Monthly Archives: October 2010

Desire2Learn Primer

There is always a learning curve when it comes to making a major change. DePaul’s switch from Blackboard to its new learning-management system, Desire2Learn, is no exception, but don’t be afraid! With some knowledge, training from Faculty Instructional Technology Services, and a little practice, Desire2Learn skills are easily within your reach.

First, Consider the Metaphor

In Blackboard, course materials, whether for a fully online class or a hybrid course, were posted in a folder structure, with folders generally as buckets for weeks or modules. A syllabus, for instance, would be uploaded as a new “item” into a specific location, which was a folder.

Desire2Learn has a tree-structure, rather than folders. Navigation is across the top of the course, rather than on the left, as my colleague Eric talks about here. In Desire2Learn, a course generates with a more fluid structure in place, as opposed to Blackboard, which had a handful of set menu items. In Desire2Learn, you get to decide how you want your course to look and where your items should be.

Next, Decide How It Should Look

Think about how you want your course structured: Do you just need a place for students to access your syllabus and weekly readings? Are you teaching fully online in a weekly schedule? Do you use modules? Is your course ten weeks? Five weeks? FITS has a variety of templates for download, that, when imported into your course, will create a basic structure in which you can organize your course. The templates will build the empty “buckets” in which you can upload or create the course materials you need.

Then, Begin to Build

Once you’ve determined how your course should be arranged, you can upload files through the “Manage Course Files” section of your course (accessed when you click “Content” in the Navbar). Once you’ve uploaded the files you need in your course, it is easy to drag and drop them into the module or structure where you want it to live using the “Course Builder” tool. The Course Builder also allows you to create new pages, like a new “item” in Blackboard. You can copy text from Word documents (from, example, a syllabus) and paste it into a page.

And of Course, Ask for Help

Getting from your empty course shell to a fully built, fully featured course offering might not happen the first time you sit down in front of Desire2Learn. When you get caught up in a question you can’t answer, FITS is here to help. DePaul Faculty have access to on-campus training at Lincoln Park and in the Loop designed to teach the basics of course building, as well as proficiency with specific tools. FITS also offers an online, self-paced training course, which offers documentation, tutorials, and point-of-contact support.

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When “The Social Network” Penetrates the Rest of our Lives: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

When we learn something new, it’s natural (and often helpful) to reference previous experiences. In the trainings we’ve been holding for Desire2Learn, we’ve often found ourselves making comparisons to other Web tools in hopes of fostering connections to the new system.

With D2L, one of the first comparisons that comes up is Facebook. When we show people how to create a profile, they are entering information “as they would on Facebook.” Then, once they’ve added a picture of themselves, that picture displays in discussions “like it does on Facebook.”

I wanted to step back from this comparison for a moment, though, to ask, “How useful is this practice? What is the cost-benefit ratio?”

The Good: Familiarity Breeds Usability

In many cases, yes, using knowledge of other tools to learn a new tool is helpful. Usability studies (often from Jakob Nielsen, a usability expert I love to cite) show that features of websites that we can “learn” will make our experiences with a site better.

For example, on most websites, companies place their logo in the upper-left corner of the screen, and this logo serves as a link to the site’s homepage. This wasn’t always the case, but once this feature became available on several websites and users “learned” to click the logo to go back to the homepage, it caught on as a common feature across the Web.

Profiles and other tools operate in D2L do seem to be taking cues from social networking. It’s helpful to see a student’s face next to their discussion posts, and students in online classes appreciate the extra touch that “seeing” their instructor throughout the course provides. Since this is a familiar feature from Facebook, it can make the Discussions tool more usable.

The Bad: Identity Crisis

Unfortunately, something that we learn in one tool doesn’t necessarily translate to every other space on the Web. If the Discussions tool in D2L looks like a Facebook wall, will students have the savvy to switch to a professional tone when they enter an area whose appearance usually reads “social”?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I would argue that this is an important teachable moment. We are communicating more and more online or via text, and the ability to switch your persona and your tone in different scenarios is a valuable one. These can be the most difficult learning curves to overcome, since it’s harder to differentiate between two similar items than it is to differentiate between opposites. In this case, familiarity is at the core of the problem, but by setting clear expectations and modeling effective professional communication, you will help students learn a skill that is a “must” for their future professional lives.

