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Images too large? Don’t have Photoshop? What can you do?
ADDING IMAGES TO D2L When helping faculty with their D2L courses I see a common problem almost daily: uploading images to D2L that are full resolution and too large for the screen. Sure, once uploaded to D2L they can be sized on screen visually, but image size itself stays the same – – so over…
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Pushpins in D2L
I recently attended the D2L Regional Users Forum at the BCIT downtown campus in Vancouver and spent a couple of my sessions with a D2L trainer learning about some of the tips and tricks with D2L and came across a little tidbit that may be a bit of a time-saver. In the mini-bar of the…
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Lecture Casting: Echo360 Presentation
On Thursday last week I attended a presentation from the folks at Echo360 about their range of lecture capture solutions. The presentation was hosted down at Camosun College in Victoria. We were delighted to be invited to attend by our colleagues at the Centre of Excellence for Teaching and Learning at Camosun. From what I…
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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…
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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…
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Open (and FREE) Textbooks
The Open Education movement has many merits in terms of providing free resources to students and instructors from K-12 to post-secondary and graduate education -“open” in terms of no commercialization or publisher/company involvement. Open also means that it has been made available under the Creative Commons licensing in terms of sharing, repurposing, and using. This…
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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…
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State of the Learning Management System Marketplace 2012
Source: The Delta Initiative – shared under a CC BY-ND license I always enjoy the Delta Initiative’s round up of what is going on in the learning environment market. The latest infographic shows the current market share for the major software producers of learning management systems. Most notable on this graphic for me: The returned growth of the home…