Desire2Learn: Tricks, Tips, Ideas...?

[Laura Gibbs]

I'm someone fully immersed in D2L for my OU job, since I teach online courses. So, what do you all do to get the most out of Desire2Learn and helps folks in your colleges/departments to do so?

I am passionate about D2L WIDGETS - especially dynamic javascript widgets; that's the one thing in Desire2Learn that really suits my way of doing business. Kudos again to David Corbly and the guys in the Library IT department for creating a WONDERFUL widget for OU Library services that is available across the board for all D2L courses at OU.

I was asked by Desire2Learn to create a "Showcase Course" showing how I use widgets in my courses - if you are member of the D2L Community website, you can visit my Showcase Course here. I've got notes about how I create and add widgets to Desire2Learn, and I've got a website which is a repository of all the widgets I've created and which I am glad to share with others: SchoolhouseWidgets.

What are the other supercool things we can do with Desire2Learn??? And what is the best way for us to start sharing more widgets across campus, in addition to the super Library widget that is already available???

Snapshot of my Showcase Course (the color scheme is D2L's Community scheme, definitely NOT crimson-y and cream-y) - you can click on the image for a larger view:

[Eric Blazek]

Here in Liberal Studies, we use D2L for what D2L is good at, as a wrapper around our course :-) D2L handles the gradebook, dropbox, discussion boards, and roster, but the course content is in it's own professional (custom) website. The news item is an introductory message with a link to the website, the image at the top of the right column is also a link to the course. Library widget below that, and the Liberal Studies seal at the top left.

I have also experimented with setting JS cookies in this widget, so that the course website could pick up the section, instructor, even the student name for that matter - any information available in D2L could be passed into the website. So far its all just experiments though, nothing in production.

[Scott Watkins]

This sounds great! Maybe a little over the top for most of our faculty, but I'd like to get an idea of how you have this implemented. Can you post some code or anything that would help us see the structure?

[Eric Blazek]

Yes, it is a bit more than any faculty member could ever handle. Why should we expect faculty members to learn HTML, CSS, D2L, plus a graphical tool, several multimedia tools, etc ? I think it is rather unrealistic - which partially accounts for the slow creation of online courses. Faculty would have to be Superman.

CLS uses an I.T. team with a full-time web developer (myself); a full-time graphical designer (who lives in Photoshop and Dreamweaver); and an instructional designer (who keeps his hands off the websites). Together, this 'team approach' can support the 80+ faculty subject matter experts and ~150 courses. We build the websites and set up all the D2L sections for the faculty before the semester. If they have taught the course before, we even copy over their gradebooks and dropboxes. If they've not taught the course before, we set up the gradebook and dropboxes for them.

Obviously, not every department can add three FTE just to support online courses. CLS can do it because online enrollments is 90%+ of our college. A&S could do it - Karen Cozart and her group support D2L, but provide no implementation. Instead, they teach faculty members to fly like Superman :-) I haven't seen very many in the skies overhead, have you ?

The code is all written in PHP/MySQL with the CURL library to take care of the session handling and POST variables. The FireFox add-on 'Tamper Data' is useful to see all the post/get data. I like the free XAMPP package from http://www.apachefriends.org/ - Apache, MySQL, PHP, and phpMyAdmin - all in one easy installer, available on Windows, Linux, Solaris and OS-X too.

[Laura Gibbs]

I think there is a middle ground between being Superman (i.e. coding faster than a speeding bullet) and being a faculty member who doesn't really understand the web. As someone who teaches online and does all my own web development, the trick I have learned is to find the best configurable TOOLS that let me build my own content - websites are hard to build and configure (I stopped building websites a couple of years ago because it took too much time), but I create my own widgets, I maintain many blogs, I use lots of RSS-related tools...

I worry a lot about online faculty members who have not learned about any of the new web2.0 tools, and unfortunately Desire2Learn does not feature the use of those tools except for, thank goodness, the widgets.

Earlier this summer I decided to create a blog that shows what kind of technology I think it is worth knowing as an online faculty member - it's not PHP/MySQL by a long-shot, but at the same time there are plenty of technical skills that I to make my job manageable. With 100 students every semester, and just 40 hours per week to make sure all of their needs are met, I need to take advantage of every web-based efficiency I can find.

Right now, for example, I am replacing many of the pages in my course websites with del.icio.us generated materials - that way I can tag new things and have them automatically added to the pages without doing any webpage updating myself. I LOVE DEL.ICIO.US - it is totally content-oriented, easy to use, and ultra-efficient. And, of course, it has RSS... :-)

Here's my tech blog from a faculty member's perspective:
How To Technology Tips

[Scott Watkins]

This is a great discussion. Getting perspective from both the developer and the end-user (faculty) should prove to be invaluable to us here.

Laura, your position as both gives us a great needed insight into what we can do to support our faculty.

Eric, I think your position is truly unique. Most of our faculty here would really like to take advantage of D2L to a much higher degree, but we're lacking the resources to really support that. I give some basic how-to instructions and 'you could do this' type of advice, but I'm far from an instructional designer (My wife is and she reminds me of it constantly). However, I like the idea of creating a dedicated site for each course. Would you mind elaborating on how these dedicated sites enhance what is available within D2L and what your faculty can do above and beyond just the basic D2L set up?