Category: General
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Rapid Electronic Essay Grading with Adobe Acrobat Pro
‘Marking’ can be one of the most time-consuming of a university teacher’s responsibilities – and one of the least productive. Do students actually learn from your comments? Or do they go right to the grade and ignore the remarks? Do they reflect on end-comments and revise? Or have they heard it all before? (You need…
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Flipping PDFs!
I am always online, both at work and at home. Admittedly, I spend way too much time online some days, but while there, I research and learn quite a bit in my area of interest – web development and related technologies/tools. This week I reviewed a free and rather impressive tool called FlipSnack (http://www.flipsnack.com). This…
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Is Gaming Responsible for Student Disengagement
I’m currently reading a book titled ‘Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter’ by Steven Berlin Johnson. I would recommend reading this book. It is an amazing and thought inspiring read. But that’s not what this post is about. In part of the book, Steven discusses why…
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Adding RSS Feeds to your Desire2Learn Course
An RSS feed is a web feed format used to publish frequently updated works, such as news headlines, blogs, audio and video in a standardized format. RSS feeds allow students to gather information more efficiently as they do not have to visit individual sites or wade through outdated content. Adding an RSS feed to your…
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Easy Importing of Questions into Desire2Learn Quiz Tool
Test-enhanced Learning Increasing Student Success Given recent findings that test-enhanced learning (TEL) improves students’ understanding and retention of material through regular quizzing, (e.g., Lyle & Crawford, 2011; McDaniel, Roediger, & McDermott, 2007; Roediger, Agarwal, McDaniel, & McDermott, 2011) we investigated how TEL-inspired online quizzing tools can be used in the Desire2Learn course management system. The…
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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…
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Why Open Educational Resources Matter
Definition The concept of open education encapsulates a simple but powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that the open web provides an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse knowledge.[1] Free Educational Resources Open Educational Resources (OER) are basically freely available and Internet-based, educational content and curriculum which…
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D2L Surveys and Polls
I was recently asked to look into a free tool for polling students (that would show them immediate results) within the D2L environment. D2L currently doesn’t have a poll tool/widget, although it is a requested feature: http://desire4community.com/feature-request-polling-widget-in-desire2learn/ After researching and testing many the free online poll sites, my favorite product for polling is questionpro.com. Here’s…
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Entering the Open Education Textbook Debate: Information Wants to be Free
The recent BC Government announcement on funding the creation of open access textbooks for the 40 most popular courses in post-secondary education has caused a great deal of excitement, both on the side of those advocating that commercial access to resources is an unnecessary and cost-prohibitive barrier to education, and those who believe that the…
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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…
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British Columbia Desire2Learn Regional User Forum
On Friday, Liesel and I shared Vancouver Island University’s journey this year working with Desire2Learn at the British Columbia Desire2Learn Regional User Forum held at BCIT in Vancouver. The conference brought together about 60 participants from institutions in BC and as far as Alberta to hear what was on the horizon with Desire2Learn and share their experiences. In our presentation we reflected on our experience…
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Desire2Learn Version 10.1 Software Review
There’s a lot to like about Desire2Learn version 10.1 Here we have it. Six months in to learning Desire2learn version 10.0 and version 10.1 is released. With some pretty significant changes I might add. But I’m ready. Bring it on. Reading their press release and watching their Webcasts I quickly see there are lots of…