Category Archives: Learning Management System

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Mastering D2L Checklists

In FITS we are big proponents of using the Checklist feature in D2L. Using Checklists gives students an opportunity for self-assessment and eases the pressure on the instructor to answer "when is XYZ due" questions.

But every tool has a cost, and the cost of using the Checklist feature (with dates) is that whenever you copy a past or current course Checklist into an upcoming course, the dates are all out of whack and need to be updated (since dates don’t automatically roll forward in D2L).

In this post I’ll cover:

  1. Modifying Large Numbers of Date-Specific Checklist Items Quickly (Part 1)
  2. Condensing Checklists from 10 Weeks to 5 Weeks (Part 2)

Part 1 – Modifying Large Numbers of Date-Specific Checklist Items Quickly

Now the big secret isn’t really a secret. This process is essentially using Excel to pre-format the dates, keyboard shortcuts to copy/paste, and CMD+Tab (OS X) or ALT+Tab (Win/*nix) to navigate between Excel and Firefox.

First thing you need to do is update the syllabus with the new assignment dates. I recommend to my professors that they update the information on their syllabus first so they have a master list of assignments and dates to pull from.

Now that the syllabus is updated (ha, wasn’t that easy?) open Excel and copy/paste all the tasks/checklist items into Column A and the dates they are due into Column B. Ensure the dates in Column B are formatted as MM/DD/YYYY (for example: Wednesday, July 4, 2012 would become 7/4/2012) since MM/DD/YYY is the format D2L uses. This part, converting the human-readable dates to dates D2L can use, is probably the most time-consuming part of the whole process of updating Checklists.

Now that you’ve got your prettily formatted tasks/checklist items and their dates, go into the Checklist area of the course (https://d2l.depaul.edu/d2l/lms/checklist/checklists.d2l?ou=<whatever the OU is>) and you should see all the Checklists.

  1. Click on the Checklist you’d like to edit.
  2. Check the box at the top of the list of Checklist items (Fig.1, 2).
  3. Click on the double pencil Icon (Fig.1, 3).
  4. You should see a page with the Checklist item information displayed nicely (Fig.2).
  5. Go to Excel and click on the cell in Column B that corresponds with the first Checklist Item.
  6. Press CMD+C or CTRL+C to copy the information in the cell.
  7. Press CMD+Tab or ALT+Tab to go back to Firefox.
  8. Click on the date for the checklist item and press CMD+A or CTRL+A to "Select All" the information in the cell and then press CMD+V or CTRL+V to paste the contents of your clipboard into the cell.
  9. Press CMD+Tab or ALT+Tab to go back to Excel.
  10. Press the down arrow to go to the next cell down in Excel.
  11. Repeat Steps 6-10 for all the Checklist items.
    • Note: The key here is to make sure you are using the shortcuts. Think about the patterns your fingers are making as you CMD+Tab, Down-Arrow, CMD+C, CMD+Tab, Left-Mouse Click, CMD+A, CMD+V, CMD+Tab, etc. It’ll take a while but after 3-5 items your fingers will start to remember the pattern and you’ll get faster.
  12. Once all Checklist items have their dates updated, click SAVE to save the fruits of your labor.

(Fig.1)

(Fig.2)

Congratulations, you are on your way to modifying your enormously long list of Checklist item dates in record time.

Now enjoy your repetitive stress injury.

Part 2 – Condensing Checklists from 10 Weeks to 5 Weeks

If you’re teaching a 10 week course in 5 weeks, instead of spending a considerable amount of effort on condensing two weeks of checklists into one, try renaming each of the weeks into A/B categories as follows:

  • Week 1 becomes Week 1A
  • Week 2 becomes Week 1B
  • Week 3 becomes Week 2A
  • Week 4 becomes Week 2B
  • Week 5 becomes Week 3A
  • Week 6 becomes Week 3B
  • Week 7 becomes Week 4A
  • Week 8 becomes Week 4B
  • Week 9 becomes Week 5A
  • Week 10 becomes Week 5B

Now you have 10 weeks of checklist content condensed down into 5 weeks. This also helps keep your "10 Week Professor" mental-model intact, so there is low or no cost having to re-learn where information is in the checklist (it’s in the same spot, but with a different name).

Now you can start removing or shuffling content from the checklists if necessary and the students have solid cognitive divisions between blocks of content (rather than jamming two weeks of probably-not-totally-related checklist content into one checklist).

Conclusion

You are now a Checklist master.

