After a long night and an early morning it was surprising that I was as functional as I was. At this point in the conference, I realize I’m just human, can’t do the million things I want to do in a city and at a conference, and just relax. Instead I had a great conversation/rant about ePortfolio with some of the guys who actually develop the product. I told them about the long-term vision I’d have for the product (including learning goals that students can assess themselves on, with rubrics they design, with outcomes that they determine and assess) and some seemingly short term improvements (like taking the improvements they made in 10.0 to the creation of homepages in courses, and grafting it on the ePortfolio presentation tool – which seems like such a no-brainer). We’ll see if my enthusiasm for getting the presentation building piece of ePortfolio fixed is any help. I also intended to attend an 8:00 AM session, but felt that a run-through of our presentation might be time better spent.
I’d like to hear about the Executive Platform Panel if anyone got up at 8:00 to share their story of what they heard.
Implementing Learning Outcomes and Collecting Insightful Data in Higher Education
My co-worker Lavinia and I co-presented this one, and again it went well. This time it was a more traditional presentation, which I’ve embedded below:
We got some really interesting questions, and got into the nitty gritty stuff about Competencies in D2L. I still have a huge issue with the language of “competency” (does not achieving a competency mean that you are incompetent?) and I guess that can be addressed with language packs if I were clever enough to think of what the structure should be called.
Expanding Widget Functionality Using Desire2Learn Interoperability Tools
Lone Star College uses JQuery UI (which works with LE 10.1, but not 10.3) and Javascript with inline CSS to alter widget functionality. You can use D2L replace strings ({OrgUnitId}, {RoleId}) to change content in a widget depending on who is viewing the widget. They found that the most taxing thing was combing through the Inspect element panel of Chrome or Firefox to determine what the name of the item was. Valence documentation will be releasing this information if it’s needed, so that will be really helpful and speed up development time.
Lone Star College used the custom variables in the External Learning Tools to pass custom variables to the project – basically the content of the replace strings.They use it to embed request forms that are typically hosted external to the system – our ticketing system would be a local example. D2L CSS Classes will also be made available for developers, so that you can make custom developments look more like D2L solutions.
Continuous Delivery Model
So like everyone else who’s a D2L admin, it strikes me as Continuous Delivery might be the best thing, or the worst thing ever. I guess we’ll find out next August. Monthly releases will occur the first Tuesday of the month – then there are five application dates – the first two waves are application to test, the last three are application to production. So if you are scheduled for wave 2 and wave 3, you’ll have a week with the update on your test. As an admin you are locked into the waves except for the odd circumstances. Honestly, I don’t particularly like that idea, but it’s what’s happening. I guess I’ll have to see how other schools are feeling the upgrade paths.
The language around what D2L are doing with Continuous Delivery Model is changing as well an Upgrade is your last Upgrade, the one to LSOne/10.4. Updates are what happens in Continuous Delivery Model. Similarly, Release Updates are more of a roadmap – what’s coming and when they’re expected to impact you. Release Notes are what’s changing that particular month, and will be released 3 weeks prior to the application date.
I wasn’t any more scared of this than I was before. As we’re going through it, I spend two months pouring over documentation, distilling it down to four or five pages, rewrite it for our user group then push it out, apply it and train people on it. While major changes will be seen for up to 12 months in advance, and are up to the admins to enable, it strikes me as it changes training and local documentation significantly for us – because we’ve customized our instance, particularly around language use, pretty heavily. I’m not asking D2L to do our documentation work – even though they’ve offered all clients their own videos, but I suspect I’m going to get a whole lot more busy with a Continuous Delivery Model. We’ll see.
Closing Keynote – LeVar Burton
I am not a trekkie, don’t really care about celebrities, but I enjoyed LeVar’s talk, although I struggle to make a connection between Reading Rainbow’s move from public resource to private enterprise and D2L – talk about a missed opportunity, to have John Baker come out at the end and say, “all D2L clients have access to Reading Rainbow’s library of video assets starting now.” I wasn’t let down, per se, but it was a pillow soft ending to a good conference. When the gold-standard of this sort of thing is Apple announcing all upgrades are free for the OS – that’s an oomph.
Actually that wasn’t my end to the conference, it was with a beer with my favourite D2L’er Barry Dahl. Of course, losing my passport was another story…