D2L for online tutoring?

[Mark Walvoord]

OK...I'm getting frustrating with all my searching for a good online tutoring solution (for our new Action Program through University College); so, that means I come to you all!! I've been comparing the following:
D2L, TutorTrac's Whiteboard, AskOnline, SmartThinking, NetTutor/WorldWideWhiteboard, and Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro (see incomplete excel spreadsheet below). But, nothing seems to do everything we want (or it is overpriced or limited in some features we need).

Important features to us include: ability to track individual users (number of and duration of visits to a certain session); ability to have chat, discussion ("asynchronous chat"), and whiteboard; ability to archive and search sessions; ability to use our own hired tutors. Bonuses would include: ability for program to help setup/display tutor/session schedules; not too expensive.

D2L cannot easily track/output user's time spent in discussion board or chat for a particular subject (as I understand it). D2L also is missing a whiteboard. WorldWideWhiteboard has told us that D2L won't work with them to integrate (though apparently they can integrate "easily into CMS"). Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro seems great (thanks to Adobe and IT's Matt Runion for helping me explore this), but is missing the asynchronous (discussion) feature. Anyway, you see my trouble.

I guess since this is a D2L discussion category...my question to you is: any ideas on how to make the FREE (to me) D2L work for online tutoring (thanks Michelle Davis for your help so far)? As a portal to something else; integrating a virtual whiteboard into it, etc.? I'd love to use an RSS feed from the discussion board to tell my tutors when a student/client has posted a question...

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Mark, re: RSS feeds and discussion boards, that is not available in D2L (why not? who knows... it's a dreadful gap) - but if you don't mind running a discussion board outside D2L, I've been so impressed with ning.com (what we are using here), that I've decided to use it for my classes this fall. The Desire2Learn discussion board is abysmal by every criterion I would use, but ning.com has some really excellent features, including good RSS and email notifications. It doesn't offer any of the tracking you are looking for, but just as a way to have people interact with each other online for discussion purposes, I think it works very nicely. I'm paying $10/month to get the GoogleAds off the ning site I set up for my classes, which seems like money well spent to me - I hated every time I had to use the D2L discussion board, and my students disliked it intensely as well (it was the one thing they commented on negatively in their class evaluations every semester). I'm glad to pay $10 a month to get free of that.

About your other criteria, I don't have any insight - I feel very lucky to be teaching in a mode where tracking and monitoring are not important, and where all the activity is asynchronous. It makes life online much easier not having to manage those dimensions.

Please let us know what solution you end up with! I am really curious what kind of software there might be out there for this kind of thing!

[Mark Walvoord]

Thanks for your reply and comments! If I may ask a followup...what was it that your students disliked so much about D2L discussion boards?

Also, have you played with the Blog feature in the new D2L version? I'd love to be able to use it for the Biol1003 class I'm teaching this Fall/Spring (instead of Blogger or Bloglines).

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Mark! It's hard to get to know people as individuals in the discussion board - all the posts look the same, and it's onerous to even include an image in your post (I haven't checked the newest D2L version, but here are the instructions I gave last year for including images in posts - ugh!). It's very hard to do anything in a D2L discussion board post to make it look like you; all the posts look pretty much the same.

IAnother big problem at D2L was the names - it always displays the dotted names, but I would guess about 10% of my students go by their middle name and don't use their first name at all. So even though that was a problem for only a small number of students, for them it was a big problem - and it is actually a problem for all the students, because they wouldn't recognize the names of their fellow students who left comments for them. I use the students' preferred names everywhere else in the course - in their blogs, their websites, etc. - but then all of a sudden in discussion, they were stuck with a different (wrong) name because of the dotted names in D2L. Some of them positively loathe their first names, but they were stuck with them in D2L.

Also, without notifications, people wouldn't know when someone had responded to them, so there was not real natural back-and-forth at all.

Since I teach classes that are 100% online, the online environment is the only place people can get to know each other - and the D2L discussion board process doesn't contribute to that "getting to know" process at all. In their blogs and websites, the students are wildly creative in their use of colors, fonts, images - but they couldn't express themselves that way in D2L, and the other advantages a discussion board should offer (e.g., good back-and-forth communication) weren't there either.

The D2L blog is a disaster - it is not really a blog at all; it is more like some kind of online journal. The problems with formatting and editing are the same as with the discussion board (everything looks the same, with no way to make the blog look/feel the way you want it to) - and the RSS feed is a joke: it gives a feed of the title only, and it's password protected, even if you pull the title into an RSS feed reader, you cannot click and go to the item, unless you are already logged into Desire2Learn. ARGH. I tried blogging with it a little bit just as a personal experiment, but I found it so stultifying that I didn't even try to use it with students.

Previously, I've been using Bloglines with students for blogging because it has such good RSS integration, but I gave them extra credit for learning how to use Blogger.com also. Now I've decided to use Ning for the fall, and I am really excited about that. I think the students will really like it because it has a lot in common with Facebook, and they can choose their own personal themes for their profile pages, add widgets and videos, etc.

I'll report back on how it goes - it's a BIG change for my classes, but when I got my student evaluations this past week (they were super late this semester for some reason), I realized that I had to do something! I got really high ratings on the classes, but the comments about D2L discussion board were even more intensely negative than usual... and I'm sympathetic - over the past year I've become a very avid user of Ning, though, and experience tells me that my enthusiasm can be infectious for the students! Fingers crossed!

[Laura Gibbs]

P.S. I should say that I have not tried out the blog tool in the latest version of D2L, but since there is still no RSS notification for the discussion boards, I wouldn't expect that there has been any real improvement to their implementation of the so-called blog. You should check with Anita and Michelle about that, though - I did a lot of testing of the blog feature last year trying to figure out how it worked, but I haven't checked to see if it looks/works differently in the new D2L version.

I did update my instructions for how to add widgets to a D2L homepage, because there are some important changes to that aspect of the new D2L and I wanted to make sure anybody who had used my widgets previously didn't get confused by the new way that works in the new D2L. :-)

[Scott Watkins]

Hey Mark,
I'm really not sure where to start here. It doesn't seem like there's an easy solution to what you need other than developing from scratch. You could always use a 'mash-up' of different applications and make them seem seamless by using a common design template, but then you run into the issue of how to authenticate users from app to app. Another option would be to develop from an open-source application. Dr. Pat Hardre and her team developed an online training course for new TAs completely in Moodle (although there's a steep learning curve, there are a variety of components available to integrate). The course is located at http://edres.ou.edu/ita/. Otherwise, if it's just a matter of one or two features being left out of D2L, then I would suggest the mash-up. Use wordpress or mybb forum (open-source apps) and just require an additional login (I know it's not the best solution, but for the price it really can't be beat). Good Luck!