Author: eschudel

Coming this month in D2L: a 2-way connection between Assignments and Grades, and between Discussions and Grades.

If you have linked an Assignment or a Discussion to a Grade item, you will now be able to enter marks in the Grades tool, and when saved, those grades will be sent to the Assignment or Discussion item. In other words, you can now grade your assignments in either the Grades tool or Assignments tool – whichever is your preference.

This function will be especially useful for assignments that are handed in in class (there are two new Submission Types in the Assignments tool to allow for “On-paper submission” and “Observed in Person”) or when you want to give students the option to either submit assignments to the Assignments tool or hand in paper assignments during class.

Want to know more? Contact eLearning Support (desupport@camosun.ca) to arrange for a consult with an instructional designer.

On September 5, I announced the new Annotation Tool in the Assignments tool in D2L . And today, I wanted to give you some additional notes about this tool, because of some questions that have come up for us from faculty.

First, the Annotation tool, which is enabled by default, can be disabled for specific assignments.  To do this:

1. Click the down arrow next to the assignment you want to edit, and select Edit Folder.
2. Scroll down to the bottom of the Properties tab to Annotation Tools, and deselect “Make annotation tools available for assessment”. Then click Save and Close.

   

Second, I wanted to mention the difference between downloading the annotated version (PDF version) and downloading the original document when assessing assignment submissions. Note that this is for file submissions when the Annotation tool is enabled.

1. Click the down arrow next to the assignment you want to grade, and click View Submissions.
2. Click on the Evaluate link for the student’s assignment you want to assess.
3. To download the document itself, click the arrow next to the assignment link, and select Download.

   

4. To view and download the Annotated file (as a PDF), click on the document link to open the Annotation tool, add your annotations, then click Download.

   

5. To close the Annotations tool window and return to the original view, where you can download the assignment document itself, click the X above, on the right side, of the Annotation window.

   

Stay tuned next Monday where I will tell you about a few new updates regarding the connection between the Assignments and Discussions tools, and the Grades tool.

This tutorial is designed for faculty who have previous experience using the various tools in D2L, and will cover the steps involved when you want to put your students into groups in D2L.

Using Groups means that you can release tools, activities, and content to specific groups of students, for example, Assignment folders which would be accessible only by a group of students, or modules of content which only specific groups of students can view. For further information, please contact desupport@camosun.ca for assistance.

Steps

1. Go to the Groups tool in your course. If you don’t see Groups in your My Tools drop-down, you can find it by going to Edit Course.
2. Click New Category. A Category will contain the groups you will put your students into. For example, Assignment 1 Groups might be your Category, then you will have several Groups within that category into which you will enrol students.
3. Give your Category a Category Name (e.g., Assignment 1 Groups).
4. Scroll down and select your Enrolment Type. Here are the choices:
   1. # of Groups – No Auto Enrolments – Use this when YOU want to enrol students into specific groups yourself
   2. Groups of # – Use when you know how many students you want in each group, but you want D2L to automatically enrol them
   3. # of Groups – Use when you know how many groups you want, but you want D2L to automatically enrol students into them
   4. Groups of # – Self Enrolment – Use when you know how many students you want in each group, but you want students to self-select which group they want to be in. (Self-enrolment can also be given an Expiry Date, after which remaining students will be auto-enrolled into empty group spaces),
   5. # of Groups – Self Enrolment – Use when you know how many groups you want, but you want students to self-select which group they want to be in
   6. # of Groups, Capacity of # – Self Enrolment – Use when you know how many groups you want AND how many students you want in each group, but you want students to self-select which group they want to be in
   7. Single user, member-specific groups – Use when you want to create groups of ONE (this is great if you want to provide students with Discussion forum space for personal journaling – so they can post journal entries that only you can see).Fill in the required boxes for whichever enrolment type you chose (e.g., Number of Groups, Number of Users), then select which tools/workspaces you would like to automatically create as you create your groups (note that you can connect tools/activities/content to groups AFTER you have created them as well). Then click Save.

      

5. Follow the instructions for creating the additional tools (Discussion, Locker, Assignments) if you have selected them, clicking Create and Next as you go. When you are finished, click Done.
6. Finally, click Save.

Things to Remember

Note that if you have created self-enrolment groups, you will not be able to use View as Student to see what this looks like to your students – you need to be a registered student in the course to see how the process works. However, we have created a handoutfor students on Self Enrolling into Groups that you can find in the On-Demand Training course in D2L look at, or point students to in the D2L Student Guide.

This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence.Icons by the Noun Project.