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Desire2Learn Campus Life Adds Visual Designer, Dashboard

Desire2Learn has released an update to Campus Life, a mobile communications and collaboration tool for education.

Built on Amazon's Elastic Cloud Compute platform, Campus Life is a tool for creating portal-like campus apps for Android, iOS, and Blackberry devices. It provides access to campus information and services, including access to the learning management system, news, calendar, audio and video, and directories. It can work with the Desire2Learn Learning Environment (Desire2Learn's flagship LMS) or in conjunction with other technologies or as a standalone tool, providing access to course materials and discussions, gradebook access, RSS feeds, social networking tools, and library services.

The new release, introduced this week at the Educause conference in Philadelphia, includes a tool called Visual Designer, which allows users to build prototype apps through a drag and drop interface.

The software also adds a new Release Dashboard, which, as the company described it, is a "visual summary displaying the build and approval status of your mobile apps on the app stores. It also provides conveniences for reviewing and testing the app, including one-click emails to testers with download links, automatically generated QR codes, and a history of past releases."

Finally, the new version also includes a new theme and UI for Android, with support for PDF and other formats, image previews, thumbnails, and multiple pages.

Desire2Learn said that additional features will become available in November.

Campus Life is available now. Further details can be found on Desire2Learn's site.

About the Author

David Nagel is the former editorial director of 1105 Media's Education Group and editor-in-chief of THE Journal, STEAM Universe, and Spaces4Learning. A 30-year publishing veteran, Nagel has led or contributed to dozens of technology, art, marketing, media, and business publications.

He can be reached at [email protected]. You can also connect with him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidrnagel/ .


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