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Classroom Copyright Perils

Recently, I attended a faculty professional-development event and, as is often the case at such things, the subject of putting pdf copies of course readings directly into one’s course on the university learning management system (LMS) came up. As I sat quietly (or at least attempted to), a faculty member showed how easy it was to simply upload these files into their course. "But can I do that?" someone asked. "Don’t I have to use the library reserve process?"

By nature we are all creatures of using the path of least resistance. Is it easier to simply upload everything myself into my course than to plan ahead and have someone provide me access through the library? Absolutely! The question, however, isn’t (or shouldn’t be) is it easier, but what is legal. As it turns out "fair use" is not an easy thing to determine and even those (like libraries) who are perhaps the most versed at the process are not immune to getting themselves into trouble. In 2008, Georgia State University was sued by three publishers (Cambridge University Press, SAGE Publications, and Oxford University Press) for copyright infringement for materials placed on the university electronic-reserve system. 

The ruling in GSU’s case just came down last week, and the judge, by and large, ruled on the university’s behalf. This case has been closely watched in university circles especially in light of some fairly restrictive cases just north of the border in Canada. Barbara Fister’s blog entry on the GSU decision poses some interesting thoughts on the topic of what happens if institutions decide to avoid risk by simply paying higher fees to license-collecting agencies without regard to fair use.

This is essentially what has happened and is happening in Canada where Access Copyright (the Canadian license collection organization) is attempting to severely increase rates and have claimed that "posting a link" is the same as making a copy. Potentially, a university who accepts the new fee structures could now be responsible for a $27.50 fee for every full-time equivalent student and be subjected to surveillance of campus email accounts.

In light of the turmoil in the world of copyright clearance and fair use, what are faculty members to do when it comes to making decisions about using excerpted materials in their classes? The short answer is stick with the professionals. If you don’t think that the publishing world is watching, think again. If a library can get into hot water, don’t believe that you are only small potatoes. The best option is to work within your university’s copyright and fair use policy and your library reserves process.

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Information Hoarders: Towards a More Simplified Design

After the show Hoarders was added to Netflix streaming last year, I went through a phase. It’s an addictive show, if you’ve never seen it. People who compulsively collect overwhelming amounts of what others would call clutter or even garbage are forced to clear out their accumulations or else risk losing their home, health, or loved ones. Invariably, there’s a teary scene in which the hoarder is asked to choose their family over their stuff and their bad habits—it’s just good television.

I bring up Hoarders because there’s a particular phenomenon that comes to light at least once an episode when the cleaning teams start digging through the overflowing closets: they find really nice, usable things that had been buried for years—things like brand new work clothes, office supplies, or cookwear. Of course, with these nice things having been inaccessible behind piles of more recent accumulations, the hoarder will have already bought replacements for them, sometimes repeating the cycle of buying, losing, burying, and forgetting they have the same item several times over.

Stay with me here, but I often see a similar phenomenon in some online-course sites.

There’s a tendency, if you’re not careful, to over clutter your course design to the point where you worry that your students won’t be able to find key pieces of information, so you reproduce that information in more places: in your syllabus and your course homepage and in the individual modules. I’ve seen courses do this for things like a deadline schedule for multi-part assignments, instructor contact information, and lists of links to online resources. If you follow this pattern for every piece of information that you think is just essential for your students, you can easily reach a critical mass of content in your course site that’s impossible for your students to navigate, and indeed impossible for you to navigate when you need to make changes or adjust content for the next quarter. And when you see that there’s so much content that your students won’t be able to find something essential, you duplicate that content again in an area you think will be more visible.

You see where this is going.

I don’t know that it’s realistic to have an online course that never duplicates information in more than one place, but the next time you’re thinking about how to surface an important piece of information, think twice about duplicating it in more than one place in your course site. Consider using these alternatives instead:

Better Organization with Descriptive Page Names and Headings

In some cases, you need to direct students’ attention to information they may not be looking for or particularly interested in, like an academic integrity policy. But other things, like deadlines and your contact information, students will actively seek out, and you just need to make it easier for them to find it. You can do this by making sure the names of your pages (topics in Desire2Learn) describe the content in them. It can take some time to think of good page names, but it’s time well spent. Try to put yourself in your student’s shoes: for example, if you saw a link to a page called “Faculty Bio,” would you expect that to also contain the instructor’s contact information? Maybe “Faculty Information” is a better name if the page also contains that information.

