New Assignment Types in D2L Dropbox

If you use the assignment Dropbox in D2L, you may have noticed some new options for acceptable assignment types.

Previously, students had to submit a file to Dropbox in order to complete a submission.  Now, this is not mandatory!  Instead of a File Submission dropbox, you can now create Dropboxes for:

  • Text submission (so students can write a one-paragraph text without uploading a file, or embed an audio file, a video, an image, etc. into the HTML editor)
  • On-paper submission (allowing you to use the Dropbox to give feedback for something submitted in class)
  • Observed in person (allowing you to use the Dropbox to give feedback for an in-class presentation, for example)

Selecting the Assignment Type for your Dropbox is simple.  First, go to the Dropbox tool in your course.  Then click New Folder.

click New Folder

Give your Folder a Name, then scroll down to the Submission, Completion and Categorization section.  Click the Submission type drop-down menu and select the submission type you want.

Scroll down and select your Submission type

If you select Text submission, you don’t need to do anything else.

If you select On paper submission or Observed in person, you will also need to click the Marked as completed drop-down and select one of the following choices:

  • Manually by learners (the students will get a Mark as complete button to let you know that they have completed the assignment)
  • Automatically by evaluation (the assignment will be marked as completed once you, as the instructor, evaluate it)
  • Automatically by due date (the assignment will be marked as completed on the due date if one is set)

You can then finish setting up your Dropbox (adding your due date, etc.) and click Save and Close when you are done.  If you want to see what a student sees, you can then Preview the Dropbox to make sure the assignment type you selected is indeed the one  you want.

Note:  Once you select an Assignment Type for your Dropbox and save it, you can’t change it, so if you choose the wrong assignment type, you will have to delete the dropbox and create a new one.

Planning for SD? Consider eLearning Workshops this Spring!

If you are thinking ahead to what you might want to do on your Scheduled Development in May/June (2019…crazy!), consider what eLearning will have to offer.

Here is a list of workshops we will be offering in between May 3 and June 21, 2019.  The final schedule will not be available until February (and dates will be subject to change due to the fact that we can’t book all our spaces until April), but this list will hopefully inspire you!

If you have any questions, or don’t see what you are looking for, email Emily Schudel at schudele@camosun.ca.

Lansdowne Workshops

What’s new in D2L

  • Designed for instructors who have previously taught with D2L, this workshop will focus on the new features available in the recent upgrade. This session will focus on new functionality and some of the benefits for faculty and learners.

Introducing D2L to your Students

  • Using D2L, but not sure how comfortable your students are with it? Come and find out what other faculty at Camosun are doing to introduce D2L to their students.

D2L Quizzes – How, Why, and the Daylight Experience

  • This hands-on workshop will cover creating, managing, and grading quizzes and the question library in the new version of D2L, Daylight Experience. Basic familiarity with D2L is recommended for participants interested in this workshop

Facilitating Discussions and Collaborative Work in D2L

  • In this workshop we will examine a variety of online communication tools within D2L, and discuss various facilitation techniques that you can use to engage learners and promote collaboration online.

D2L Design Considerations for Mobile Devices

  • More and more students are using mobile devices (phones and tablets) to work in their D2L course sites. But how does it actually look to students? Bring your tablet and phones to this workshop, and try out some design techniques to make sure your students can get the most out of your D2L site on their own devices.

Fun with Rubrics

  • This hands-on workshop will discuss best practices around designing a variety of rubrics and integrating them into your assessment, participation, and feedback strategies.  Note that we will set up a simple rubric during the session to practice using the tool, but participants are encouraged to bring their own rubrics for discussion with the group. Basic familiarity with D2L is recommended for participants interested in this workshop

Top 10 Digital Learning Skills Strategies for Your Students

  • Are you looking for strategies to support your students who are learning using digital resources?  Whether you are using D2L to support your face-to-face teaching, teaching blended, or completely online, we have some tips and resources for you!

Making Your D2L Course Accessible: 7 Things You Can ALWAYS Do!

  • Do you know if the digital course materials you’re providing for your students are accessible? Would every student in your class be able to access required readings or videos or audio content? In this workshop we will cover 7 key things you can – and should! – always do to support equitable access to your course materials.

Ethical Dimensions of Educational Technology

  • Many of us are integrating educational technology into our teaching, but how many of us are discussing the ethical issues that come along with those technologies? This blended workshop will support conversations around institutional policy, privacy, social justice, accessibility, and personal risk, when it comes to educational technology, and help you develop strategies for being creative and innovative while keeping these issues in mind.

