eschudel – Page 45 – Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning

D2L Tool Tip of the Week: Customizing your Homepages and Widgets

This tutorial is designed for faculty who have experience using D2L and will cover the steps involved when you wish to modify what is on your course’s Homepage and/or create custom widgets for your Homepage. Note that this tutorial presumes you have NOT copied an already modified Homepage from another course. If this is the case, all you will need to do is activate that Homepage. For further information, please contact desupport@camosun.ca for assistance.

Steps for customizing your Homepage

Steps for creating a custom widget and adding it to your Homepage

Step 1: Create a custom widget

Step 2: Add your custom widget to your Homepage

D2L Tool Tip of the Week: Customizing your Navigation Bar and My Tools Drop-down Menu

This tutorial is designed for faculty who have experience using D2L and will cover the steps involved when you wish to modify what is on your course’s Navigation Bar and/or in your My Tools drop-down menu. Note that this tutorial presumes you have NOT copied an already modified navigation bar from another course. If this is the case, all you will need to do is activate that navigation bar. For further information, please contact desupport@camosun.ca for assistance.

Steps

Step 1: Create a Navbar for your course

Step 2: Create a custom My Tools drop-down menu for your Navbar

Step 3: Add your custom link to your Navbar

Step 4: Activate your Navbar!

Finally to activate your new Navbar, click on Navbars one more time.

Things to Remember

The edits you make to your Navbar and My Tools drop-down menu will only appear if you have activated your Navbar. Check this first if your NavBar changes do not appear.

Once you have created a new Navbar, you can copy it into other courses. If you do this, the only thing you will have to do is activate it in the new course.

D2L Tool Tip of the Week: Copying Course Components from One Course to Another

This tutorial is designed for faculty who have previously taught using D2L, and who will be teaching in a future term and would like their new D2L course site to be set up with the same structure (content, news items, quizzes, dropbox folders, grade book, etc) as their previous D2L course site. It is also for those faculty who have been working in a development course and are now ready to move their materials and activities into their live course. For further information, please contact desupport@camosun.ca for assistance.

Steps

Go to the Course Home of the course you want to copy INTO.
If you Selected Components,

eLearning Development and Support Services Fall 2015 workshops

Don’t forget to register now for eLearning Fall 2015 Workshops.

The eLearning Development and Support Services workshops are designed to assist faculty (beginner to advanced) incorporating educational technologies (including Desire2Learn (D2L) and multimedia) into their teaching. Please register for the workshop session(s) you would like to attend. Registration is important as it allows us to notify you if there is a room change or cancellation.

Note: Our workshop schedule is subject to change. Please check back to confirm dates, times and locations for the workshops. Don’t see what you’re looking for? Contact eLearning Support (desupport@camosun.ca) to book a consult with an Instructional Designer.

Go to eLearning Development and Support Services Workshop Series – Fall 2015 for more information, and to register.

Friday, June 12: Friday Fun Fact – Where is Camosun College, and how old is it anyway?

So, this has nothing directly to do with educational technologies or online learning, but Camosun College is the reason Distributed Education (and I, your intrepid blogger) is here, so I thought I would look into a bit of its history for this holiday Friday’s post. And yes, it may seem a funny thing to post on a blog belonging to a unit at Camosun College, but I think most of the audience following this blog, mostly through Twitter, does NOT work here, so I think it’s fair.

Camosun College first opened in 1971, so it’s a fairly young institution. To quote the camosun.ca website, “Located in picturesque Victoria, British Columbia, Camosun is situated on the traditional territories of the Lkwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples. The college adopted the name “Camosun,” a Lkwungen word meaning “where different waters meet and are transformed…” (http://camosun.ca/about)

We have two campuses – one close to the University of Victoria in an area of the city called Oak Bay, the Lansdowne campus, and the second up in Saanich called Interurban – and close to 20,000 students studying in over 160 programs.

We do a lot of cool things at Camosun College (in addition to online and blended learning). I don’t pretend to know what they all are, so I won’t start listing them here at the risk of missing something. The one plug I will make, which I think is particularly cool, involves our Centre for Indigenous Education & Community Connections, Eyēʔ Sqȃ’lewen which you can read more about at the IECC website (http://camosun.ca/learn/school/indigenous-education-community-connections/index.html). One of the initiatives driven by the College and the IECC is the indigenization of Camosun College curriculum (http://web.camosun.ca/cetl/curriculum-design/learning-about-indigenization). There is even a free course offered to all staff and faculty at the college, TELTIN TTE WILNEW (Understanding Indigenous People), which does bring me back to Distributed Education, because this is a blended course which we support through our online learning management system, as well as instructional design guidance and recommendations.

So, that’s my short post for this holiday Friday, and now you (perhaps) know a bit more about Camosun College from which all these blog posts originate!

