Desire2Learn for Higher Education Cookbook

Gain expert knowledge of the tools within the Desire2Learn Learning Environment, maximize your productivity, and create online learning experiences with these easy-to-follow recipes.

Overview

• Customize the look and feel of your online course, integrate graphics and video, and become more productive using the learning environment’s built-in assessment and collaboration tools
• Recipes address real world challenges in clear and concise step-by-step instructions, which help you work your way through technical tasks with ease
• Detailed instructions with screenshots to guide you through each task

In Detail

Creating an engaging online or web-enhanced class in the Desire2Learn Learning Environment doesn’t have to be difficult. The easy-to-follow recipes in this cookbook guide you through everything from getting your course ready for students to calculating final grades.

“Desire2Learn for Higher Education Cookbook” offers recipes that will help you set up, customize, and conduct your online courses — whether you’re new to the system or a seasoned D2L user. The recipes are written for version 10 of the learning suite, although many of the examples are also applicable for version 9.4.

The cookbook is organized around tasks that instructors address during a typical semester, starting with a basic course setup and working towards calculating final grades.

Early recipes focus on creating a personalized learning environment by helping you customize the look and feel of your course and its content. Other recipes in the cookbook teach you how to integrate your favorite multimedia and social networking sites. Later chapters offer recipes for productivity in several of the learning environment’s tools.

“Desire2Learn for Higher Education Cookbook” is filled with screenshots and detailed steps to increase your productivity when working in the learning environment to create and facilitate your online courses.

What you will learn from this book

• Copy course materials from another class or previous semester
• Customize your course navigation bar
• Create a visually appealing course theme
• Quickly reorganize an existing course
• Embed videos from YouTube and other websites
• Create and display your own screencasts
• Make your content more mobile-friendly
• Streamline the quiz creation process
• Archive a copy of your final grades
• Monitor student participation

Approach

Part of Packt’s Cookbook series; if you don’t have the time to work your way through a long tutorial, then this is the book for you. The step-by-step recipes are independent from each other so you can dip in and out of the book or follow it from start to end to build a higher education course.

Who this book is written for

If you’re familiar with D2L’s basic tools but want to do more with your course, then this book is for you.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Getting Your Course Ready for a New Semester
Chapter 2: Personalizing Your Course
Chapter 3: Getting Materials into Your Course
Chapter 4: Working with Multimedia
Chapter 5: Diving into HTML Code
Chapter 6: Managing Assessments
Chapter 7: Collaboration and Participation
Chapter 8: Working with the Grades Tool