Also, for pages with lots of content, use headings to chunk information, and make it easier for students to scan the page to find what they’re looking for.

If you do this well, there will be only one logical place where students will expect to find the information, and they’ll look for it there.

Links

Rather than duplicating your content in multiple places, consider just linking to it. You don’t need to describe your assignment in the module introduction and in the Dropbox folder where the student actually submits it. You can just put the assignment description in the Dropbox folder, and instead of repeating that in the module introduction, simply link to the Dropbox folder.

This might seem obvious when you read it, but it’s one of those things that even the most experienced online instructors and instructional designers need to remind themselves of. We need to remember that we often don’t need more stuff in the course, we need to make it easier to find and access what’s already there.

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Cloning the Research Librarian and Other Solutions

Problem: Student–to–Research Librarian Instructor ratio is 60:1.

Solution: A collaborative effort between the faculty, research librarian, and instructional designer to design and embed online tutorials in the learning management system, Desire2Learn (D2L)…quickly.

It is mid-October and the January 2nd winter quarter start date is fast approaching. Nursing 400: Theories of Nursing will be offered as a hybrid for the first time. The instructional designer and faculty have been working feverishly to produce narrated PowerPoint lectures, embed video clips, write content and assignment instructions, develop rubrics and engaging discussion prompts, and integrate images and graphics. The course hinges on a multistep research-project assignment and the librarian instructional time is vital for students to have a successful course experience.

How will the students become familiar with the massive amount of library resources available to them vital to their research-project assignment? The research librarian usually conducts face-to-face instructional sessions on information literacy (IL) and useful library resources. However, the number of students in the winter cohort is much larger. He figures he needs two to three clones of himself to conduct all the scheduled face-to-face sessions plus advise students and tend to faculty research requests.

In comes the instructional designer. What about embedding online tutorials right into the course so that you can focus on advising students and handling special requests? Ding-ding-ding! Of course, the research librarians have already thought of this. They created a YouTube channel with tutorials about general library resources; but for this course, tutorials are needed that specifically address the research needs of nurses. The librarian, instructional designer, and faculty decide on four topics crucial to nursing students who are at this stage in their study and research novices. After input from the librarian and faculty, we get to work on the scripts and create the accompanying PowerPoint slides. The British accent of the research librarian coupled with his witty humor creates an entertaining and authoritative sounding product.

Now where to place these tutorials? We decide to create a “widget” in D2L that resides on the course home page so that students see it every time they log in and it’s quickly accessible. The faculty clearly directs students within the introductory course announcements to the tutorials that also include a short video introducing the research librarian and providing his contact information. Mid-course, we nervously solicit feedback from students via an embedded survey within the course.

Select Survey Results

6 question survey; n=20

Question 2: Did you feel successful when researching your topic after viewing the tutorials?

Yes

95%

No

5%

Not sure

0%

Question 3: Given the option, would you have preferred online tutorials, in-person library instruction session, or both?

Online Tutorials

50%

In-person Instruction

5%

Both

45%

Open-ended Question: Would you change anything in the online tutorials? 

No, I thought the tutorial was very self-explanatory and covered all the necessary topics to adequately navigate through the DePaul library resources.

I think that everything was well covered

No, I thought it was enough to get me started, navigating things like this usually requires me to play around in it.

I thought it was very thorough. I like how it was broken up so that if we forgot something, we could go back and rewatch a section without having to rewatch the whole thing.

No, I think it would be beneficial to have the tutorials as an overview for an in-person tutorial.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, it is helpful to look at a more comprehensive study of student content retention and the effectiveness of online tutorials versus face-to-face instruction.

Alison Brettle and Michael Raynor published a paper in Nurse Education Today titled “Developing information literacy skills in pre-registration nurses: An experimental study of teaching methods” (2012) which looked at the question of whether an “online tutorial was as good as face-to-face training for teaching IL [information literacy] skills to students nurses.” (p.2) The study of seventy-seven students added evidence to the previous claim by Carlock and Anderson (2007) that suggests online tutorials and face-to-face instruction of IL and research skills are equally effective methods.

The small student sample from NSG 400 seems to validate these findings.

We will continue to iterate the online tutorials based on student feedback and performance. It is also important to listen to that 5% who do not find the tutorials equally as helpful as face-to-face instruction; where are the gaps? We will look for solutions that capitalize on the scalability of online tutorials while integrating the irreplaceable value of face-to-face instruction. We can’t clone the research librarian, but we will continue to seek other solutions.

