D2L

Fusion 2014 – Unconference and Day One Recap

Posted on by Jon K.

Instead of a big post I’m going to break my experiences up into three distinct posts because a) it’ll get me to post more frequently, b) that’s something I want to do and c) no one wants to read a monolithic block of text.

So I flew out of Buffalo, and it was an interesting time crossing the border where I got the fifth degree about where I was going and what I was doing. I think they thought I was being paid to speak at a conference, next time I’ll have to change the language I use to say something like attending a conference. After the border and the pornoscanners at the airport. I arrive in Nashville. Now, I’m not that worldly, but I’ve been to a few places. Nashville is not one of my favourites, not because the city is particularly terrible, it’s not particularly walkable, and it has well, public transportation issues. Outside of those quibbles (which are big problems for me) it’s a fine city with some fine people.

The Unconference

One of the best things that happens at Fusion for the last 5 or 6 years is the Unconference. I missed the first few because I was never able to actually get to Fusion, but the last couple of years I’ve been able to go, this was the event kick-off that was fun, social, and often leads to previously undiscovered ideas and new ways to break D2L. I didn’t stick around for the full discussion because I was a bit tired, but the one thing that I did learn was that VHS (Virtual High School) use Javascript to develop interactive elements of courses. Now that’s not a particularly shocking example, but combine that with the Valence API and maybe you could do some in situ testing and push results to the gradebook. Later a few of us went out for a nightcap and a good time was had by all.

Fusion Day One

Typically the first day has a ton of beginners and introduction sessions in the morning, so I ended up meeting with my co-presenter to go over our session the next day. The sessions I did attend were incredibly useful for me and I learned a ton about how other places develop in-house solutions. In fact most of my attendance was in sessions that were around External Learning Tools or the Valence API.

Keynote

So John Baker’s keynote threw the audience a little, the big takeaway was that Desire2Learn is now D2L, and the Learning Environment, or the LMS, is now called Brightside Brightspace. I guess there’s a thinly veiled jab at the competitors being the dark side, but I can’t say that I understand the need to change names. Lots of people at the conference have suggested that Desire2Learn seems a very 1990’s thing, reminiscent of the dot com boom/bust. I can’t say that they’re wrong. However, it would’ve been nice to have been told that officially. I’m a bit of a smartass when it comes to names, so my immediate nature is to shorten this to it’s logical shortform, BS. Not necessarily flattering. I don’t think D2L is big enough to have gotten out in front of it to shorten it to B, which in and of itself is not a good acronym either (B product? B movie?).

I’m not the only person who’s looking for a short form for it either. Considering I don’t know the difference between Brightspace and the LE (so is the new version called Brightspace version 1?) or if the existing products are called the LE 10.3 still… so many questions. None of them answered.

I’m sure many will talk about Chris Hadfield’s inspirational speech, it was great and all, and I certainly appreciate what he’s done. I just don’t see the connection to the conference that he brings.

Integrating Neat Tools and Activities into your Course through LTI

This session was all about External Learning Tools – which we’ve had a summer of dealing with so far. This particular session talked about integrations between SoftChalk, SWoRD and TitanPad. I’m familiar with SoftChalk through a series of courses I’m taking at Brock University and I can say that I’ve never been particularly impressed with the product – perhaps that’s the way that Brock is using it, or the way the course was developed, or a limitation of Sakai, Brock’s LMS. Either way, this session demonstrated the connection between SoftChalk activities hosted in Content then connecting to add grades into the Gradebook – certainly a more interesting way to deal with whatever you design in SoftChalk.

SWoRD was a particularly an interesting case – although I don’ t know how robust or deep the integration was (I suspect D2Lwas merely passing enrollment data to SWoRD). SWoRD is a peer assessment tool that might be an alternative to something like PeerScholar.

I’m always happy to see Etherpad clones, and TitanPad was used as an example, but if you’ve hosted an Etherpad clone at your institution you can pass user names to the Etherpad for auto tracking in the document. I’m not sure how robust Etherpad is for say, classes of 600+, but that would be an interesting experiment.

One thing the D2L presenter said was that in the configuration of the external tools, when you check the option to send User ID, it means sending the anonymized version of the username, which is interesting because the language used in the external tools dialog would benefit from adding this tidbit – we’ve turned it off in most cases (and seem to have no issue with students/instructors logging into the external tool) because we thought it would violate our University privacy rules.

