What’s New in D2L 8.3

My Courses Widget

Faculty can now choose to show course updates show in My Courses Widget. Updates for unread discussion messages, ungraded quiz attempts, unattempted quizzes, and unread drop box submissions or feedback can be displayed.

Discussion Boards

With just one click faculty can now create a new topic with same title as the forum they are creating or they can set the forum to not post messages until the instructor has approved them. The current version of D2L allows users to post anonymous messages and forums can be hidden or displayed between a specific set of dates but with the upgrade to 8.3 faculty will be able to lock and unlock forums by dates.  Locking a forum stops users from posting new messages but the previously posted messages are still visible to students.  Faculty can use the new pinned message feature to post announcements, summaries of discussion board postings, or rules of conduct and those messages will always stay at the top of the message list. Faculty can move Topics between forums and can copy Forums, Topics, and associated Pinned Messages.  Messages can also be moved between Topics.

Messages can now be given a rating of one to five stars by users and the average rating will display next to each message. Faculty can use rubrics to facilitate grading student discussions and also create grade book columns for topics. When setting up restricted discussions faculty can now select (or filter) by both the Group Category and Forum using drop down menus displayed on the same page, previously these two items were on separate pages.

Drop box

Drop boxes can now be set up to accept group assignments. Faculty can set the drop box folder type to either accept individual submissions or group submissions when the dropbox is created. Once the drop box has been created faculty cannot change the drop box folder type from one category to another.

Grade book

D2L 8.3 includes a setup wizard to streamline the grade book setup process.  Different feature sets can be displayed for novice users and for advanced users. Faculty can enter grades in a spreadsheet like interface and can collapse category headings.

Schedule / Calendar

A Quick Add popup window has been added to the interface to allow faculty to quickly create a schedule/calendar posting. The popup window allows the user to enter the event title and indicate whether the event is an all day event or indicate specific dates and times. The faculty member will need to use the standard New Event screen to create events that require descriptions, need to be set as private, to set the priority level or to add external links.  The New Event screen now allows faculty to specify which users can see specific events. New events can now be added from the Drop box, Checklist, Quizzes, Discussions, Content, Grades and Survey Tools.

Content

When faculty members click on the Content link on the Blue navigation banner they now go directly to Manage Content. Clicking on the View Content button allows faculty to view content as it would display to students. Reports are also available for the content area so that faculty can view the number of users who visited specific pages and the average time spent on each page. Reports can also be filtered by user to view the number of content topics visited.

Classlist

A print tab button that facilitates printing the Classlist has been added in addition to a report view that displays the number of persons enrollments and withdrawals in a course by role name.

Email

The ability to email selected users has been added to the email feature of the Classlist tool.