References:

Brettle, A., Raynor, M. Developing information literacy skills in pre-registration nurses: An experimental study of teaching methods, Nurse Edc. Today (2012), doi: 10.1016/j.nedt.2011.12.003

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Desire2Learn: Rethinking the Online “Course Site”

Here at DePaul, we’ve got a well-established learning management system. For many faculty, this provides a means to deliver content in both text and multimedia forms to students anywhere in the world. Some faculty are using their course sites in really excellent ways, delivering lecture content, videos, discussions, and assessments entirely online. Many others, though, do not want to or believe they need to use the system. On first glance, a number of disciplines don’t seem to benefit from having this system in place; for example, a music instructor whose sole purpose at DePaul is to teach private lessons might not see the value in having a course site available, since they don’t have a syllabus and each student’s lesson content is different. A foreign-language instructor might not see the immediate value of a course site beyond being a syllabus repository, if the majority of the course content will be conversational speaking. However, there are many ways to leverage the technology available in the Desire2Learn system to avoid the woes of the “common course site.” In order to take a course site to these new places, we first have to break down exactly what the words “course site” mean to us as instructors and designers, and from there we can use the available tools to produce something truly beneficial to students.

A Desire2Learn course site is, in its simplest definition, nothing more than a website. When you access your course site, you are accessing a collection of Web pages associated with your course and a collection of students who have access to it. As you create content in your class, you are really creating a series of web links and web pages to convey your information. D2L does a great job of hiding most of the tough stuff from you, so for the most part the system really is WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). You don’t have to know any code or special tricks to get the basics to happen. In a broader sense, a “course site” becomes that collection of web pages that, taken as a whole, comprise the learning materials for your course.

What if your course content doesn’t seem very internet-friendly? What if you’re working in a typically “analog” discipline that historically doesn’t make much use of Web resources? Keep reading for a few ideas that might help you rethink how you configure your class for online learning:

Idea 1: Lecture Delivery

Consider how much time you spend lecturing to your class. How many hours a week/month/quarter do you use in class for this? In order to maximize in-class discussion and reflection time, consider creating online lectures. You can record them yourself using screencasting software like ScreenFlow or Camtasia, or using online software like Screencast-O-Matic. Screencasting software essentially records whatever’s on your computer screen at the time, along with audio and/or video, and produces a video file that can be used in your course site. Students could be watching your lecture before they come to class, and then you can spend your class time discussing what they already know instead of having to present it for the first time. You can also be sure that they will get all the necessary information because they can stop, rewind, and watch over and over. You could use your course site to be the main delivery system for your lecture content.

Idea 2: The Listening Room

Suppose you are an instructor who needs to use numerous audio files for your instruction. This could be someone in music creating listening lists, someone preparing broadcasting examples for a journalism class, or a foreign-language professor providing conversation and pronunciation excerpts. D2L handles audio excellently, and can be used to present one or many examples at once. You can create content pages with audio files that will play back directly from within the page. If you have multiple examples that need to be grouped together, your FITS consultant can create a “channel” on our streaming server, so you can present a group of items as a unified whole (for example, if you wanted to present an entire Beatles album at once). There are a number of resources out there for audio files, but one of the best for music is the Naxos Music Library, which DePaul subscribes to. You can stream music directly from this collection and link to it in your course site, so students don’t have to go looking for the music. Giving your students audio examples directly in the course site will increase the availability of those materials to them for study: no more sitting and waiting for a recording to become available in the language lab or music library, and they can play and replay these files an unlimited number of times. You can embed audio in a page with descriptive text as well, so they will know a little more ahead of time about what they will be listening to.

Idea 3: The Theatre

It’s always a nice change of pace to show a film in class. This can help break up the monotony of lecture-response-lecture-response. However, what if films and film clips are a major part of the class? Consider a Television News class, where students may be frequently viewing historical newscasts or those of their peers, or a Literature in Film class, where students will be frequently viewing old films or film clips and making comparisons to the literature it is based on. If a clip is shown only once in class, it can be more difficult to ensure that students really got what you wanted them to get out of it. D2L handles video in much the same way it does audio; you can post a video clip in your course site and it will provide a player for you, so you can view it online. D2L can handle directly embedding clips from other websites like Vimeo, Viddler, and YouTube as well. You can also have channels built for your video clips if you want to show a specific set to students. Much like the lecture-delivery idea, this enables you to have students watch clips before class, so you can jump right into discussion of the clips instead of having to sit through them all in class. It also keeps those materials available to students, so they can watch them repeatedly to study for an upcoming exam. You can also embed a video clip in a page with some descriptive text content; this way they won’t just watch, but will watch for specific things.

