Faculty Request for D2L or Instructional Design Consultation Available to Faculty!

As part of our continued efforts to provide D2L and Instructional Design support to all NLU faculty, we have recently created a survey/questionnaire to be filled out for requesting one-on-one support. Please note that these one-on-one sessions should really be used along with our D2L Training sessions. There is simply too much material to cover in the full training that cannot be adequately covered in a one-on-one session. If that simply cannot be done with your schedule, please let us know and we'll find a way to work with you over the course of several one-on-one sessions.

In these consult sessions you can receive help with any D2L tool or function including Gradebook, Discussions, uploading files, etc. We can also help with course clean-up, best practices training, and full or partial course design.

Sessions are intended to be one hour in length; we will work with you to find the best time, date, and location. Please keep in mind that much of this information is available through our scheduled training sessions (schedule can be found on the Faculty Resources website) or in our D2L Post-Training Café in D2L (email us to request access if you do not already have it). 

For any additional information or questions, please contact OIT Learning at Learning@nl.edu or request one-on-one support here.

Visit the OIT Tutorials - Youtube Channel

Are you looking for a quick refresher or tutorial in D2L? Whether it’s using the gradebook, rubrics, discussion forums or email, you’re likely to find a quick tutorial video on OIT’s Youtube playlists. It’s a great place to start when you need a quick answer! Subscribe to our channel to receive regular updates. Videos are divided into two categories: D2L for NLU Students and D2L for NL Instructors. Videos will be added regularly. Feel free to suggest additional videos in the Post Training Café in D2L.

Streamline Sending Class Emails by using D2L’s Classlist Tool!

D2L’s classlist tool isn’t just for reviewing your classes’ student enrollment data; it’s also an efficient tool for sending class emails. The classlist tool makes it easy to email the entire class, a group of students, or just one student. The benefit of using the classlist tool is the tool’s ability to automatically place your students’ official D2L email address into an email, removing the possibly of emailing the wrong student or accidently entering a student’s email address incorrectly. Additionally the classlist tool enters your student’s d2l email into an email’s Bcc (blind carbon copy) field. By placing your student’s D2L email addresses automatically into the Bcc: field the tool guarantees that students who receive the email cannot see the names of the other recipients, which is a best practice for upholding student privacy.

4 steps to sending an email from the Classlist:

1.    Select the check boxes beside the users you want to email and click Email.

2.    Enter your subject and message in the appropriate fields.

3.    You can click Browse to add an attachment.

4.    Click Send.

Watch this video tutorial to learn how to email your class via the classlist tool:

New Course Availability Settings

As the first half of the term comes to a close and some courses are now wrapping up, we have discovered the need to adjust a course date availability setting in Desire2Learn. Previously, course access for students was initially set by the dates listed in Banner. Faculty then had the ability to adjust those dates desired, allowing students to access their courses earlier or later than the "official" course dates as listed in Banner. It has since been discovered that many of those adjusted dates were overwritten by Banner. Because of this, we have changed a setting to allow students access to future and past courses, irrespective of course dates.
So, what does that mean for you? If you do not want students accessing your course, you must change the course status to "Inactive". To so this,

1. In your course, use the "Course Admin" link in your Navbar and choose "Edit Course"
2. Click the link for "Course Offering Information"
3. Uncheck the "Course is Active" check box located slightly above course dates options, under Edit Course>Course Offering Information.
4. Scroll down and click "Save"

Should you have any questions about this process, please feel free to contact OIT at learning@nl.edu. 

Thank you,

Your D2L Support Team

Desire2Learn Down This Morning

Desire2Learn (D2L), is currently down and non-functional since approximately 7:30AM this morning.

We are very sorry for any inconvenience that this is surely causing you. Please check our Online Campus throughout the day for updates as to the status of our system and for access once we’re back online.

Michael Graham, CIO

Sonja Strahl, Director of Academic Computing

D2L Downtime

I'm sorry to have to report another issue with the Desire2Learn servers causing a marked slow down on our site. Currently, D2L is working at resolving the problem. We have been told it should be fixed later today.

Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause you!
-Your D2L Support Team

We have just received this notification of an emergency maintenance window that will take place this evening at 7:00 (CT) this evening. During this time, NLU's Online Campus will be down. We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience but hope that it provides a higher level of stability and functionality to our servers and our D2L environment.

-Your NLU D2L Support Team

"An emergency maintenance window is required today  for our SaaS Operations to perform storage subsystem maintenance to support our system high availability commitments.

At the recommendation of our data center vendors we will be implementing an upgrade to the firmware. This will require 30 to 90 minutes of downtime, we will be posting a maintenance message during the outage and we will make every effort possible to minimize the amount of downtime. We apologize for this and realize it is a major inconvenience to your our customers however we believe this is going to improve the integrity and performance of the system.

Start Time of Maintenance window: January 16, 2013 20:00 ET

End Time of Maintenance Window: January 16, 2013 21:30 ET"