The Secret to APIs

The second session of the day for me was around the use of Valence (D2L’s API) to create personal discussions in a course with enrollment of one student and the instructor. The big takeaway for this was that in courses that have enrollments set, you can save a ton of time by writing a script to do the repetitive boring stuff like create a group of one, enroll a student in it, then create a discussion topic and restrict it to that group. Was interesting to see C# used as the middleware programming language – I thought that C# was out of favor but maybe not? PHP would’ve been easier, and PERL/Python might’ve been faster to complete the task. Either way, this is the work that earned Ryan Mistura the Desire2Excel award in the student category. Cool stuff

Solution Spotlight/D2L Year Recap

Nick Oddson and Ken Chapman handled the recap of the D2L year, focusing on the extensibility of the platform. They did point out that there is a 40% faster time to resolution because they’ve increased their support and SAAS service teams. Which is good, because their service was slow before. I have noticed that their support turnaround is probably the best it’s been in years.

The looking forward part of their talk was interesting – it seems like they talked a lot about either 10.3 improvements (that were already announced last year, and available now), or stuff that we can’t see yet. Perhaps a chart:

10.3 Feature Unreleased to the Public
  • Wiggio
  • Discussions (Grid View restore)
  • Binder – Windows 8 support
  • Quizzing UI/UX improvements
  • Content Notifications
  • Student Success System
  • LEaP – Adaptive Path learning
  • Course Catalog (currently being used on Open Courses)
  • Visual Course Widgets (customization, I presume at a cost)
  • Built-in practice questions in Content (contextualized learning)
  • Gamification built into the Learning Environment (I assume 10.4/LSOne/Brightspace)

I suspect that the amount of talk about predictive modelling is something they want to build primarily for remedial use, and for online courses primarily. As a market strategy, that makes some sense. Some of D2L’s bigger clients are primarily online universities.

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Blackboard Collaborate Integration with Desire2Learn, Uhh D2L, LE uhh Brightspace 10.3

Posted on by Jon K.

I think I did that right?

Back in June we took a few weeks and integrated Blackboard Collaborate (our web conferencing tool) with our instance of the Learning Environment (Brightspace just doesn’t feel right). We are currently running 10.2 SP9 of the LE.

Reflections? Well, for such a simple integration (and really the D2L interface is waaaaay better than the Blackboard Collaborate interface) it took a hell of a long time. We had to purchase and get D2L to install the IPSCT pack – so if you’re entering into an agreement with D2L and may way to do this later, definitely spend the cash up front. From start to unveil it was over six weeks – now that’s not solid work on just this. After D2L installed the IPSCT pack, we had to contact Blackboard support to get our credentials. Seeing as we’ve had total turnover in who supports Blackboard Collaborate, our new Collaborate support person was not on the list of approved contacts – which is funny because she’s the one who does all the tickets. So we contact our account manager. No response. It turns out that well, they are no longer our account manager, that’s why we haven’t heard from them in over 9 months. Great. So support can’t do anything, neither can our phantom account manager. Finally we get to the bottom of who our new Blackboard account manager is, they straighten out the mess and our person is now an approved contact. After that it still takes a week to get our credentials for test and prod.

Configuration on test went smoothly enough – if you’ve ever worked with External Learning Tools in the LE, it’s the same as any other configuation in that tool – have the address to make the connection, secret key and password, check a few more boxes, and then off you go. Now everyone who gets enrolled in the LE gets a Default Role at the org level, and then gets assigned a more applicable role at the course offering level, which means for us, you have to go through not only the Instructor/Student and TA roles, but the Default Role as well. While this is a pain to do, it’s often easy to forget to do it – and that’s what we promptly did. A day or two was spent tearing what’s left of my hair out, until the lightning struck and it sparked the engine enough to get it firing again.

Fast forward a couple of weeks and we get some time to implement it on prod, we yet again forget what we did to make it work. A week later we said something to the effect of  “Fudge, Default Role…” ran off to the LE and fixed our error. Sometimes it’s not the technology that fails you…

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Learning Portfolio Writing Prompts

Posted on by Jon K.

One of the problems of asking first year students to “reflect” is that, typically, they don’t know how to reflect. It’s not a skill that a lot of students come prepared to University with, nor have developed. Yet, it’s a critical skill to have – to think about what you’ve done, and identify what worked well, what needs improvement and what can change.

Reflection is really not a simple process, but it’s crucial to learning, and really important to deep learning. Think of all the life lessons you’ve learned, and I bet you’ve thought about them often, and sometimes deeply. They change you. Similarly, good educational experiences (whether that’s reading a book, attending a lecture, practicing a lab, or just trying something out) cause you to think about them, and again, sometimes deeply. It’s that deep learning that the Learning Portfolio wants to get at.