Social Media use in Education

  • Interested in integrating social media into your classroom?  This workshop will examine various social media tools used in the teaching and learning and discuss best practices.  In addition, participants will have the opportunity to share strategies on how social media can be incorporated into their own courses

Creating Community in the Online Classroom

  • What does it mean to create an online community for your students? What considerations do you need to keep in mind when developing online activities to support that online community? This blended workshop will give you the opportunity to engage in online community building, and to work with your peers face-to-face to develop strategies for integrating online community-building activities into your course.

Flipping the Classroom

  • Wonder what all the hype is around the “flipped” classroom? Come experience one way to flip a classroom in our 2-hour workshop.

WordPress for Teaching and Learning using Camosun’s WordPress

  • WordPress is a blogging and website creation tool now available at Camosun College. In this workshop you will learn the basics of how to set up a WordPress site on Camosun’s WordPress instance. Prior to attending the session, you will be set up with a WordPress account so you have a place to work during the session!

Getting Started with Kaltura: Streaming Media at Camosun!

  • Kaltura is Camosun’s a streaming media tool (we sometimes call it Camosun’s YouTube). This means faculty and students now have a place to create, edit, and house their course-related videos. Kaltura also integrates with D2L. Come to this hand-on session to find out more about what Kaltura is, what it can do, and learn how you can use it for your courses.

Kaltura Media Capture: Creating Multimedia Magic!

  • Are you interested in creating engaging media pieces for your courses?  Not sure where to begin?  Join Bob Preston for this hands-on workshop Kaltura Capture Space.

Best practices around integrating media into D2L

  • This hands-on workshop covers the technical consideration of integrating multimedia into a D2L course, answering the questions: What do you need to keep in mind when integrating a multimedia piece into a D2L course? What are the benefits of linking versus embedding? Where can I store my video files?  Why can’t I just import media files into D2L?  How do I effectively insert audio files? When is copyright a consideration? Time will be set aside for you to integrate and test your multimedia components in D2L. Basic familiarity with D2L is recommended for participants interested in this workshop.

Open Education Resources: What, Why and How

  • At the heart of the Open Education movement lies the idea that publicly-funded knowledge and knowledge products (textbooks, curricula, lecture notes, tests, assignments, video, images) should be made freely available to the public (including students). As educators dedicated to the creation and transfer of knowledge this idea is appealing. But how does it work? What constitutes Open Education Resources (OER)? How are they licensed? Where can you find them? What are the best ways to use them? In this workshop we will explore how to use Open Education Resources to remove barriers to education.

BlackBoard Collaborate Ultra: Information sessions

    • Blackboard Collaborate Ultra is a synchronous classroom tool that is coming to Camosun. This means that faculty now have an online tool with audio, video, chat, and whiteboard/desktop sharing capabilities to support their teaching in real-time. Come find out more about Blackboard Collaborate and how it can be used, as well as when it will be available, at this information session

WordPress for Students

  • WordPress is a blogging and website creation tool which is now available in the Canadian cloud, meaning that if you would like your students to build blogs and websites as part of their learning, we can now offer a solution which will be in compliance with the BC Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. Come find out more about how to set up a site for yourself, and what you need to know to get your students started.

Getting Started with ePortfolio in D2L  (Tentative pending pilot)

  • Looking for options for your students to collect and share documents, assessments, presentations, etc. with other students and faculty across their Program? Come find out how ePortfolio in D2L might support you!

Getting Started with Readspeaker/TextAid in D2L

  • ReadSpeaker offers text-to-speech solutions for websites, online course materials, e-books and digital documents. In this session, we will introduce you to the collection of ReadSpeaker tools we now have available within D2L courses and show you how you and your students can use and access these tools.

Interurban D2L Workshops

Getting Started with D2L (New Instructors)

  • This workshop will provide you with an overview of the essential teaching tools available in our learning management system, D2L. Participants will be able to take away a practical, course development checklist to assist with learning D2L. Whether you are looking to supplement your face-to-face classes, transition from using a basic course website or simply want to learn more about how to enhance your current teaching methodologies with using D2L, this workshop has a little something for everyone. Come explore the possibilities!

What’s New in D2L (for instructors who have previous teaching experience using D2L)

  • Designed for instructors who have previously taught with D2L, this workshop will focus on the new features available in D2L. This session will focus on new functionality and some of the benefits for faculty and learners.

