Desire2Learn Help

Desire2Learn Help is your source for the most recent user documentation.

Click on "View all Help Documents" for help guides and information about the features of this system.

With the system version upgrade from 9.2.1 to version 9.4, are many enhancements and features to frequently used tools of the system. Please see below for a brief description of the enhancements available.

Description of Version Enhancements

Dropbox 

The Leave Feedback interface is completely redesigned for 9.4 to show both submissions and space to grade the submissions in one page. Instructors can also now view specific document types in your browser without downloading them. Documents are available as text only or as a document image (meaning instructors can't select text). 

The following file formats are compatible with Dropbox's document viewer:

• MS Word (.doc, .docx) - View ONLY in D2L, Annotate in MS Word
• MS PowerPoint (.ppt, .pptx, .pps)  - Annotate in PowerPoint
• Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) - View in D2L, Annotate in Adobe Acrobat
• Web (.htm, .html)  - View and annotate in D2L
• Plain text (.txt)  - View and annotate within D2L
• Images (.bmp, .gif, .jpg, .jpeg, .png)

Instructors can also annotate users' web and plain text file submissions with the HTML Editor and attach those annotations as part of feedback.

Calendar

The new Calendar is completely redesigned to focus on presentation of course material. 

• Lets instructors create events from Content and schedule your course independent of availability events.
• Instructors can subscribe to all your course calendars or individual course calendars through iCal. This enables instructos to easily view your Desire2Learn course events in external calendars such as Outlook and Google Calendar, and on mobile devices such as iPhones, Android, and Blackberry.
• Instructors can now create and track personal tasks in Calendar. Personal tasks replace personal events from previous versions.

News

• Instructors
• Publishing Status: Instructors can save drafts of news items for later, or set items for future publication. See Creating a News item.
• Major Edits to News Items: In conjunction with dismissing news items, instructors can mark edits to News items as major edits, which restores the edited items to users' News widget and triggers a notification, if they've subscribed to notifications.
• Students
  • Students can now dismiss news items from appearing in the News widget once you've read them. See Managing News items.

  Notifications

Students can now have more information delivered to them through RSS, email or text messaging.

• Students can subscribe to receive email or SMS notifications on dropbox folders with approaching end dates.

Notification preferences are accessible from the My Settings widget. Learn More.

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