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Software Preview
First Look: Desire2Learn Essentials
3/1/2007
Courses and course management Of course, at the heart of Desire2Learn Essentials is its course management features. From the student perspective, these features include a wide range of content, communications, organizational and assessment tools. From the instructor perspective, they also include tools for creating and modifying content, scheduling events, grading, reporting and various other features we'll touch on below.
First, the student features.
Student tools
As we saw previously on the general welcome screen, each student has access to courses in which he or she is enrolled. Clicking on a course calls up a new page that contains, once again, custom widgets for access preferences and various other features; a course-specific navigation bar; and the course content itself.
Course content itself is fairly straightforward. It can include text, links, images, multimedia and common file types, such as Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, Word documents, etc. And tis content can be organized into modules and further organized into module sections. Within the course content is a collection of tools for help, feedback, printing, discussions, and basic navigation. Below you'll see an example of a section within a sample course module.
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.
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