D2L Fusion 2013 summary: Doug

HEADLINES

The 10.2 upgrade is going to present a great opportunity for online faculty and students. New tools and the re-formatting of existing tools will offer greater efficiencies and the ability of users to customize their work flows.

·         Intelligent agents coupled with release conditions and replacement strings can assist instructors in providing more personalized feedback to students in a timely manner automatically.

·        Analytics, which will become “Insights”  in 10.2 will be much more useful to faculty than what is currently available. 

BEST SESSIONS

Meeting with support team from D2L was excellent dialogue. Regis’ concerns were laid out and reasonable explanations were offered as to why some of the issues that other users experienced won’t be problems in our upgrade. The fact that they were high up in the support hierarchy took away the concern that it was just a sales pitch and they discussed openly what their concerns were and how they would approach them. Meeting Nick was a bonus, but it also gave us the opportunity to openly praise him to others in his organization which I think is important as it showed them that we recognized and appreciated the excellent support we received.

EXPO HIGHLIGHTS

·         The Binder app could be a very useful tool for students. Though just for IPads currently, it will become very useful to students as it becomes available to other browsers. Could be especially useful to the PT iPad initiative.

·        Approach training with a theme and collaborate efforts rather than approach in our silos.

·        The Vendors Top Hat has a student response system that utilizes student owned devices that eliminates expensive clicker systems. The pickup involves a dedicated browser that doesn’t result in data charges to the students.

BIGGEST SURPRISES

·        Version 10.2 is going to come with document templates that may help with some of our current battles over consistent format, however, if no controls are placed on their use, it may only exacerbate the issue

       Drag and drop will be a wildly popular time saver, but it is going to wreak havoc on the back end file structure. Drag and drop will simplify the upload process, but the uploaded file is simply dropped into the root folder. It is very likely that faculty either through ignorance or lack of concern will ignore the backend file structure all together which will lead to difficulties in managing the content. This will need to be addressed in training.

      If not addressed early, faculty may view analytics as a way for administration to scrutinize instructors rather than improve education for facul

      BEST IDEAS

·         Use training to cohesively train not just in what’s new and how to use, but to also train to avoid creating identified problems in our workflow.

·        There are additional issues with the change that may create new problems, but knowing and anticipating them will give us the opportunity to assess how we can try to prevent them with training.

·         Utilize Insights to identify struggling students early and support them to be successful. Interventions can be as simple as encouragement or making students aware of existing resources that target their needs.