Idea 4: The Gallery

Remember how much photocopying we used to do before each class? Every student needed to have a copy of every necessary page. In the case of instructors using images in class, sometimes this meant an awful lot more copying to show them, one to a page. Worse, a copy machine doesn’t necessarily reproduce images entirely accurately, so photocopies of the great works of western art probably don’t have the same effect as the originals. These days, digital copies of the images can be obtained and simply displayed online in your course site, where they will be available in perpetuity in a more authentic-looking form than a copied page. You can insert pictures one at a time into a content page, or you can use software like SoftChalk (available free at this link for DePaul users) to create an album that can be embedded and flipped through in a single content page. You can also embed photo galleries from other services such as Flickr into a content page; this can be a great way to create a gallery of student works that can then be displayed for the whole class after students upload to the external site. Imagine you’re teaching an Art History class. Wouldn’t it be great to have high-resolution images of the works you will be studying available right from within your course site? It would be a great help to students as they studied for exams, especially in those cases where they were studying things that weren’t necessarily in the book. Being able to do a side-by-side comparison in a flippable album would also reduce the amount of paging through the textbook a student would have to do to accomplish the same task.

Idea 5: The Tester

You’re probably aware that there is a pretty robust testing system inside D2L. It’s possible to do many things, including timed and randomized exams and surveys that vary their questions asked based on answers given. However, did you know that it is possible to use almost every type of content you can use anywhere else in a quiz question? That’s right, you can use images, audio, and video in a quiz question, as well as outside Web resources. An art professor could give an identification exam online by showing the work of art with each question. A Chinese language professor could give an exam in which students need to listen to an example and match the audio to the Chinese characters displayed. A professor teaching a film class could ask a question about a specific clip, and embed it right into the question; a music-history professor could give a listening exam online by providing audio examples for each question. If you’re using D2L for your classes, but not making much use of the Quizzes or Surveys tools, it might be a good idea to take a second look at the possibilities these tools offer. The reality is that almost every exam you could give on paper, you could also find a way to deliver online.

Idea 6: The Studio

Many applied courses such as internships, practicums, and private lessons don’t often make much use of a course site since so much of the course’s content is really about the student’s individual work and cannot be quantified on the same level as his/her classmates. Many of these sites end up with a syllabus and a few other general course documents and that’s about it. However, there are many reasons to use the system to make the site a resource even though not much “teaching” will happen through the site. For example, students enrolled in private music lessons not only have a weekly private session with the instructor but also one or more times a month meet with all the students of the same instrument/voice part for “studio class,” where they perform for one another, have guest speakers, and share common experiences. In this case, a course site for the entire “Trumpet Studio” could serve not as an instructional site (since that’s what happens in lessons) but as a repository for all students of that type. Sheet music and audio and video examples could be posted for general consumption by all enrolled students; since students at many different levels share the same studio class, there would be a wealth of knowledge and material available for younger students as they progress through the program. Studio class or concert performances could be recorded and then shared through the course site for the rest of the studio. As another example, a professional internship course site could be a repository for the most useful materials for students in that discipline rather than a teaching site. They know what they are supposed to do, but you can use your site to help them do it!

 

As you can see, there are multitudes of ways to make use of the Web space you have been given just by teaching at an institution that offers it. Just because you haven’t used a course site before for a course doesn’t mean you shouldn’t; with a little imagination you can turn a ghost town of a course site into a vibrant and truly useful resource that your students will keep using again and again. It’s our department’s job to help guide you through the selection, design, and production process to make your course site sparkle; just get in touch with your Instructional Technology Consultant or let us know at fits@depaul.edu whenever you’re ready to take that next step.

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Making Online Courses More Accessible by Design

Many years ago, before I moved to Chicago and began working at DePaul, my supervisor at a previous job took me on a field trip to a nonprofit service organization for the blind. At that time, I had never seen someone with a serious visual impairment use a computer. I had no idea how a screen reader worked, and all my knowledge of accessibility best practices came from second-hand sources I’d found online.