The Ugly: Social Network Contempt = New Tool Contempt

I can’t say that I’m as big a fan of Facebook as others in my demographic, and I sometimes worry that making comparisons to Facebook can be problematic for our audience in trainings. Many people aren’t the happiest with Facebook right now due to some recent troubles with changes they made to privacy settings, so I don’t want to bring any negative baggage to the new system.

While these are negative experiences we may not want to associate with a new tool, I think they can also make us smarter users overall, which never hurts when we’re learning. Rather than encountering a rude surprise when we discover that our D2L profile information (where we shared our love for bubble baths and interest in YouTube videos of babies using iPhones) is available to everyone in our academic classes, we know to ask questions about information availability up front.

Whether you’re thrilled or horrified to see features familiar from social networking sites find their way into your learning management system, remember that you don’t need to use these features any more than what helps you as an instructor. There may be a trend toward social networking, but don’t let that force you into constructing 140-character assignments.

Blackboard and Desire2Learn

Having worked with instructors over the summer and during the fall quarter on transitioning from Blackboard to Desire2Learn, I understand the frustration and confusion many have experienced regarding DePaul’s decision to change learning management systems.

As one of the participants in the LMS review, I tested Moodle, Angel, Desire2Learn, and Blackboard 9. I’ll cut through all the pros and cons and just say that I thought Blackboard 9 would be the best decision because we were already using Blackboard 8. Obviously, the decision has been made to move to Desire2Learn, and that isn’t going to change.

Instead of talking about why I wanted to switch to Blackboard 9 or why we should all appreciate (or hate) Desire2Learn, I’d rather talk about the confusion and frustration in moving to Desire2Learn.

I am teaching a section of WRD 103, Composition and Rhetoric I, this quarter, and I am using Desire2Learn as a supplement for the course. I post my daily agenda, readings, assignment sheets, and other “stuff” on my course site. So far, none of my students have had any trouble accessing the course site or the materials there, and while some might give Desire2Learn’s usability all the credit for that, I’d say that my students’ determination and experience with networked computer interfaces helped them more.

I personally haven’t had any major headaches in using Desire2Learn. I never taught in Blackboard so I can’t compare the teaching experience, but I have built and provided support for about a hundred courses in Blackboard in the past two years. Fundamentally, the process for building “stuff” in either LMS is the same. You click buttons, point to files or areas in the course, type, and click more buttons. I’d argue that an instructor who knows how to build course content in Blackboard could do the same in Desire2Learn once he or she finds the appropriate buttons in Desire2Learn. I think Blackboard users are having a harder time finding the appropriate buttons in Desire2Learn because it uses a horizontal navigation instead of a vertical navigation like Blackboard.

Desire2Learn:

Blackboard:

     

Neither navigation is inherently better; it’s a matter of becoming familiar with one or the other, or in my case, both. I think a lot of faculty and staff are initially confused that there isn’t a menu along the left-hand side of the screen, and out of this confusion arises frustration.

Sometimes, confusion and frustration can be productive. But in the cases I’ve seen faculty experience frustration and confusion with Desire2Learn, they tend to manifest in negative, unhelpful ways. It generally follows a script something like this: “Help, I can’t figure ‘X’ tool out. What do I do? Desire2Learn is so dumb/hard to use. Why did the university even decide to switch to this? It’s so stupid. You know, there have been schools or departments where the faculty refuse to adopt a new LMS.”

I certainly sympathize with this sentiment, but I tend to think it’s a waste of time. My advice would be to just forget about how you did thing in Blackboard, Angel, or whatever other learning management system you were in before, and just think more generally about computing. When you get some new software, you can rely on your prior knowledge to expect that the “File” menu in the new software will be similar to the “File” menu in other, similar software. So the “Content” link in Desire2Learn is going to be similar to the various course content areas in Blackboard, like “Course Materials,” “Readings,” and “Instructor Information.” So when I said that it’s less about Desire2Learn and more about my students’ determination and experience with networked computer interfaces that has helped them with becoming familiar with Desire2Learn, I’m hoping you can find a similar determination and can call on previous general computing knowledge to help you.

I leave you with a flowchart to help with figuring out Desire2Learn: (ref)