D2L Ignite Regional User Forum – November 8

Posted on October 16, 2013 by Renee Pfeifer-Luckett

ignite2013

On Friday, November 8, 2013, the first regional conference in Wisconsin to be hosted by Desire2Learn will take place at the Sheraton Madison Hotel in Madison, Wisconsin.

Similar to the annual D2L Fusion User Conference, this regional event provides an opportunity for teaching faculty, staff, and those interested in exploring technology in teaching and learning to attend “locally” without incurring a lot of travel expenses and time commitment. It will be a great venue for sharing, networking, and exchanging ideas with your colleagues from other regional campuses. Topics will focus on a variety of aspects of pedagogy and teaching with technology both directly and indirectly related to D2L. The UW System is co-sponsoring this event and assisting in planning the program.

Registration and session details can be found at:
WI D2L Ignite User Forum – registration deadline is Nov 1.

Snackable Series: E-Service Learning

Posted on October 3, 2013 by Elizabeth Simpson

The Learning Technology Center (LTC) is pleased to invite faculty and instructional staff to attend the next free session in the Snackable Series “Solving Teaching Challenges One Byte at a Time.” In the “Snackable Series” sessions, a specific learning technology is spotlighted. The next session will be held October 16th and 17th and focuses on E-service learning.

Service learning is a powerful tool to foster critical thinking, engage your students, and promote civic engagement. E-service learning is a service learning program or project conducted online. This format allows students limited by work obligations and geography to participate. This session will introduce some formats for online service learning, some common partnerships, and the practices of other faculty.

The dates, times, and location for this snackable are as follows:

Wednesday, October 16, 2013: Noon to 1 p.m.
Thursday, October 17, 2013: 11 a.m. to Noon
Location: iCIT Training Center, McGraw 112

If you have any questions regarding the Snackable Series and its sessions, please contact the UW-W Learning Technology Center.

Linking to Google Docs from D2L

Posted on October 2, 2013 by Amy Williams

There is currently a known issue in D2L that impacts quicklinks pointing to any “google.com” website. iOS (iPhone/iPad) users that are viewing a course in “Desktop View” will not be able to click on quicklinks to “google.com” websites. The supported workaround is to create the link in a new course file using the “Insert Stuff” tool.

Within any course file in the D2L text editor, you can choose the “Insert Stuff” icon from the menu bar. Within the dialog window, choose “Insert Link” and then enter the desired URL.

If you have any questions or need additional assistance, please contact UW-W D2L Support.

Users Receiving Old D2L Notifications

Posted on October 1, 2013 by Susan Degen

Some users may have received several email notifications from D2L that were related to past courses. Learn@UW has inadvertently triggered notification emails this afternoon (October 1st, 2013) starting at around 3:00 PM for UW-Whitewater users.

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.

Email and SMS Notifications Available in D2L

Posted on September 27, 2013 by Susan Degen

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.

College Readiness: University of Wisconsin System’s Math MOOC

Posted on September 27, 2013 by Elizabeth Simpson

Please join us October 10th to welcome Dr. Robert Hoar and Dr. Jennifer Kosiak.

MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses, are technological innovations that create new ways for people to learn. The typical MOOC is a fully online course in which students have zero-cost access to the course and all of its instructional materials.

With funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a team at UW-La Crosse designed a Math MOOC to align with the on-campus remedial math course MTH 051: Intermediate Algebra. The team’s goal was that successful completion of the MOOC would prepare students for placement beyond MTH 051 in the curriculum, allowing them to enter college-level math and science courses. After a successful pilot in the summer of 2012, the MOOC was opened to interested students from around the world. This was the first MOOC developed in the UW System.

On October 10th, two of the faculty involved in this project will visit UW-Whitewater to share their experiences in building the College Readiness Math MOOC and their hopes for the future. Robert is a Professor of Mathematics and the Director of the UW System Institute for Innovation in Undergraduate Research and Learning, and Jennifer Kosiak is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at UW-La Crosse.