At one point during our tour, we asked one of the volunteers to show us a website that was difficult for her to navigate. The site she chose contained a large navigation menu composed of at least fifteen tabs at the top of the screen. As she moved her cursor from the upper left corner across the links, each one was read aloud. She explained that, because this site had no link for keyboard users to skip the main navigation, she had to navigate through every link before she could access the more important main content below.

Once she made her way to the main content of the page, she moved from link to link, trying to find a specific document she needed to access. Each time she advanced to the next link on the page, the screen reader would read it aloud, and she would pause to listen to the first few syllables before deciding whether or not to move on. At one point, the screen reader simply said, “Click here,” and then read the URL of the link aloud, which was long and incomprehensible. Because the linked text didn’t describe what it linked to, our volunteer had to stop and listen to all of the text around the link to determine if the link would take her to the document she needed.

For some reason, this portion of the field trip stuck with me. Perhaps it was etched into my memory because it seemed like such an easy issue to fix. All the site’s author needed to do was link the actual title of the document or destination page instead of ambiguous terms like “Click here.” Or perhaps I remembered it because this small change provides two benefits. In addition to helping blind users navigate a page more quickly, clear link titles reassure all users that clicking a link should take them to a page or document with a title that matches the link. This might seem like a minor benefit, but considering how often links change and break in an online course, anything we can do to clarify where a given link should go is probably worth the extra minute it might take to reword it.

Ever since that day, I’ve tried to sing the praises of link titles that match the titles of their destinations. Of course, it’s always helpful to have a well-written piece of supporting evidence from a trusted source. So, you can imagine my joy when a friend recently sent a link to this excellent information graphic.


Source: “Web Accessibility for Designers,” Info Graphic from WebAIM.org

What I love about this info graphic is it reminds me that accessible design isn’t just beneficial for the disabled. Much of what makes content more usable for the disabled also makes it more usable for everyone. To illustrate my point, here are a few guidelines from the graphic with examples of how each one can benefit all users.

Plan heading structure early. Clear headings help break up long blocks of content into more digestible chunks, making it easier for students to take a break and pick up where they left off. They also make text easier to scan for key information when students review something they’ve already read.

Provide good contrast.  Low-contrast text isn’t just a problem for users with visual impairments or color blindness. High contrast color combinations are easier for everyone to read, particularly when text runs more than just one or two lines.

Watch the use of CAPS. In addition to creating a problem for screen readers, text in all caps is difficult to read and implies the author is shouting.

Use adequate font size. No matter how good your vision, tiny font sizes lead to eye strain and frustrate all users.

Make sure links are recognizable. Cascading style sheets make it possible to spice up a course with all sorts of unique visual formatting. However, when it comes to links, the universal standard of blue, underlined text is usually best.

While this graphic was created to highlight accessibility issues that would be most relevant for designers, there are other best practices that instructional designers have to consider. In some cases, it can be difficult to justify designing online courses with complete accessibility because it’s more cost effective to address certain issues when accommodations are needed for a specific student. Audio transcription for the hearing impaired is a common example of an accessibility feature that can be difficult to justify if a course includes a large amount of audio content, such as PowerPoint narration, YouTube clips, full-length films, or podcasts.

In some cases, it’s just not feasible to transcribe everything in advance. However, there are advantages to including transcripts in the initial course-development process even if a disabled student never requests them. For example, ESL students might read the transcript as they listen to help them identify words that were difficult to understand through audio alone. In addition, students might prefer to review a transcript when preparing for an exam instead of trying to locate the portions of a video that they need to watch again.

While it can feel overwhelming to design a course that follows every accessibility best practice, keep in mind that many are easy to follow with little extra effort, assuming you’re aware of them early on. For guidelines that feel daunting, it might make sense to accommodate disabled students on a case-by-case basis. As you evaluate each challenge and determine what merits extra effort up front, keep your audience in mind. While it’s easy to feel that all accessibility accommodations are a big investment for a relatively small group of users, the impact of many accessibility improvements are seldom limited to students with disabilities. And if you don’t believe me, just ask anyone who has pushed a baby stroller down a sidewalk in the last few decades. They can tell you how helpful curb cuts are, even though they might not realize they first appeared in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in the 1940s as an accommodation for wheelchair-bound veterans.[1] Now those helpful little ramps are a standard feature that you’ll find at either end of every crosswalk in America, and I’m grateful for them every time I take a heavy suitcase to the airport.

