The CIEL Blog

Author: Stephanie Boychuk

  • Desire2Learn Learning Sessions

    This March our Centre began running Desire2Learn Learning Sessions, welcoming 31 instructors from various faculties to 25 different sessions throughout the month. The instructors averaged 2 sessions each!   If you didn’t get a chance to attend any sessions, we are offering eleven different 50 minute sessions at many times and days in April, May…

  • Embedding media in your D2L course

    Video and other visual media enrich your course. Video allows your students to access material at their own pace – they have the power to pause, rewind and replay material as many times as they like. You could record your lecture (for help getting started, see the post by Michael Paskevicius here) or you could…

  • D2L 10.1 – How to access your content tools

    When I opened up the freshly upgraded D2L today, I was both excited and nervous. I knew there were some great improvements coming (outlined here by Arwen: https://wordpress.viu.ca/ciel/2012/11/14/d2lv101review/ ), but I also knew some of the changes would affect the look and feel of content areas. I spend a lot of my time in content…

  • Randomizing Questions in Your Desire2Learn Quiz

    The quiz tool in Desire2Learn is pretty cool. I like that you can have the quiz graded and the grades exported to gradebook automatically. In addition to being able to see different types of reports on your students’ results, you can also set limits on time and number of attempts. My favorite aspect of this…

  • Open Access and Scientific Publishing

    Recently in honour of Open Access Week, PhD Comics posted a video (liked to and embedded below) explaining what open access means and why the scientific community should take notice. It very clearly lays out why open access is important to science, government, universities, and students. Enjoy, and see the post below this one for…

  • How can I project the screen of my iPad in the classroom?

    For the record: I am not advocating buying an iPad or any other product. These suggestions are based on support forums and have not been tested explicitly by myself or CIEL.   There are a number of options for projecting the screen of your iPad, depending on the other hardware you have at your disposal…