The activities we have unveiled in the first year of the Learning Portfolio were good – but mostly course based. Anecdotally, we didn’t see a lot of extracurricular activity, or if we did, it was part of the program. One potential reason was that we didn’t give any student a reason to actually use the tool. So one way to solve that will be to post writing prompts, to offer students something to reflect on and a reason to use the tool on their own. Each writing prompt will help students connect their academic work to their “outside” life, connecting academia to reality. I consider this sort of thing “translational” – an effort to break academia down to understandable language for the average person. In the process, hopefully students will engage with thinking about what they’re doing, set a goal for themselves and maybe get a little bit more out of their experience here.

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Learning Portfolio Showcase at McMaster University

Posted on by Jon K.

The day surrounding the culmination of a significant portion of my work around the learning portfolio at McMaster this year was the Learning Portfolio showcase.

In the morning, Randy Bass gave a talk about where learning might be going – I’ve embedded it here to provide some context for how our university is framing the discussion.

As usual, Randy gave a great talk, this is my second (maybe even my third) time listening to Randy speak and it’s well worth the investment of time. In the afternoon, there was more discussion around the use of the Learning Portfolio – from potential employers, from faculty, from staff and from students. Below is a short overview of some of the things we’ve learned.

One of the  big things I’ve learned this year is that the tool we’re using (D2L’s ePortfolio tool) really dictates how things get done. It would be nice to have a timed reflection option (currently we use Quizzes for this process – and that’s got problems in and of itself), it would be nice to allow students to act as teachers in certain contexts – dictated by the instructor of the course. I know that the tool is getting an upgrade, but the upgrades can’t come soon enough. Once we can use the ePortfolio app (and that’s not D2L’s fault, we can’t use it because of the method of single-sign on that we use) that will change some contexts, but maybe not all.

With all the statements about student-centred learning, faculty are asking for the ability to simplify access to ePortfolio content. I can see some benefit in the K-12 market as well for this behaviour (as much as I don’t particularly like it). If faculty are to guide students in good reflection, they should be able to randomly select someone (maybe blindly select from a group of people).

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Survey Says? A: Integration!

Posted on by Jon K.

We’re in the midst of developing an LMS survey – which has broader implications as we also want to ask about other services my department provides (which is Blackboard Collaborate for web conferencing and iClickers for classroom response). All of a sudden, this quick survey has turned into this potentially really long thing that people will be unlikely to answer. Never mind it’s late in the semester (exams started yesterday) so I expect that user responses will be less than stellar.

With that said, it will be interesting to see what people think of D2L as we’ve introduced it. In the three years I’ve been here we’ve made some significant upgrades (from 9.2 to 10 in one year, and to 10.2 the next) and with those upgrades have come some significant growing pains. Next year should see us integrate Blackboard Collaborate, Pearson and McGraw Hill into our instance of D2L, which will hopefully solve some issues for faculty (namely the butt ugly interface you have to use with Blackboard Collaborate). We’re also planning on fixing the partial e-mail issue and additionally have PeopleSoft integrated into our process as the old Student Information System is going to get shut off. Cripes, that looks like a lot of change on paper – and I’m not quite sure how things will get managed. So yeah, if I’m not blogging that may be why (never mind the two presentations I’m co-presenting at Fusion, or the one I’m doing at AAEEBL!). Busy, busy summer.

Well, what does that mean for you, good reader? Well, probably more of the same – sporadic updates, maybe some neat charts and graphs,  some preliminary findings from our Learning Portfolio initiative in year one and more snarky comments about what MOOCs have become.

 

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NMC Horizon Report 2014

Posted on by Jon K.

Hmmm.

With every passing year I spend in edtech, I always pick this PDF up with some dread. It provides hope on many of it’s long view items – hope that educational technology will get better, less manipulative, less data driven, and more inventive – allowing teachers to do what they love (hopefully) better and differently. This year’s report is pointing at The Quantifiable Self as something teaching and learning will be doing in five years as well as Virtual Assistants.