October 10, 2013, 11:00-12:00 CST
HH4303, Dean’s Executive Conference Room. 4th Floor of Hyland Hall

Space is limited to 40 individuals. Be sure to register at: https://my.uww.edu/signup/register.aspx?EID=13333 If you have any questions, please contact the Learning Technology Center.

D2L Login Errors

Posted on September 25, 2013 by Susan Degen

RESOLVED: The login issue has been resolved, and the D2L is available. The outage started at 5:40 AM and lasted until 7:35 AM this morning (9/25).

Starting at approximately 7:00 AM this morning (9/25), users have reported error messages while trying to log into D2L. This issue has been reported to the proper technicians, and we will be updating this post with more information as we receive it.

TurningPoint (“Clickers”) Software Upgrade

Posted on September 18, 2013 by Aaron Axelsen

We recently discovered that the new clickers receivers provided from Turning Technologies will not work with the currently installed version of TurningPoint 2008 (4.3.2). To mitigate this problem, we are going to install the latest point release of TurningPoint 2008 (4.5.1) on all windows based classroom computers beginning at 5pm on Thursday, September 19^th, 2013.

If you are currently using TurningPoint 2008 on an office computer to create presentations for classroom use, you will also need to upgrade those installations to version 4.5.1. This can be done using the steps below:

Make sure that you have PowerPoint completely closed on your computer.
Click on the “Start” icon and locate the “ZENworks Application Window”
Find the application named “TurningPoint 2008 (4.5.1)” and double click it.
Once the installation finishes, you will now have the 4.5.1 version of TurningPoint installed on your machine.

If you are currently using TurningPoint 2008 on a personal computer to create presentations for classroom use, you can download the latest version by going to: http://www.turningtechnologies.com/software/downloadForm.aspx?AssetId=400

The first time you open your existing clicker presentations, you may receive a notification that they need to be updated to the latest version.

Click “Yes” to allow the conversion process, and the rest will be done automatically for you. Be sure to save the presentation after it has been converted.

We are also planning a migration to TurningPoint 5, along with some additional levels of D2L integration. Additional information will be made available at a future date. The upgrade to TurningPoint 5 will NOT take place in the middle of the semester.

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

Snackable Series: Creating and Facilitating Discussions

Posted on September 16, 2013 by Elizabeth Simpson

The Learning Technology Center (LTC) is pleased to invite faculty and instructional staff to attend the next free session in the Snackable Series “Solving Teaching Challenges One Byte at a Time.” In the “Snackable Series” sessions, a specific learning technology is spotlighted. The next session will be held September 18th and 19th and focuses on utilizing discussions in D2L.

Discussions in D2L are a form of asynchronous interaction between the members of a class. When designed properly, discussions build a learning community, encourage critical thinking, and help your students apply the material they are learning. This session will introduce you to some best practices in designing and facilitating discussion in D2L and will include sample discussion prompts you can adapt for your course.

The dates, times, and location for this snackable are as follows:

Wednesday, September 18, 2013: Noon to 1 p.m.
Thursday, September 19, 2013: 11 a.m. to Noon
Location: iCIT Training Center, McGraw 112

If you have any questions regarding the Snackable Series and its sessions, please contact the UW-W Learning Technology Center.

D2L Slowness Reported

Posted on September 4, 2013 by Aaron Axelsen

Update: The service interruption has now been resolved. Users may have experienced unusual slowness or received errors between approximately 1:18 PM and 2:50 PM this afternoon (September 4th, 2013). If you are still having issues logging into D2L, please contact UW-W D2L Support.

Users have reported intermittent access interruptions, slowness, and some are receiving “Internal Errors”. Users have also reported the inability to log into D2L, either the process times out or an error is displayed. This has been reported to Learn@UW, and their technicians are looking into the issue.

We will update this news item with any new information as we receive it.