Course Spring Cleaning

  • This workshop will focus on setting up (or refining) your course homepage, widgets, navigation and themes. We’ll also show you some best practices surrounding course maintenance (cleaning up manage files & question libraries) and how to manage release dates associated with your course from one central location in D2L (saving you time!).

Working with Master Courses and Development Sites 

  • This workshop will highlight various models and collaboration strategies used by faculty to support the development, use and maintenance of master courses and development sites in D2L. Come learn how master courses are being used to share content, resources, teaching strategies, activities and assessments.

Designing for Engagement: Moving beyond Text and Images

  • Come learn how to transform your content to accommodate a variety of learning styles and abilities. We’ll begin with an overview of the content tool and its functionality to get you started with building content. We’ll then explore how you can transform various types of content including (but not limited to): PDFs, PPT and Word documents to a web-accessible format that improves the teaching and learning experience.

Setting up Your Gradebook

  • This hands-on workshop will focus on setting up your D2L Gradebook from start to finish. Please bring your course outline (or a breakdown of your assessment items) to the workshop if you wish to build your own Gradebook.

Quizzes & Leveraging Course Analytics in D2L

  • This workshop will begin with an overview of how to create, customize and grade quizzes. Participants will also learn how to take advantage of the D2L’s robust analytics to enhance the learner experience and identify redesign opportunities.

 Exploring Different Ways to Use Rubrics

  • Come learn how you can streamline your assessment strategy, communicate expectations and feedback for your learners while also building in quality assurance measures and cutting down on manual marking. Various examples, lessons learned and planning tips will be shared. Participants will have the opportunity to build or refine a rubric.

Taking a Closer Look at Communication & Collaboration in D2L

  • Take a closer look at how instructors can use communication tools to connect with students and support collaborative learning experiences. 

Conditional Release + Intelligent Agents 

  • This workshop will provide participants with an overview of how conditional release and intelligent agents can support the development of personalized learning paths for students within your course.

Creative Applications in eLearning

  • This workshop will showcase some creative ways to deliver content, engage learners and put a twist on some of the common teaching tools in D2L.

Introduction to Kaltura (Streaming Media at Camosun): Information Session

  • Kaltura is a streaming media tool that is coming to Camosun. This means faculty and students will now have a place to create, edit, and house their course-related videos. Kaltura also integrates with D2L.  Come find out more about what Kaltura is, what it can do, how you can use it for your courses and when it will be available.

Introduction to Blackboard Collaborate Ultra: Information Session

  • Blackboard Collaborate Ultra is a synchronous classroom tool that is coming to Camosun. This means that faculty now have an online tool with audio, video, chat, and whiteboard/desktop sharing capabilities to support their teaching in real-time. Come find out more about Blackboard Collaborate and how it can be used, as well as when it will be available.

Using WordPress for Student Blogs: Information Session

  • WordPress is a blogging and website creation tool which is now available in the Canadian cloud, meaning that if you would like your students to build blogs and websites as part of their learning, we can now offer a solution which will be in compliance with the BC Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. Come find out more about how to set up a site for yourself, and what you need to know to get your students started.

eLearning Workshops Winter 2019

Register now for eLearning Winter 2019 Workshops!

The eLearning Workshop Series is designed to assist faculty (beginner to advanced) with incorporating educational technologies (including Desire2Learn (D2L), WordPress, Blackboard Collaborate Ultra, Kaltura, and multimedia) into their teaching.  Note: This schedule is subject to change. Make sure to register for the session(s) you would like to attend so that we can notify you if there is a room change or cancellation.  Don’t see what you’re looking for or not sure where to begin? Contact eLearning Support (desupport@camosun.ca) to book a consult with an Instructional Designer.

Register for workshops at https://www.surveymonkey.ca/r/GDWH7WY

We also have drop-ins (no registration required)!

Our Lansdowne drop-ins are on Tuesdays 12:30-1:30pm in the CETL offices in the Lansdowne Library, and out Interurban drop-ins are on Fridays from 11:30am-12:30pm in our CETL offices in the Liz Ashton Campus Centre, room 235.

Lansdowne Workshops

Title: ReadSpeaker in D2L
Date & Time: Friday, February 8, from 2:00-4:00pm
Location: Ewing 112, Lansdowne Campus
Description:  ReadSpeaker offers text-to-speech solutions for websites, online course materials, e-books and digital documents. In this session, we will introduce you to the collection of ReadSpeaker tools we now have available within D2L courses and show you how you and your students can use and access these tools.

