded or assessed using rubrics, all from a single location. Setting assignment due dates, providing extensions when needed, and evaluating group assignments is made easy through the dropbox.

Blog
The Learning Environment provides a safe atmosphere for users to communicate with peers and reflect on learning and life experiences by developing a blog. Users can read their peers’ blogs, leave comments, and maintain a list of favorite blogs. Flexible configuration options empower you to choose whether your users’ blogs are available inside and outside your institution. Blogs can also be published as RSS feeds.

Measurement and Assessment Tools
Assessment plays a critical role in the online learning process. Monitoring a student’s understanding and progress within the subject in person is often difficult. The Learning Environment includes an unparalleled suite of measurement and assessment tools to evaluate user outcomes and perform formative and summative evaluations of the effectiveness of instructional programs.

Competencies
Competencies provide standardized assessment across courses and allow your organization to formalize program or degree requirements for certification or accreditation. The Learning Environment facilitates easy tracking of user progress by leveraging the organizational structure to share competencies across multiple courses. Competencies and learning objectives can be assessed at the organization, program or course level through quizzes, dropbox assignments (individual or group), discussions, grades, and surveys. The results can also be manually entered to meet any type of assessment appropriate to your institution. The competencies tool offers the power and flexibility to model competencies of any degree of complexity with an intuitive setup wizard.

Rubrics
Rubrics enable your organization to define transparent assessment criteria and create structured feedback. The Learning Environment supports qualitative and quantitative rubrics with unlimited achievement levels, empowering you to create assessment mechanisms to any degree of precision. You can use rubrics to manually or automatically evaluate performance on activities that are linked to competencies and learning objectives through a variety of course tools including quizzes, dropbox assignments, and discussions.

Quizzes
Users can be assessed using the quizzing tool, which includes a complete toolkit of question styles that can be adapted to any pedagogy. Quiz questions can be created with varying difficulty and randomized within a quiz. The consolidated question library empowers you to store questions in a common location where they can easily be shared across quizzes or reused in self assessments and surveys. To ensure quality, you can preview quizzes before releasing them. Share quizzes across multiple courses and compare outcomes between classes by leveraging your organizational structure.
quizzes

Self-Assessment
The self assessment tool enables users to test their comprehension of course material and receive immediate feedback. Self assessments support the full range of questions available in quizzes and can be quickly assembled by reusing questions from the consolidated question library shared with the quizzing tool.

Survey
Capture valuable course or organization-wide feedback from your user community with the survey tool. The survey tool supports anonymous responses to ensure accurate and honest feedback, integration with course content, and a comprehensive range of standard question types, combined with the ability to email custom invitations and specify the number of responses. Use the tool’s convenient built-in reports and statistics to analyze results, or export data to an external system for advanced analysis.

Reporting
The Learning Environment’s powerful reporting features put a world of data at your fingertips. Choose from a diverse array of graph options (bar, line, etc.) and output settings to help identify important patterns from a range of data sets. System-level reports enable site administrators to monitor system performance, usage, user enrolment, logins and other vital data to ensure the system operates at peak efficiency. Course-level reports integrated into Learning Environment tools empower staff to assess the effectiveness of their instructional materials and monitor use of course content, participation in discussions, performance on quizzes, and a variety of additional activities.

Course Management Tools
Manage courses like never before! The powerful, robust, and easy-to-use toolset found in the Learning Environment empowers your institution to design, develop, and deliver effective courses where users can achieve results. The extensive functionality enables you to decide to what extent users will be assessed and monitored, and the seamless integration between the tools ensures your time is used efficiently.

Gradebook
The Learning Environment gradebook enables novice users to get started quickly, while offering the powerful feature set required to support the demands of the most advanced users. The setup wizard streamlines the process of configuring the gradebook and provides flexible setup options that empower instructors to implement the grading system that best works for their individual course. To save time, you can enter grades in a simple spreadsheet-style interface or import grades from Microsoft Excel. The gradebook is also integrated with the competency framework, consolidating the two assessment mechanisms and expanding the range of course activities that can be tied to learner competencies.

Classlist
The classlist tool enables you to manually register learners in their course or quickly import multiple users from a text file. This tool also provides a valuable means of tracking user progress through the course: students can be identified who are falling behind and an early intervention can happen to ensure learner success. Moreover, the classlist assists in the formation of an online learning community by enabling users to view a listing of their peers and links to peer profiles, homepages, shared files, and other resources.

Email
The Learning Environment includes a fully-featured email system that your institutions can configure for internal-only or internal and external messaging, or integrate with any existing IMAP system including Microsoft Exchange, Groupwise, and Sun iPlanet. The email tool automatically associates messages and contacts with course offerings, and facilitates continuous communication with the rest of a user’s experience.

Schedule
The schedule tool provides an integrated calendar to help users stay on top of coursework and upcoming deadlines. You can automatically add important dates to users’ calendars through a variety of course tools and site administrators can add system-wide events to inform users of scheduled downtime, exam periods and other important events.

ePortfolio
The Desire2Learn ePortfolio is a powerful, yet intuitive platform for collecting, organizing, reflecting, and presenting learning artifacts. Presenting materials for assignments, working on group projects, resume creation and job seeking are made easy through flexible and diverse design and sharing options.

LiveRoom
Synchronous chat, whiteboard/canvas, presentation technology designed to assist in real-time collaboration. By offering real-time communication tools, all users can benefit from connecting and collaborating with one another.

Learning Repository
The Desire2Learn Learning Repository (LOR) is the first fully integrated standards-based LOR enabling the storing, tagging, searching and reusing of learning objects. The Desire2Learn Learning Repository empowers organizations to effectively capture, reuse and manage content across multiple programs, courses and sections.

source: http://www.desire2learn.com