  1. “Curb cut.” Wikipedia
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Arm Yourself with Basic HTML Knowledge

I started working in the FITS department (then called Instructional Design and Development) at DePaul as a graduate assistant, and a large percentage of my duties at the time involved moving instructor-created content from a word-processing document into the learning management system–basically, a lot of copying and pasting. But it wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Simply copying text from Microsoft Word and pasting it into Blackboard or Desire2Learn often produces strange text formatting.

These are just a few of the text formatting problems I’ve seen:

  • huge spaces between words
  • abnormally small or large text
  • seemingly random switches between serif and sans-serif fonts
  • long strings of strange xml code that are visible to students.

Other times, of course, it copies exactly as you would expect it to. In short, when you copy from a word processor into a web form, it’s very difficult to predict, even for someone who’s been at this for as long as I have, exactly what you’re going to get.

At DePaul, we have a number of instructors who are tech literate enough to want to build content for their online courses themselves but don’t know what to do when these formatting errors occur, becoming understandably frustrated.

Almost everyone is more comfortable composing their text in a word processor rather than directly in a Web interface. And I wonder if it’s time for that to change. How much of the text we produce today is going to be consumed on paper, and how much of it is going to be consumed on a screen? Should we still be teaching our students to write in a word processor, when these compatibility issues persist with Web-based writing? Should we become just as comfortable writing in the web editor as we are in the word processor?

In a perfect world, word processors would copy perfectly clean HTML into the text boxes of whatever web form they’re pasted into. But until we have a word processor from that perfect world, the brave instructor might benefit from knowing some basic HTML.

I’m not going to go through all the HTML that goes into making a website—there are great comprehensive guides elsewhere for that already. Rather, I’m going to go through some basic HTML tags that allow you to format text when you’re working in something like a learning management system.

But before I delve in, you might ask how you access the HTML for whatever you’re working on? It varies depending on what you’re working in, but in Desire2Learn, you’ll see an “Edit HTML Source” button in the lower left corner.

HTML is made up of tags, which are recognizable because they are inside angle brackets, like this: <p>. Most tags have an opening and a closing, with the content for the tag in the middle. For example <p> is placed at the start of a block of text to identify it as a normal paragraph, and </p> is placed at the end to “close” the paragraph.

These are the basic tags your content might use:

  • <p>…</p> – Paragraph
  • <h1>…</h1> – Main (page) heading
  • <h2>…</h2> – Subheading
  • <h3>…</h3> – Sub-subheading
  • <ul>…</ul> – Unordered list (bullet points)
  • <ol>…<ol> – Ordered (numbered) list
  • <li>…</li> – List item (used for each bullet or numbered item in a list. These should be nested inside a ul or ol tag.)
  • <strong>…</strong> – Bold
  • <em>…</em> – Italics
  • <a href=”[web address of link]”>text of link</a> – a link
  • <img src=”[web address of image]” /> – Image

This is an example of what clean HTML looks like, as viewed from the “View Source” button in Desire2Learn. Beneath that is an image of what actually displays when students see it. See if you can look back and forth between them and, based on the tags above, understand how the tags in the top image are producing the formatting in the bottom.

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For working in a learning management system, the tags above are really all you should need. If you see any other code in the body of your html source, that’s probably what’s causing your text formatting problems. Here are some examples of things you might see that will cause formatting problems.

  • <span> – These are often created when you copy from a word processor to a web text box as the system tries to preserve exact formatting, but usually do more harm than good. Make sure you delete both the opening and closing tag.
  • &nbsp; – This isn’t an HTML tag per se. Rather, it’s displayed as an extra space. If your text is showing extra spaces, look for some of these in the body of your HTML source.
  • <font face=”font” size=”number”> – Font tags can change the font face or font size. Make sure you delete both the opening and closing tag.

Working in HTML source isn’t for everyone and certainly not every instructor, but it is a little empowering to know exactly how your web text editor of choice—not even just in Desire2Learn— functions, and be able to go into the guts of the code and manually fix that which the system broke for you.

HTML is the language in which full websites are designed, so this is obviously just the basics. But if you want to learn more HTML, there are a lot of great resources out there, the most widely recommended for beginners being w3schools.com. Maybe this will be your entry point into the wide world of making websites.

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Management by Exception (MBE)

As a long-time project manager in the software engineering industry and especially during my time at Apple Computer, I’ve had to work in environments with a frenetic pace, to say the least. Limited time was available to manage multiple projects, let alone deal with the intricacies of the details. Hence, I learned early on to deal with the exceptions rather than the norms. This is a widely used management strategy called Management by Exception (MBE).