Find out more at:

The official Camosun College website: http://camosun.ca/
Camosun College at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camosun_College
Camosun College, Learning about Indigenization: http://web.camosun.ca/cetl/curriculum-design/learning-about-indigenization
Centre for Indigenous Education & Community Connections: http://camosun.ca/learn/school/indigenous-education-community-connections/index.html

DE Workshops start TODAY!!

The anticipation is over!!

We still have some room, so don’t miss out. Our Workshop Series is designed to assist faculty (beginner to advanced) with incorporating various educational technologies (including Desire2Learn (D2L) and Camtasia) into their teaching. Make sure to register for the session(s) you would like to attend (click on the links below to view the sessions, and then on the Register Here button at the bottom of the page) so that we can notify you if there is a room change or cancellation.

Note: This schedule is subject to change. Please check back to confirm dates, times and locations for the workshops. Don’t see what you’re looking for? Contact DE Support (desupport@camosun.ca) to book a consult with an Instructional Designer.

Go to DE Workshop Series – Spring 2015 for more information, and to register.

DE Workshops start Next Week!!

Don’t forget to register now for our Distributed Education Spring 2015 Workshop Series. Only one week before the excitement begins!!

The Distributed Education (DE) Workshop Series is designed to assist faculty (beginner to advanced) with incorporating various educational technologies (including Desire2Learn (D2L) and Camtasia) into their teaching. Make sure to register for the session(s) you would like to attend (click on the links below to view the sessions, and then on the Register Here button at the bottom of the page) so that we can notify you if there is a room change or cancellation.

Go to DE Workshop Series – Spring 2015 for more information, and to register.

D2L Tool Tip of the week: Setting up Quizzes with Special Access (for example, for students requiring accommodation, time extensions, etc.)

This tutorial will walk you through setting up Special Access options in a quiz for a student requiring accommodation (for example, more time to write exams). It will also note some considerations to keep in mind when setting up the quiz, depending on the kind of accommodation required by the student.

Go to the Quizzes tool in your course
Open an existing quiz, or click on the New Quiz button to create a new quiz.

8. Note that you cannot Preview the Special Access version of the quiz yourself, but here is an example of what the student with Special Access will see…

…as compared to the “regular” access

Things to remember

If you will be requiring students to complete their quiz in the Respondus Lockdown browser, make sure to include this information for them somewhere BEFORE they click on the quiz (for example, in the title of the quiz) so that they know they need to go to Respondus LockDown Brower BEFORE opening the quiz.

Specific accommodation considerations Special Access WON’T help with

If you have students requiring spellcheck to be on you will likely need to set up a separate quiz to accommodate for exams with long answer questions if you want to keep spellcheck off for other students.

If you have students requiring larger font for their questions as well as for question textboxes (i.e., for answering Long Answer questions), note that this issue is still being explored and solutions will be added to this tutorial as they are discovered.

Reminders for the week

Remember the ID drop-ins. Only 2 weeks left!

Tuesday,. March 31 from 12-1 at Lansdowne, in LLC156
Wednesday, April 1 (it’s no joke) from 12-1! at Interurban in CC235

And don’t forget to register now for our Distributed Education Spring 2015 Workshop Series. Only one month before the excitement begins!!

Go to DE Workshop Series – Spring 2015 for more information, and to register.

Friday Fun Fact: Back in the day…

I thought today I would share what I think about when I hear people complaining about the speed of their Internet connection and computers, and the lack of memory on their various devices (and, yes, I have been known to be one of those people).

Does anyone remember this?

The Commodore PET

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 France license. Attribution: Photograph by *Rama, Wikimedia Commons, Cc-by-sa-2.0-fr***

THIS was the first computer I ever used. I was in grade 11, and our high school had just started its first Computer Science (I think that’s what it was called) class. And we used PET computers. What a disappointment – I was expecting Star Trek, and I got a teeny tiny monitor (the Commodore site – http://www.commodore.ca/commodore-products/commodore-pet-the-worlds-first-personal-computer/ – says it was 9 inches), and a “practical storage device”, in reality a cassette tape drive (yes – cassette tape!), which took FOREVER to save the simplest code onto. I don’t remember much about what we coded into the PETs, but I do remember having to spend hours and hours flowcharting everything first, and then hours and hours entering code praying it would work, then hours and hours saving the code onto the practical storage device to hand in.

I didn’t touch a computer again for several years. I was in university, and it was my brother’s Apple IIE– or was it an Apple IIc, no definitely a IIe… Anyway, it had no hard drive, but at least saved everything onto a floppy disc instead of a cassette tape – a 5 ¼ inch disc, mind you. But that’s a story for another day.

The Apple IIe

Author: eschudel

D2L Tool Tip of the Week: Customizing your Homepages and Widgets

D2L Tool Tip of the Week: Customizing your Homepages and Widgets

Steps for customizing your Homepage