Author Archives: Shane Degen

Winterim D2L Scheduled Maintenance

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Technologists at DoIT in Madison will be performing scheduled infrastructure maintenance impacting Desire2Learn on four occasions in the coming month.  It is worth noting that three of these are during regular maintenance windows, while the other is on a Sunday morning.  During these times, Desire2Learn will not be available.  Access will be restored as soon as possible after the work has been completed.

  • Thursday, December 28; 5:00am-7:00am (regular maintenance window)
  • Thursday, January 4; 5:00am-7:00am (regular maintenance window)
  • Thursday, January 11; 5:00am-7:00am (regular maintenance window)
  • Sunday, January 7, 2018; 8:00am-12:00pm

As you are working on and preparing your Winterim courses, please adjust your course assignments and due dates accordingly.

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

D2L eGrading Process Available for Fall 2017

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The D2L eGrading process is now available for the Fall 2017 semester. This process allows instructors to transfer final grades from their Desire2Learn Gradebook directly to their WINS Grade Roster.

If you prefer step by step documentation, that can be found at: WINS eGrading Overview.

If you have any questions or concerns with the eGrading process, please contact UW-W Desire2Learn Support.

Copying and Cleaning Content into your New Course

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Now that Winter 2018 and Spring 2018 course requests are available, you are likely looking to populate your new courses with materials you have already created and compiled. The Copy Components feature in D2L allows instructors to replicate the course components from one course offering to another. These include all commonly used components such as — news, content, files, gradebook structure, quizzes/question library, discussion group structure, and more. You can use this tool to easily re-use relevant content from one D2L course offering to another.

For written instructions to help copy, please visit the D2L Copy Components documentation we have available. Alternately, you can also watch a video walkthrough of the process.

After copying materials into your new course, you may be interested in cleaning up some unnecessary things.  Some areas have a habit of bulking up over time, and we recommend checking them for unused items.

  1. Content, Dropbox, Grades, and Discussions areas are things you probably clean up every semester.
  2. The Groups tool will transfer over course sections from previous semesters.  Clean out Groups from previous years to make your relevant Groups easier to find.
  3. News items often include specific dates, time sensitive information, or mention of Content items that may or may not be around anymore.  Keep the ones that are still relevant, but delete the expired ones that you don’t intend on reworking each semester.
  4. In the Quizzes area, the Question Library is a great resource to house questions you think you might use again in the future. It is also a chronic hiding place of questions instructors deemed unsuitable for use in their classes.
  5. It is not uncommon for Instructors to build Surveys for a specific purpose, and only use them one semester.
  6. The Manage Files area houses everything you have ever uploaded to content.  If there are old documents, PDFs, PowerPoints that you don’t need you can remove them by going through the Manage Files area.

If you have any questions regarding the copy components tool or would like assistance cleaning up your course, please contact UW-W D2L Support.

 

Winterim 2018 and Spring 2018 D2L Course Requests

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Winterim 2018 and Spring 2018 D2L course requests will soon be available in the D2L Course Request Application.

  • Winterim 2018 requests can be placed starting Monday November 6th.
  • Spring 2018 requests can be placed starting Monday November 13th.

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

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

Call for Proposals: LTDC Virtual Showcase 2018

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The UW System Learning Technology Development Council (LTDC) Virtual Showcase 2018 will be held April 3-4, 2018. Instructors and professional staff – please consider joining them by submitting a proposal to present or facilitate by November 30, 2017! Proposals may be submitted at the following website: Virtual Showcase 2018

changes moving forward

This virtual conference offers an opportunity for sharing your successes and challenges in teaching with technology. This conference will provide you with the opportunity to virtually connect with other practitioners and requires neither travel expense nor a significant time commitment.

Presentations during concurrent sessions will be approximately 30 minutes in length with 15 min Q&A following. Proposals are sought in the following five general categories:

  • Digital Learning Environment
  • Teaching & Learning Best Practices
  • How-to & Resources
  • Student Engagement
  • Technology

We look forward to learning more about your teaching and learning experiences!  If you have any questions contact the Learning Technology Center.

Desire2Learn 10.7 Upgrade – What Happened This Summer?

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There was an upgrade to Desire2Learn on Thursday, June 15th and if you weren’t teaching you may have missed it. D2L received a handful of new features, and fixed a slew of outstanding issues.  We are excited to share all of these with you.

This post will highlight a few items we believe are the most impactful, but a more complete “What’s New?“ document is available here: https://spaces.uww.edu/x/TwF5

Additional Functionality for Creating Group Discussions
When creating a new Discussion Topic, there is now a “Topic Type” option.  This adds the ability to create a Group or Section topic that is available to everyone, but only allows students to see threads created by users in their same group or section.

Updated Quiz Question Authoring ExperienceNew quiz expereance
A visual redesign of the Quizzes tool to improve the usability of creating and editing Multiple Choice, True/False, Short Answer, and Long Answer questions. Instructors are able to opt out of the new change individually.

Turnitin / GradeMark Enhancements
Dates are now correctly set in the Turnitin side to avoid the “Error communicating with Turnitin” error.
When you copy Turnitin-enabled folders into another course, you can now enable all folders at once.

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

Saturday Learning Technology Center Instructional Development Event

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The LTC is offering an all day Saturday event focusing on instructional development! The event kicks off with D2L support and training in the morning, and then continues in the afternoon with classroom technology exploration.

Join us as early as 8:00am for D2L support focused on us directly supporting you and your specific D2L needs.  Get all of your questions answered, and stay until your problems are solved!

After lunch, feel free to join us as we head out to a real classroom on campus and play with the tools you will have available to you in your instructional space.

Saturday Event Schedule
*sessions subject to change based on instructor needs.

8:00 – 10:00am Staff available for 1:1 appointments with instructors
10:00 – Noon D2L basics help
1:00 – 2:00pm Staff available for 1:1 appointments with instructors
2:00 – 3:00pm Classroom technology training
3:00 – 4:00pm Staff available for 1:1 appointments with instructors

 

Register here!
If you have additional questions or concerns regarding this event,  please contact the UW-W Learning Technology Center.

Student Engagement Workshop Series

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Chalkboard and cell phone

The Learning Technology Center and LEARN Center are pleased to co-sponsor a 3-part workshop series focused on student engagement, based on issues identified by faculty in recent instructor support surveys. This series will focus on current opportunities and challenges relating to student engagement, in both face-to-face and online courses.

By taking part in the Student Engagement Workshops Series, instructors will be able to:

  • Examine different research-supported approaches to student engagement
  • Compare and contrast different methods of engaging students across different modalities
  • Practice using different technologies and techniques to engage students

Attendance at all 3 sessions is encouraged, but not mandatory.  For additional information, check our signups.

If you have any questions about these workshops, please contact Sally Lange at learn@uww.edu or (262) 472-5242.