One of the things to be praised about Desire2Learn is the flexibility it offers to instructors in the way they can present course materials and content. You don’t just have to tell students to go to the Quizzes tool for an exam; you can link to it from Content, from a Checklist, or even from within an already-established HTML page. You can create a special widget that will link to it, or a News item that points to it. You can even make a special navigation bar button that will go directly to it for that all-important final. More is better, right?

Not always. Some instructors provide multiple links to the same documents, quizzes, or content, in an effort to make things easier for their students to navigate. Although this gives you incredible versatility in how you can set up your course site, linking in many different ways can, in fact, actually reduce the overall perceived usability of your course site. Furthermore, you may be creating extra headaches for yourself in course design to maintain all these links. Consider these things:

1. What if you change the location of a piece of content that is linked to from three or four different places? It creates a situation in which every time you move content around, you risk breaking not one, but three or four different links, which you will have to replace manually.
2. Having multiple links to the same thing can in some cases reduce the security you have been careful to apply to certain materials. For example, you might have a link to a quiz that is set to appear in Content with a release condition, so students must satisfy a condition in order to see it. At the same time, you must remember to set the same condition for every link to that quiz in your course site, or you risk students getting into the quiz without your knowledge. Here’s the even bigger kicker: if you create that quiz link in an HTML page in Content, or in a News item, you simply can’t apply the release condition to it even if you wanted to.

On the surface, since the majority of complaints we get as instructors from students about our course sites are access-related, it would seem to make sense that the more ways we give them to find things, the less likely they are to have these issues. However, this is only partially true. When students are confused about where to find things, giving them more links may or may not actually have any effect. It’s like applying the scattershot approach to solving the problem. “If they can’t find one link, I’ll give them four, in different places. That should do the trick.” However, is this really a solution, or just a quick fix?

The real solution lies in how we think about a course’s UI, or user interface. Desire2Learn does a great job of making a lot of the hard stuff easy by presenting an interface that is fairly intuitive. For example, when you first come to a Course Home page, you will see News items front and center, you will be notified about upcoming course events, and you will see a navigation bar that presents the major tools that will be used in the course. It is pretty obvious that the notifications are there to be read, and are visible for that purpose. It also is pretty obvious that there are a number of features in the navigation bar that are important to the functioning of the course.

Beyond that, as much as we wish we could, we can assume nothing about one course site as compared to another. No two course sites are created equally, as the flexibility D2L offers instructors also means that they can make radically different course content without changing much of anything in the default ways their site runs. For example, some instructors use the Quizzes tool extensively for all their exams in a course, while some use it only for low-stakes ungraded weekly problems. Some instructors eschew the Quizzes tool altogether for essay exams, using the Dropbox tool instead so they can run essays through Turnitin plagiarism detection. If you’re a student coming into a course site, can I assume you will know just what to do, given this huge array of possibilities, if you are just dropped into the course site?

Of course not. Therefore, the onus is on the instructor to provide a clear path to navigating success in the course, which includes the course site. Rather than giving students many different ways to do the same thing, which in some cases will confuse them, it turns out to be far better to give them one, but to explain it completely.

It seems a bit pejorative to say that you should strive to make your course sites “foolproof,” but that is exactly the way to go about it. This is something we at FITS are always encouraging instructors to do. When students arrive at the site, do they find instructions that tell them how to get started? Is there a clear and consistent navigation scheme present that students can easily figure out? Are materials there given titles that demonstrate where they fit in the hierarchy? The best course sites should take little to no extra time on your part to explain, because they should be simple enough to navigate and understand that a first-timer should know what to do. Are your typical procedures pretty much the same from week to week? If so, trying to keep everything consistent as far as look and feel will greatly reduce any confusion later on. Here are a few things to think about and do that can help:

1. Give students a “Welcome” News item on your Course Home page that links directly to the syllabus, schedule, and other pertinent materials to get them started right away.
2. Use an easy-to-follow module structure in Content. Many professors use a week per module, but you could use a case study, a unit, or anything you can think of, so long as the module structure is consistent and easy to figure out.
3. Use the same consistent structure for your modules in Content each week, including keeping things in the same order (you might think ordering doesn’t matter to students, but it definitely does). If you have additional materials for some weeks, put them at the end of the week’s list.
4. Brevity is key. Students hate exhaustive detail (and sorry students, I don’t mean in long reading assignments!). The more complicated your course structure is, the more likely a few will get lost!
5. If you’re not using the tool in the navigation bar, get rid of the button. Some students will actually email you asking about why you don’t have quizzes when you might not even be doing online quizzing!

Rethinking your user interface isn’t easy; in fact, it can be one of the hardest things to do in taking a course online. But fear not: we’re here to help. You can find your college or school’s embedded Instructional Technology Consultant at http://fits.depaul.edu/Contacts/Pages/default.aspx , or you can get answers to those burning course design questions by emailing fits@depaul.edu.