This term I thought I would begin writing a series of posts based on our eLearning workshops – both for those of you who can’t attend, as well as to remind those who did of some of the amazing things you learned at the workshops!
Today, from the workshop Getting Started with D2L, I am answering the question: “Do you know when you and your students have access to D2L courses at Camosun?”
D2L at Camosun is connected to our registration system (Colleague). That means that faculty and students are automatically added to live D2L course sites through that connection.
What this means for faculty, is that if your course is “flagged” for D2L in the registration system, you will see a blank shell for that course appear in your D2L course listing approximately 30 days before the course start date. Then, 7 days before the course start date, you will see your students appear in the D2L course Classlist. This is also the point at which your students will have access to D2L in general – but NOT to your course site. Your student will not have access to your course site until the day it starts (the official start date in Colleague). Note that this is all controlled through Colleague – we in eLearning cannot give your students access to your D2L course materials earlier than the official start date.
You may also be wondering how long students have access to your D2L course site after the course ends. Well, they will have access to the course site for 20 days past the end date as it appears in Colleague.
Sometimes faculty want to work on a course D2L site before their live course appears in their course list (for example, when planning/developing a September course in May/June for Scheduled Development). If this is the case, you can ask eLearning to create a DEV site for your course. This is a static D2L course site (meaning that it is not dependent on start and end dates) containing NO students (meaning you can use it to create, experiment, etc. without worrying that students may see what you’re doing). If you would like a DEV site for a course (and I recommend having one), contact desupport@camosun.ca.
More questions about D2L and getting started? Contact eLearning (desupport@camosun.ca) to arrange a meeting with an instructional designer at Interurban or Lansdowne!