Title:  Top 10 Digital Learning Skills Strategies for Your Students
Date & Time: Tuesday, February 19 from 2:00-4:00pm
Location: LLC151, Lansdowne Campus
Description:  Are you looking for strategies to support your students who are learning using digital resources?  Whether you are using D2L to support your face-to-face teaching, teaching blended, or completely online, we have some tips and resources for you!

Title:  Introduction to Kaltura (Streaming Media at Camosun): Information Session
Date & Time: Monday, March 4 from 3:00-4:00pm
Location: LLC151, Lansdowne Campus
Description:  Kaltura is a streaming media tool that is coming to Camosun. This means faculty and students will now have a place to create, edit, and house their course-related videos. Kaltura also integrates with D2L. Come find out more about what Kaltura is, what it can do, and how you can use it for your courses, as well as when it will be available at this information session!

Title: Introduction to ePortfolio in D2L (info session)
Date & Time: Friday, March 8 from 12:30-1:30pm
Location: LLC151, Lansdowne Campus
Description:  Looking for options for your students to collect and share documents, assessments, presentations, etc. with other students and faculty across their Program? Come find out how ePortfolio in D2L might support you.

Title:  Introduction to Blackboard Collaborate Ultra: Information Session
Date & Time: Monday, March 11 from 3:00-4:00pm
Location: LLC151, Lansdowne Campus
Description:  Blackboard Collaborate Ultra is a synchronous classroom tool that is coming to Camosun. This means that faculty now have an online tool with audio, video, chat, and whiteboard/desktop sharing capabilities to support their teaching in real-time. Come find out more about Blackboard Collaborate and how it can be used, as well as when it will be available, at this information session.

Title:  Using WordPress for Student Blogs: Information Session
Date & Time: Thursday, March 14 from 3:00-4:00pm
Location: LLC151, Lansdowne Campus
Description:  WordPress is a blogging and website creation tool which is now available in the Canadian cloud, meaning that if you would like your students to build blogs and websites as part of their learning, we can now offer a solution which will be in compliance with the BC Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. Come find out more about how to set up a site for yourself, and what you need to know to get your students started.

Interurban Workshops

Title:  Getting Started with D2L (New Instructors)
Date & Time: Thursday, Jan 3 from 10:00am-11:30am
Location: LACC 235, Interurban Campus
Description:  This workshop will provide you with an overview of the essential teaching tools available in our learning management system, D2L. Participants will be able to take away a practical, course development checklist to assist with learning D2L. Whether you are looking to supplement your face-to-face classes, transition from using a basic course website or simply want to learn more about how to enhance your current teaching methodologies with using D2L, this workshop has a little something for everyone. Come explore the possibilities!

Title: What’s New in D2L (for instructors who have previous teaching experience using D2L)
Date & Time:  Friday, Jan 4 from 10:00am-11:30am
Location: LACC 235, Interurban Campus
Description: Designed for instructors who have previously taught with D2L, this workshop will focus on the new features available in D2L. This session will focus on new functionality and some of the benefits for faculty and learners.

Title:  Course Set-up
Date & Time: Friday, Jan 4 from 2:00pm-3:30pm
Location: LACC 235, Interurban Campus
Description:  This workshop will focus on setting up (or refining) your course homepage, widgets, navigation and themes. We’ll also show you some best practices surrounding course maintenance and how to manage release dates associated with your course from one central location in D2L (saving you time!).

Title: Incorporating eLearning Projects into Your Scheduled Development (SD) Plans
Date & Time:  Friday, January 11 from 10:00am-11:00am
Location: LACC 235, Interurban Campus
Description: This workshop will focus on the key planning considerations to think about when estimating the amount of time required to complete eLearning projects during SD.

Title:  Setting up Your Gradebook
Date & Time: Friday, January 25 from 10:00am-11:30am
Location: LACC 235, Interurban Campus
Description:  This hands-on workshop will focus on setting up your D2L Gradebook from start to finish. Please bring your course outline (or a breakdown of your assessment items) to the workshop if you wish to build your own Gradebook.

Title: Managing Final Grades in D2L
Date & Time: Friday, April 12 from 10:00am-11:30am
Location: LACC 235, Interurban Campus
Description: It’s grading time again! This workshop is designed to provide a quick refresher on how to input and manage grades in D2L. An overview of how to apply grade schemes and release calculated and adjusted final grades will also be provided.