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Software Preview
First Look: Desire2Learn Essentials
3/1/2007
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.
For example, with course content, instructors are provided tools for uploading, managing, and organizing text, images, and other content types. In the discussion area, instructors can create, delete, and otherwise manage forums. And for quizzes and self assessments, it includes the ability to create and grade various forms of tests.
Of course, it also provides a number of statistical and organizational tools. A "Class List" function provides instant access to all participants in a course, including staff and students, with one-click access to e-mail and instant messaging ("paging") through the D2L Web interface (seen below). The "Grades" function provides access to grades for all students in a course, organized automatically by assignments and tests set up within the system by the instructor.
The test engine within D2L Essentials provides a number of tools for creating graded and self-assessment tests, along with management features.
For the creation of tests, some of the specific features include:
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