On the surface, these seem reasonable – however I believe that most institutions are doing this in some form already. The Quantifiable Self is really about identifying trends (mostly around health through tools like FitBit or Nike+ app) and using that physical information to push you to do better, walk more and so on. With education, in a well designed course, students are already doing this – taking self-assessments that build confidence in a field, confirming that the student “knows” something. LMS analytics also contribute to this – in our instance Desire2Learn has the Student Success System, which gives feedback to students individually on how they’re performing in the class and in school in general. This horizon technology is already here, not five years away at all. At some point, there will be pushback (I hope) on all this data collection that is saved in private institutions – you as the creator of that data should be able to control it – it is in fact your intellectual property.

Virtual Assistants? Oh c’mon. That’s here in higher education now. Students are checking Google on their phone, which gives them more information (tailored to their search patterns) that they might need. On the Android phones, Google Now is providing contextual information that can be used in context – if you search for political science information every Wednesday at 7:00, Google Now will start feeding you information about political science at that time. Furthermore, Google then takes your new interest in political science into consideration on future searches. Siri and Iris are omnipresent in classrooms, and used to fact-check, find alternate solutions to problems, or just alert the user to a new deal on shoes. Again, this is not on the horizon, it’s here.

What is on the horizon is faculty using and integrating this technology into their classrooms in creative ways.

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Happy New Year

Posted on by Jon K.

In the past I’ve looked at previous posts about what I think will happen, and reflect on those ideas. It’s not that I don’t think reflection is valuable, it’s just that I’m not that interested in navel gazing (hell, I can see my navel getting bigger by day).

This year, I’ll outline some of the projects I’m currently involved with and will try to write about this year.

Work Projects

So for work, I’m working on two large-ish projects. One is a Productivity and Innovation Grant funded project lead by the University of Guelph, around learning outcomes in D2L. What the project encapsulates is ensuring there’s alignment between course, program and ultimately University related outcomes – and the reporting that D2L will suggests where there are holes in the alignment. It seems like it will improve the Analytics/Insights tool greatly with global reporting options – which is something I’ve struggled with greatly.

The other, is around Learning Portfolios. The department that I’m embedded with has gotten some funding from the University to advance Learning Portfolios (the ePortfolio tool in D2L) on campus and it’s looking like we will be responsible for this area from here on out. I think that some improvements to the way the tool works by D2L will only help the adoption of the tool – however there’s still some major hurdles that have to be overcome before there’s widespread adoption. That’s not to say that adoption and use hasn’t grown greatly, it has – just the impact of the use so far has not produced enough of a ripple to spread campus-wide. That’s our job in year two. I’m putting in a Fusion 2014 proposal to co-present one of the really interesting stories from first semester that ties blended learning, learning portfolios and helping students reflect (in this case on career choices).

Personal Projects

Other than the banal things like redo the bathroom and visit more places, I’m putting out a record with my one band and releasing another record with my other band. Not very exciting unless you like hardcore punk.

While this is work-related, I want to put together a rubrics repository (like Rubistar, but much more focused on local courses, and local sharing) that has a series of rubrics saved covering higher education courses that the University teaches. This way, it gathers together some of the best work that faculty have done, recognizes them, allows them to set sharing permissions, and ultimately, choose to export as PDF or into D2L. This is a big project, and really not on anyone’s timeline, but I want it to happen. It’ll have to be open source, and to that end, maybe it doesn’t just spit into D2L but into Blackboard or other systems too. The first iteration will of course work with our system (D2L) and then maybe we can branch out.

I’d love to help update the Feed2JS codebase to get it WCAG 2.0 compliant.  I’d also love to blog more.

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Student Engagement Idea: Upvote/Downvote Questions In Discussions

Posted on by Jon K.

Way back at the beginning of time, I worked in Language Studies with a professor, Gerry Dion. Gerry was (and is) a great guy, and frankly, about ten years ahead of his time. In my first semester working with Gerry, my job was to maintain computers in a small lab, and help students use the First Class communication system, which was a really good system to use for class collaboration and instructor flexibility. Gerry taught “French, in a Canadian Context” (course code was LL636, which is part of the minutia that I carry around in my head). Anyways, this course was a flipped class with course materials on a CD-Rom. The first six weeks were French language basics, the second six weeks were cultural research. Students grouped up, did research, and then posted to First Class their essays. Everyone in the class would read each other’s essay. Then there was a multiple choice final exam that consisted of questions pulled from the essays.

