February 2007 — News
Print this article | Email this articleClick here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal
First Look: Desire2Learn Essentials
Beyond the course content itself, there are also several communications functions. These include an area for discussions, which includes access to statistics on individual users enrolled in the course (posts read and posts authored).
And it includes blogs, which can contain public and private entries, as well as e-mail, paging, notifications through interface widgets, feedback, and surveys. (On the administration side, surveys include a selection of typical question types, e-mailing custom survey invitations, restricting responses, reporting and statistics, course integration, and export to external systems.)
Assignments and tests are also handled directly though individual course. Assignments can be turned in using a drop box. Tests and quizzes are handled through the D2L Essentials interface. And there are also self-assessments, which are not graded but rather used by students to measure their own abilities prior to taking graded tests.
Once assignments and tests are submitted, students can access their grades immediately and, if given the option, can retake a test to improve their grades.
Outside of the courses themselves, students also have access to a calendar of events, a "locker" for storing files (with a fixed amount of usable space), self-enrollment capabilities for joining courses, and other statistical and organizational tools.
Instructor tools
As with other course management systems, D2L Essentials includes the ability for users to have multiple rolls within an organization. A user might be a student in one course, an instructor in another, maybe a guest in another. Essentials provides unlimited organizational units and roles with granular permissions. Rolls can be switch through a widget known as the Rollswitch widget.
At all participation levels, much of the interface and workflow remain consistent. But the capabilities when accessing various features changes with the role of the user.
We previously looked at a course using a student login. Now we take a look at a related course using instructor access.
As with student access to a course, instructor access provides all of the common widget elements that have been set up; all of the course content, viewable just as a student would see it; quizzes and self assessments; and all of the other organizational, statistical, and communications tools.
However, instructors also have the ability to alter all of the various elements of a course and create new courses.
