Author Archives: Susan Degen

Winterim and Spring 2014 D2L Course Requests Now Open

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Desire2Learn @ UW-WWinterim and Spring 2014 D2L course requests are available now through the D2L Course Request application.

As a reminder, course requests for a semester become available on the first day of priority registration for students, and course shells for D2L need to be requested for every semester you plan on using D2L.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact UW-W D2L Support.

Desire2Learn Service Update (10/24)

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Desire2Learn LogoThis morning, Thursday, October 24th, Desire2Learn Inc. deployed Service Pack 14 to our D2L learning environment.

The following fixes were included in the service pack:

  • Performance improvements were made in the Email address book to make it quicker at selecting recipients and adding them to an email.
  • Quicklinks in notifications generated by News items now correctly navigate to each quicklink item.

A hotfix was also applied during this update that corrects the issue that was blocking users from adding participants with the “batch file” option. If you’ve previously used this option but were unable to do so during this semester, you should be able to do so now.

Mixed content handling in Firefox and Chrome is still an issue, especially for courses that have links to external resources. We wrote about this previously on our blog, and you can view that post for more information.

As a reminder, the Notifications feature has been enabled starting this semester. This feature allows users to receive notifications on several different tools to either their email or to their phone. For more information, please see our blog post on the Notifications feature.

Also, for interested faculty and staff, the D2L Ignite Regional User Forum is still accepting registrations. For more information on the conference and a link to the registration, please see this blog post.

If you have any questions or concerns about the service pack updates, please contact UW-W D2L Support.

Email and SMS Notifications Available in D2L

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Starting this Fall 2013 semester, email and SMS notifications have been enabled for Desire2Learn.

You can receive instant notifications to your email or phone for several tools, including Discussions, Dropbox, Grades, News, and Quizzes, or receive a daily summary of activity. You can also exclude specific courses from your notification options.

To set up or change your Notification settings, after logging into D2L, you can click on either the Tools menu or your name in the minibar (as seen in the screenshot below), and select the Notifications option.

Screenshot of Notifications in the minibar

Also note, that if you use the mobile notifications, do not include the “1” preceding the area code in your phone number.

For more directions on setting up your notifications, please see this page of the D2L user guide. If you have any questions or need additional assistance, please contact UW-W D2L Support.

Copying Links Out of OWA

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In the Outlook Web Application (OWA), emails that include a hyperlink are automatically rewritten to include a redirect. The reason OWA adds the redirect is to keep your information, such as user name and subject line of an email, from being inferred from the URL.

When you copy any of the links out of OWA, they will include the redirect. This can be problematic if you intend to share or use this URL with others, either in another email or in Desire2Learn (D2L). Because the redirect is specific the OWA, other users will not be able to access the original link.

There isn’t an easy, catch-all solution to avoiding this depending on how the link is formatted in the email. For example, if the hyperlinked text is the same as the intended link destination (the URL is “http://www.google.com” and the text is also “http://www.google.com”), you can simply copy the text to get the correct URL. If the hyperlink text is just text (e.g., the URL is “http://www.uww.edu” and the text is “UW-W Homepage”), the easiest way to get the correct URL is to click the link and then copy the URL out of the browser’s address bar. Also, if available, using the Microsoft Outlook desktop program to access emails and copy out links will avoid this issue altogether.

If you have any questions about or need assistance with copying links out of an email in OWA and into D2L, please contact UW-W D2L Support.

Changes to D2L Copy Components Tool

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With the latest service packs applied to the D2L Learning Environment, there were a few changes made to the copy function in the Import/Export/Copy Components tool.

Instead of using a drop-down menu to select the “source” course for the copy function, an new Search for offering function has taken it’s place. This allows you to easily select or search for a particular course that you would like to copy from.

For more detailed directions on how to copy components from a D2L course, please see the Copy Components wiki page. In addition to those written instructions, a video tutorial is also available below:

If you have any questions about the changes or using this tool, please contact UW-W D2L Support.

Desire2Learn Service Update (8/20)

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This morning, Tuesday, August 20th, Desire2Learn Inc. deployed Service Pack 12 and 13 to our D2L learning environment.

Two of the biggest changes made to the Learning Environment with these service packs include a course search function in the Copy Components tool and better functionality with the document viewer within the Dropbox tool. In addition to the updates, the Notifications feature has been re-enabled for users. Further information will be provided for Notifications and the Copy Components changes in future blog posts, but updated instructions on how to copy using the Copy Components tool are available on the Copy Components wiki page.

Some of the issues addressed in the document viewer withing the Dropbox tool are as follows:

  • Presentation (.pptx) files edited within Google Docs were not viewable.
  • Some documents had images cut off.
  • Chinese characters did not display correctly.
  • MS Word documents with many pages failed to convert.
  • Document viewer did not display graphs.
  • Some MS Word 2013 documents were not viewable.
  • Some right-to-left MS Word documents did not convert properly.

Additional fixes to tools in these service packs are as follows:

Dropbox: Dropbox submission files now display in correct order after sorting files alphabetically by users’ first name and last name.

Discussions

  • Editing a pinned Discussion post no longer unpins the post.
  • Instructors can now receive notifications for discussion topics that have release condition associations.

Grades

  • Formula grade items now calculate correctly when using “If” conditions with floating point numbers.
  • Updating dropbox submission feedback for a grade item now correctly updates the feedback text in Grades and in the User Progress Grades Progress report

Competencies

  • To address slower page loads when the competency tree is very large and complex, and has many root nodes, an alternative option is now provided to default to a search view, rather than the tree view.
  • An error no longer occurs when deleting a grade item associated with an activity that in turn, is associated with a learning objective.
  • A performance improvement was made to prevent timeouts from occurring during competency evaluation of learning objectives associated to quizzes.

HTML Editor

  • Tables in News items now display their grid lines correctly. Additionally, setting the cell padding for the table also displays correctly. Note, that the display of table rows and padding might appear different when viewing them on older pages versus newer pages.
  • Text in a table now aligns in published content the same way it appears in a preview when using the HTML Editor.

Homepages: Gradients for widget titles now displays in Internet Explorer. Gradients for homepage backgrounds are no longer displayed in Internet Explorer 8 and 9 due to limited browser support for gradients and background opacity.

Web Framework: On full screen pages, the background color now covers the full width of the main screen.

If you have any questions or concerns about this service pack and the tools updates, please contact UW-W D2L Support.

 

Desire2Learn Service Update (6/27)

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Desire2Learn logoThis morning, Thursday, June 27th, Desire2Learn Inc. deployed Service Pack 11 to our D2L learning environment.

Included fixes to tools in this service pack are as follows:

Quizzes: If a quiz’s Submission View is restricted to only be viewed by users who achieve a score between 0-100%, users who achieve 100% can now also access the Submission View correctly.

Calendar: Application changes were made to improve the performance of the Calendar tool.

Grades: If students have names that contain apostrophes (‘), it is now possible to correctly access their quiz attempts and dropbox folder submissions from grade book in Grades.

Discussions: New topics are no longer created in the wrong forum when users create group-restricted discussion topics from “Group Restrictions” in Discussions.

Dropbox: A performance improvement was made to reduce database I/O consumption when generating Notifications for “Dropbox – dropbox folder due date or end date is 2 days away” and “Quizzes – quiz end date is 2 days away”.

Content Browser: Titles and icons in the Content Browser widget are now restored to their original layout and no longer have alignment issues.

If you have any questions or concerns about this service pack and the tools updates, please contact UW-W D2L Support.