Turnitin services, including Originality Check, Peermark, and Grademark, will be mostly unavailable during a scheduled maintenance period on Saturday, August 15, 2015, from 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM (CT).

During this outage window, students should not submit files to a Dropbox folder that has Turnitin enabled, and instructors should not create new Dropbox folders with Turnitin enabled.

An announcement will appear to users within Turnitin in advance of when the system will be unavailable for the scheduled maintenance.

Instructors are encouraged to modify assignment due dates either before or at least several hours after the scheduled maintenance window. If possible, it’s also advised that instructors change the end date on all Dropbox folders that are utilizing Turnitin so that students won’t inadvertently submit during the outage window.

Please note, any Dropbox folders in a D2L course that are currently NOT utilizing the Turnitin Originality Check, ending before the outage window, or starting after the outage window do NOT have to be altered.

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

As many of you remember, when we took our last D2L upgrade over the summer, the discussion tool got a major overhaul.  There were some key features that were not included in the new version.  D2L has heard our feedback, and we are happy to announce that the Grid View and the Print all Threads option has returned!  These features were included in Service Pack 13, which was deployed on Thursday, January 8th, 2015.

The Reading View will remain the default view for all courses.  Individual users can set a Default View on the “Account Settings” page.

We have created the following step by step guides:

• Printing all Threads in a Discussion Forum
• Setting your “Default View” for Discussions
• Switching Between Grid View and Reading View

Other issues fixed in this update:

Calendar:

• Fix: Previously deleted event occurrences are no longer recreated unexpectedly when users edit a recurring event in Calendar.

Discussions:

• Fix: Users’ sorting and filter options are now preserved when they navigate through a discussion by using the browser’s Back button.

Grades:

• Fix: Deleted grade schemes no longer affect the performance of User Progress.

Import/Copy Course:

• Fix: A performance improvement was mode for copying courses that contain a large number of release conditions.

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

Struggling with Desire2Learn (D2L)? Register for the updated D2L Starter Course! The Starter Course has been developed to allow you to quickly leverage D2L in an online, hybrid, or face-to-face class format.

The recently updated “D2L Starter Course (December 2014)” is a D2L course that includes a number of useful templates and other resources available for you to copy and modify for use in your D2L courses. The course has updated links, templates, and addresses many of the 5th edition Quality Matters standards.

• Content Organization including a “Start Here” module and unit modules
• Student resources for D2L assistance, UW-W policies and procedures, campus services, library resources, and resources for students with special needs
• Sample D2L Rubrics that can be linked to the gradebook or dropbox
• Links to the Online Learning Resources site, including an Online Readiness Assessment
• A mid-course student evaluation survey to help you gauge that the course is meeting your (and your students’) expectations
• A LockDown Browser quiz to ensure your students are prepared to take a D2L quiz that is set up to use LockDown Browser
• Discussion starter ideas for online discussions administered in the D2L discussion forum

We welcome any suggestions or comments about the new starter course. Your feedback allows us to continuously improve the resources we provide to support faculty and staff.

Questions and feedback can be sent to UW-W D2L Support.

On Thursday, November 20th, Desire2Learn Inc. deployed Service Pack 11 and 12 to our D2L Learning Environment.  In this latest update, the following fixes and enhancements were included:

Accessibility

• Fix: Screenreaders no longer falsely announce changes to dates as if they were live regions.

Checklist

• Fix: Checklist item descriptions that exceed 4000 characters are now saved and displayed successfully.

Content

• Enhancement: In new courses, the first time instructors access the content tool, the “Table of Contents” landing page now includes an informative message about importing course material and creating modules.
  
  
• Enhancement: The content navigation panel usability was updated to provide a collapsible navigation panel.  The next and previous buttons were also relocated to make it clear if you were moving between topics or modules.
  
  
• Enhancement: User can now navigate more easily through topics with the addition of Next and Previous icons above and below the content.
  
  
• Fix: Improvements were made to prevent sort order issues due to deleted and reordering Content topics.
• Fix: Users’ completion status for group dropbox folders now display correctly in Content.  Completion tracking for a user’s submission is no longer cleared due to subsequent submissions to the group dropbox folder by other group members.

Discussions

• Fix: Posts with attachments containing filenames valid in iOS but not in Windows no longer cause topics or thread to become inaccessible.

Dropbox

• Fix: Dropbox submissions from users who are no longer enrolled in sections can now be opened and evaluated.

File Management

• Enhancement: Previously the same warning message was displayed when users attempted to overwrite existing files with uploaded or moved items in a location where an items with the same name already exists.  Now, different messages display after the following actions:
  • If users cut and past, or copy and paste a folder to a location that already has a folder with the same name, they see a message informing them that if they complete the action the contents of the new and existing folders will be merged and any existing files with the same name will be overwritten by the new files.
  • If users upload, or cut and paste a file into a folder that already has a file with the same name, they see a message informing them that if they complete the action the new file will overwrite the existing file.
  • If users copy and paste a file within its own folder, a number is appended to the end of the copied file’s name and the file is pasted as a duplicate.  No message is displayed.
    
    

Grades

• Enhancement: Users will no longer see a percentage value indicating the percentage of bonus points they received compared to the total available bonus points.  For example, “5” will replace “5/0”.
  
  
• Enhancement: A “save and close” button is now available in Grades for grading a single item.
  
  
• Fix: When adding a grade item to a dropbox assignment in Content, the correct list of available grade schemes is now displayed.

HTML Editor

• Enhancement: When users enter a URL in HTML Editor, it will automatically be converted into a link.
• Fix: Users in Internet Explorer 10 can now immediately enter text into the HTML Editor for a new Content topic after they change the file path for the topic through the “Change Path” option.
• Fix: When users select text in HTML Editor that they want to use to insert a quicklink to a URL, the select text now automatically populates the Title Field in the quicklink’s URL details.

Quizzes

• Enhancement: The quiz time limit on the quiz detail page is now displayed in hours, minutes and seconds.  Previously, it was specified as an integer with no units.
  
  
• Enhancement: Previously, the Quizzes tool communicated that a quiz was always available to users by including the word “Always” on the Quiz List page.  The language has now been changed to read “Always Available” to avoid confusion.
  
  
• Enhancement: The “Time Remaining” clock now displays hours, minutes and seconds.  Previously, it only displayed hours and minutes.
  • If a quiz is set for more than an hour, the clock flashes when there are 10 minutes remaining.
  • If a quiz is set for less than an hour, the clock flashes when there are 5 minutes remaining.
  • Regardless of the set time, the clock will flash when there is only 1 minute remaining.
    
    
• Fix: Improvements were made to the Question Library importing process to ensure questions and sections maintained proper ordering within a quiz.
• Fix: Ordering questions with long text answer options now wrap correctly to the page width and do not require horizontal scrolling to read the full text.

Rubrics

• Fix: Rubric associations are now maintained when copying discussion topics using Copy Course Components.
• Fix: Rubric associations are now maintained when multiple courses have access to the same rubrics after using Copy Course Components.

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