This 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.

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.

Some users may have received several email notifications from D2L that were related to past courses. Learn@UW has inadvertently triggered notification emails this morning for non-UWM campuses.

Learn@UW is currently taking steps to stop the flood of old messages and to determine the cause of this event. The emails can be ignored and shouldn’t affect your courses. However, we apologize that some of you may be receiving many of these emails, especially if you had notification subscriptions set up in your past courses.

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

This 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.

This morning, Thursday, May 30th, Desire2Learn Inc. deployed Service Pack 10 to our D2L learning environment.

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

Dropbox:

• In a group dropbox folder, each now completes successfully without error when searching to view submissions by “Submitted groups” and selecting the check box “Only show users with unread submissions”.
• When viewing a dropbox folder submission in the native document viewer or as a download, the submission is now always marked as “Read”.
• When Turnitin’s OriginalityCheck is enabled for a dropbox folder’s submissions, and comments with or without numeric scores are entered via Turnitin’s GradeMark, a Markup icon now appears to the submitter, linking to the commented section.
• A usability improvement was made to the “Retract published feedback” option for dropbox folder submissions: A retracted evaluation now reverts to Draft status, and the grade book will display a cleared score and feedback.
• Links to Originality Reports for dropbox folder submissions now remain correct and no longer break.

Quizzes/Question Library:

• Exporting quiz results via CSV format no longer causes an error if the quiz contains a section with Display Option “Display message and image” enabled that contains an empty message.
• Usability improved for Matching questions: Students can now respond by selecting from a drop-down list of answer options instead of manually typing entries into text fields.
• When grading from a quiz’s Questions tab, grade changes are now accurately updated and reflected in the grade book.

Content:

• The User Progress Content report on the number of visits (# Visits), and the number of visits recorded in the Content tool are now counted the same way regardless of the time spent visiting each Content topic
• Viewing SCORM reports with an entry that has a total time spent over 999 minutes no longer causes an error.

News: News items’ attachments now properly display in the News widget after they are copied to a course via Import/Export/Copy Components.

Surveys: A performance improvement has been made to the page loading time when creating new Surveys. Timeout errors no longer occur.

Assignment Grader: A bug has been corrected that now allows posting a rubric-based evaluation for Dropbox submissions.

Calendar: Several performance improvements have been made to the Calendar tool, especially when it deals with a large number of events.

Import Course Components: Importing matching questions from a Blackboard 9.1 package now correctly imports the answers as well. Previously, imported matches did not have the correct match values; instead, all matches had the first answer item set as the correct choice.

Equation Editor: The “\\” symbol now inserts a new line in the LaTeX format in the Equation Editor.

HTML Editor:

• In Discussions and Homepage tools, text in HTML Editor no longer overlaps regardless of font size.
• In Firefox and Internet Explorer, long, unbroken strings of text entered into HTML Editor now wrap correctly once they reach the edge of the editor container.
• iPad users can now use the full functionality of HTML Editor.
• Users can now safely copy existing News items and paste them into new News items without errors.
• Images inserted using the HTML Editor can now have up to 200 characters in alternative text.

Minibar: The Search for a Course selector now searches for all keywords entered into the text field. Search no longer seeks an exact match for the search phrase.

File Management: In Manage Files, file and folder context menus now open in the correct position for both Left-to-Right and Right-to-Left user interface modes.

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