I’m on a bit of a nostalgia kick lately, and well, I was thinking about this sort of activity, except within a modern LMS context. Here’s how a similar exercise using the discussion forums in D2L’s version 10.3 might work:

First, have students read each other’s work. Typically these are submitted to the discussion forum, for posting – but a group dropbox (with the entire class enrolled in one group) might work as well. Second, have a forum for each essay, and students are to generate x number of questions (and potential answers) each, and post to the appropriate forums the questions. This part of the exercise ensures that they at least read some of the work submitted. Third, have students use the upvote feature (new in version 10.3) to vote up or down the question – voting up the questions means you could answer the question, voting down means you (as a student) couldn’t answer it correctly. Students essentially identify easier questions on a fairly large scale.  Fourth, to assess activity in the system you could use the reporting feature attached to discussions to export a list of activity to CSV, manipulate that CSV to be a grades import (aligned with previously created columns). Fifth, using the upvote data, select questions that did well, and did not do well and create a quiz out of those – you could even take it a step further and allow the system to randomly select questions (once imported into the Question Library) from each difficulty of question.

Going back to my history lesson at the top, Gerry was not an easy marker, but almost always did well on his student feedback – students learned from those sorts of exercises.

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Ontario Ignite 2013 Recap

Posted on by Jon K.

I feel like it’s valuable to post my notes about conferences and events I attend – I hope you find them useful as well.

I attended and presented at the Ontario Ignite Regional Conference, which is a Desire2Learn conference intended to gather users of the system together and exchange information. It’s a good chance to catch up with friends and to learn a whole bunch of stuff. Someone suggested it was like a mini-Fusion, which I think is a pretty apt comparison. These smaller conferences might even be better as you have less choice and are more likely to hit on some tips that are interesting to you. I presented about putting the Polling Widget into your Org Level or at a Course Level homepage, which I’ve posted on here elsewhere. After that, I attended other presentations. Here’s a cliff’s notes (or a synopsis for you non-Canadians).

COMPETENCIES

University of Guelph, who are using the Competencies and Rubrics tool more than maybe other Universities (certainly mine). In this context the presentation outlined the process for Guelph’s Applied Human Nutrition program who have external competencies from the College of Dietitians Ontario. The course(s) need to feed 147 competencies, which were previously tracked in Excel. Currently content and quizzes feed these assessments, needing to meet both the requirements to trigger the Competency. Competencies allow two options – all sub options or any of the sub options – which allows for some interesting options when assessing criteria. One has to be careful when wanting to assess any of the options to meet the competency. Outcomes are able to be assessed on individual criteria of rubrics. Quizzes are able to have outcomes tied to individual quiz questions.

LEARNING OUTCOMES 

University of Guelph has been working on Learning Outcomes for many years; in 2008 UDLE’s and GDLE’s (Undergraduate Degree Level Expectation and Graduate Degree Level Expectation).  In 2012, new undergraduate learning outcomes developed for all (in some cases redeveloped). Guelph developed a curriculum mapping tool (CurricKit) since 2007. In 2012, Guelph engaged in an Analytics pilot with D2L.

Some best practices of curriculum development:

  • Faculty driven
  • Evidence based
  • Discipline oriented
  • Collaborative
  • Facilitator-guided
  • Learning centred

Guelph’s curriculum mapping survey asks faculty what they intend to assess with the course. They renamed Competencies to Outcomes on tabs within tools – which better aligns with how most people know this thing. Competencies at org level feed competencies at the program level then feed competencies at the department level in D2L. Courses with individual templates are not going to work with this structure – need programs to sit separately due to the cross disciplinary nature of courses at Guelph. I asked, Do you only associate learning outcomes at the course level? No, it’s actually at the template level, activities are at the course offering level –  set up this way to facilitate visibility and to aggregate data to the template. One problem was how to validate course assessment as outcomes assessment? Does the course assessment really add up to an achievement with outcomes? Can we make the assumption with course based assessment = program based assessment? Literature suggests not, so how do we rectify?

 

BINDER

Etexts can include digital media (eg. Video). I asked, Can licensed materials be disabled after x amount of time? Yes, controlled by date permissions in Content. Vision: “Any learner today should have the best in class utility and access to all of their course content – all in one place, all digital anytime and anywhere.” Files from your ipad will be added to that instance of Binder – not uploaded to the cloud version of Binder. Binder for Android is coming, as well as a web client. Discoverbinder.com – fusion or community.desire2learn.com will give you content to pull in.

DRM and Copyright controls in Binder

  • Date and time restrictions are respected by Binder
  • Instructors can turn off send to Binder feature as well
  • Students are notified that content is expiring

Binder Apps: provide annotation and Dropbox and Skydrive integration, within ios you can shift attachments in Mail app to Binder (on that device).  Binder allows annotation, exporting, tagging.

