Viewing D2L Version 8

At the Minnesota e-Learning Summit I spent about 40 minutes with Stephan Meyer of D2L taking a look at the inside of D2L version 8. I've blogged previously about his presentation at the Higher Learning Commission meeting where he talked about version 8 tools, but he didn't show a live demo at that meeting.

He showed me the following:
  1. Course export tool (yes, it really does exist)
  2. Competencies tool
  3. LiveRoom (much much more than a chat room)
  4. Learning Object Respository with advanced metadata
  5. Reporting tool (much further developed, allowing granular reporting)
  6. Blog tool (but no wiki)
  7. New copy component tool (much more powerful)
  8. Search tool integrated into most of the tools
  9. Redesigned (and improved) HTML editor (and works with Firefox!!)
  10. Improved survey tool (you can actually export your data - finally!!)
One of the biggest fears that users have about the new version is what will happen to the user interface. The answer is almost nothing. Almost all of the changes are in new tools, improved tools, and especially the underlying architecture that makes the program (in theory, and I hope, in reality) peform better. The user interface looks basically the same.

The LiveRoom tool looks very functional for those who want to employ a synchronous tool. Very much like a WebEx experience if you are familiar with that. It is java based. It allows you to bring in content from the course, from your computer (PPT, for example), from the web....mark it up, let students mark it up, it has an equation editor, allows you to archive the session, you can allow a student to run the show, or set one up only for a group of students to use as they like. For those of you in MnSCU, you need to know that this tool is not included in our core contract. If we are going to have access to it we are going to have to pay for it, so we'll see how that goes.

I'll post additional entries over the next few days with more information about some of the other tools.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ed2Go is NOT Higher Education

Image
For several years now I have railed against the use of ed2go courses when they are affiliated with a college or university. During my time on the Minnesota Online Council I was especially adamant against the listing of the ed2go courses at the MnOnline website as though they were endorsed courses from a member institution. There is no way that I think the brand should be diluted by including courses like this in our offerings. Why not? Glad you asked. NOTE: most of this post was written after I discovered that my own school had recently signed on with ed2go. This saddens me to no end since I spent the past five y ears railing against the use of ed2go in Minnesota Online and our colleges. Our VP in that division assures me that they will do what they can to not harm our reputation for quality online offerings - and I believe that, I'm just not sure how much of that we can actually control. I waited a couple of weeks before posting this to see whether my opinion would be changed by...
Read more

Another Switch from Blackboard to Desire2Learn

Image
As many of you know, I am always interested in the comings and goings of the LMS wars. Who's leaving Blackboard and what are they going to? I rarely have to ask the opposite question - who's migrating to Blackboard from a non-Blackboard platform - because it almost NEVER happens. The latest one to catch my eye was the University of Surrey in the UK. Here's their press release about choosing D2L . Nowhere in the release do they mention what platform they've been on - but it doesn't take much effort to find this on their current website: So, yes, this is another school switching from Blackbeard to Desire2Learn. I find portions of their press release to be revealing about their previous experience with BlackCT Vista. "A new hi-tech system is being introduced at the University of Surrey to enable students to learn on computers and mobile devices via a more personalised platform ." "The new Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), replacing and vastly improving...
Read more

New Netiquette Guidelines for LSC Online

The LSC Online Programs Advisory Committee decided to craft a set of netiquette guidelines that would serve as the recommended list that faculty could use for their online courses. It's not a full policy or anything like that, just an attempt to give them some useful information to post in their online courses. Faculty are free to use them, change them, add to them, not use them at all, or whatever. The list is posted in the LSC wiki . This project was taken on because many of our online faculty had been using a particular web resource for many years as a netiquette guide. That web page began carrying less-than-attractive banner ads and quite frankly was always more about general online netiquette rather than focused on online learning. There are quite a few other sets of guidelines out there, but many of them are rather lengthy or include items that we don't feel are needed, and occasionally we just disagreed with them. So, we decided to write a relatively short list of our ow...
Read more