Management by Exception
Management by Exception is a “policy by which management devotes its time to investigating only those situations in which actual results differ significantly from planned results. The idea is that management should spend its valuable time concentrating on the more important items (such as shaping the company’s future strategic course). Attention is given only to material deviations requiring investigation.”
 
(from Wikipedia)

How does this relate to teaching online classes and D2L specifically? Well, D2L provides a wealth of reporting tools for tracking student progress. You can spend a lot of time and effort using these tools to track how much time a student spent in a module or on a quiz or even how long they were logged on to D2L. For example, the screenshot below shows the statistics for the time spent in a module for one particular course (the student names are omitted).

This particular module should have taken the student between 45-60 minutes to complete. Now, I could use this report to measure student engagement and perhaps even give them participation points for the time spent in the module. However, there is a big ‘gotcha’ in this report, and it relates to the little information icon at the end of all but the second line. If you click on the icon next to the first line, you get the following dialog:

This means that the student’s time in the module was not accurately reported. It is most likely because the student navigated away from the D2L module in a nonstandard fashion. They may have simply closed their browser or gone to a different webpage. In other words, they just ‘disappeared’ in D2L’s view, thus losing the ability to track their time. In reality, student #1 probably spent more time in the module than indicated in this report. On the other hand, the last student in the list spent 5 hours and 34 minutes in the module. If the student is logged into the module and goes off to make dinner leaving the browser up and running, then the time is still recorded by D2L.

So that leaves us with the question, “How should these reports be used if they are inaccurate?” It simply goes back to the original premise of management by exception. If a student is having difficulty in a class, such as poor performance on quizzes, lack of participation in a discussion, or other performance issues, you can use these reports to check how much time they were actually online. You are dealing with the exception rather than trying to use the reports for evaluating engagement of each student. Simply put, they should not be used to measure actual participation due to the inaccuracies of the report.

I suppose the best way to illustrate this is an example from an online course I taught a few years ago. This was an introductory Mathematics course and I received the following email from a student:

“I wanted to email you because I was checking my vista for homework and was disheartened to find that we had a test this coming Tuesday. I was caught off guard by this, because in our previous class we weren’t informed that we would be for sure having a test. I feel that it would be only right to let us know that there would be a test at least one class period before. I was wondering if there was anyway that we could postpone the test to review the concepts that will be on it.”

Normally, I am a really nice guy and would give consideration to a student having difficulty; however, I checked the report and found that this student had been online a total of 18 minutes during the previous two weeks! Needless to say, the test was not postponed. While I did not use the reports to measure student progress, they were helpful in dealing with this exception.

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Ideas for Using D2L to Make Better Use of Your Class Time

I hope we’ve gotten past the point where some instructors out there believe the Learning Management System is only for online classes. At the very least, it’s a great way for instructors in a face-to-face class to post the syllabus and other course documents and to e-mail students between class meetings. But Learning Management Systems, like Desire2Learn, have so much more to offer to the face-to-face class, especially if you’re one of those instructors who never seems to have enough class time to cover everything. Here are some ideas for using Desire2Learn to get more out of your class time.

  • Course Q&A Discussion – Set up a discussion area for questions about course or assignment requirements to minimize the amount of class time you spend on these questions. Any question you answer online will be permanently accessible to other students with the same question later. There’s an added benefit to you, because there’s a possibility a more attentive student will answer questions so you don’t have to.
  • Set up Groups – If you use groups in your class and have students select their own groups, consider using the D2L Groups tool instead. You can post a description of what each group will have to cover and have students choose which group they want to belong to. D2L allows you to set up how many groups you want or select the maximum numbers of members for each group.
  • Primer Discussions – If you like to start your class with a discussion to get students thinking about the subject-matter, consider moving these discussions online and having your students respond before class. You can even pull up your course site on the projector at the beginning of class to highlight certain student responses.
  • Course Introductions – You want to allow your students to get to know each other, but you don’t want to use class time for all of your students to tell everyone their interests and aspirations. Set up a discussion area, or simply ask your students to fill out their profile.
  • Assignments for the First Class – You won’t win any popularity contests, but if you have a lot of material to cover, and your course only meets once a week, you might want your student to do some reading before the first class. Use D2L to email your students and post a news announcement to tell students they have an assignment before the class starts.

These are just a few ideas. The possibilities are endless. If you’re a DePaul instructor and need some help getting started, we encourage you to contact the FITS department.