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Learning Portfolios So Far

Posted on by Jon K.

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a long time, but I’ve only gotten my head above water about this in the last few days. Bear with me as semester start-itis hasn’t really cleared my system and I’m definitely fighting off a cold with flu like symptoms.

I’m very lucky to work at an institution with some pretty good vision from the top down. I’m not glad handing anyone here, I honestly mean it. Patrick Deane, McMaster’s President, has a vision, and put some institutional money behind enacting that vision. He’s identified the learning portfolio as something that students can use to document their learning journey. Watch the YouTube video for his take.

Admittedly, I have a vested interest in this idea working out, because I’m front and centre with this initiative around what we call Learning Portfolios, and what most of you call ePortfolios. I’ve ran over 20 workshops on the tool in the last year and a half, have become the defacto technical face of the thing, and well, I spent my summer working on it so that I can support the widespread use of it by faculty and students this year.

The summer has been a blur of activity – I’ve mostly had a chance to tweet about some of the things I’m doing, but here’s a quick rundown:

Figure out how to change the wording of ePortfolio in the D2L instance to Learning Portfolio

You’d think this was an easy thing – except that it’s buried in the Language options of the D2L admin settings.  To my dismay, it wasn’t as easy as changing one thing and it propagating to the hundreds of instances of the word throughout the system – it was hundreds of entries. Think it took 4 hours to manually go through and adjust this. After the upgrade to version 10.2 I needed to redo some of this work as the upgrade process either created new language entries or something got overwritten.

 Document how to use it

I’ve always believed in local documentation – I frankly hate using vendor documentation because it’s never specific enough to your particular install, nor does it illustrate why you would use it. I stayed away from the why, because that was for other people (students, namely) to decide. I did however create this repository of PDFs. 20 PDFs, articulating and well, showing students and faculty how to use the damn thing. There’s about 10 more that I want to do – these having to do with social media connections. While some of this stuff is documented in the vendor documentation, with us changing the name of the tool to something else, there is a high likelihood of confusion had we not done this. This whole thing took months of work, and isn’t close to being done. Also, I think we all recognize that students generally don’t use these systems because they aren’t as slick as Pinterest, or Facebook, or Tumblr. The ePortfolio tool is definitely not as slick as Tumblr, nor as easily customizable. So anything to get the technical details out of the way and into student hands is a desirable thing.

To that end I wrote scripts for twelve videos – eight of them are on YouTube. These were talked about in another post so I won’t go into much detail other than many people have really dug them. I think we’ll be doing more of these for not only the Learning Portfolio but also for the LMS.  With very little promotion, one video has 100 hits and the channel has 15 subscriptions, so it’s fair to say that people are interested in this type of support. More of these will have to be made.

Bend it to make it do what you want

One of the institutional goals is to help students take ownership of their learning and make explicit learning goals for themselves. With self-directed goals, many of them are not achievable in four years (or five, or fifteen even). We looked at some ways that might make sense for learners to create and self select their own goals. Ultimately, with some help from Desire2Learn, we settled on a form accessible via a widget that lives on the homepage of the LMS. That form allows the student to fill out a learning goal, making it explicit, do some thinking about it, and track it throughout your time at McMaster. So, we have a piece that does that in conjunction with the Learning Portfolio. I hope that Desire2Learn are thinking about adding this sort of functionality into the ePortfolio tool, because that gives users a giant reason why the ePortfolio tool is better than a blog, Tumblr or any other service in helping you make those connections.

Push out a template for students to use

Seeing as the institution wants to help students – what is the best way to help? There’s no one best way I’m sure, but one idea is that we push out a template to any student who registered in a course between Fall 2012 and Fall 2013. Our System Administrator looked at using the API to accomplish a push, however, there wasn’t enough time to test the script properly, so we are manually doing this. I have a CSV extract of all 30,000+ students who had the student role in at least a course over the last calendar year. I chop that down to 1000 student segments, enroll those students in a course, then push the template from my account into those student’s Learning Portfolio. Unenroll the students, after making course active due to a bug in D2L’s system (you can’t unenroll a person from a course while the course is inactive), and repeat the process.

I ramped up the numbers to 1000 (I started at 200, moved to 600, then 800, then a 1000), and that seems to be the best number to hold at. When I approached some of the ePortfolio team over the summer about our plans, they were concerned about a push to 20,000. I hope they work on the scalability of the tool going forward. Once I got into a rhythm, and used the 1000 enrollment levels, I knocked off 10,000 fairly quickly.

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