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Ellucian’s eCommunities Migrating to a New Platform

Banner users familiar with the eCommunities resource will want to take note that Ellucian is migrating its current environment to a new community platform this weekend. The new solution is very similar in structure to the existing platform, with some slight terminology changes, as the current term “places” becomes “forums” in the new community. If you are following specific “places,” you will need to re-subscribe to the corresponding “forums” in the new platform.

Also note that your bookmarks within eCommunities will not be converted. You may wish to save bookmarked threads as a PDF, otherwise you will need to search for them again post-migration.

Ellucian is planning to migrate to this new platform the evening of Friday, December 4 and expect the cutover will take the majority of the weekend. It is expected to be live on the new community at 8:00 a.m. EST on Monday, December 7.

Ellucian feels the experience will be very intuitive. They have provided a video overview along with targeted recordings on how to find your forums, how to post content, subscribe to instant as well as the daily digest, subscribe to forums/topics and follow people.

Find these videos and targeted recordings here.

If you have any questions about accessing or learning about Banner resources at Canisius, please refer to the college wiki page here or Email folsom@cansius.edu.

Submitted by: Michele Folsom, director of administrative computing, ITS

Help Desk Hours

Help Desk hours for winter break through the first week of the spring semester are as follows:

Monday, November 23 – Wednesday, December 9: 8:30 – 4:30 p.m.

Thursday, December 10 – Wednesday, December 23: 9:00 – 4:00 p.m.

Thursday, December 24 – Sunday, January 3: CLOSED (Winter Break)

Monday, January 4 – Friday, February 5: 9:00 – 4:00 p.m.

Monday, February 8 – Wednesday, February 10: 8:00 – 6:30 p.m.

Regular hours resume on Thursday, February 11:

Monday – Thursday: 8:00 – 5:00 p.m.

Friday: 8:00  – 4:30 p.m.

If you have any questions, visit the help desk located in Horan O’Donnell 016, Email helpdesk@canisius.edu or at call Ext. 8340.

Submitted by: Grant Guzda, help desk manager, User Services

Export Class Information from D2L

Watch the video here to learn how to export information about students in a given course in D2L.

Information includes students’ first and/or last names, which can be used for an attendance roster outside of D2L. The information also includes grades, which must be kept for five years minimum for ease of access. While D2L does keep those grades for the five-year minimum, it becomes difficult to access those grades after a student graduates. Export student Email addresses, which is a way to easily share a file or folder on Google Drive if needed.

You can export information from the examples above and more from D2L. Information exported is in either CSV format or Excel Spreadsheet.

Submitted by: Tyler Kron-Piatek, academic technologist, COLI

Download and Save Zoom Recordings

Videos recorded and saved within Zoom’s cloud storage space are subject to deletion 30 days after the date and time of recording. Develop a regular routine of downloading these videos soon after recording. If they need to be shared with students or colleagues, upload the videos to another suitable web location.

Google Drive is ideal for this purpose. Click here to find tutorials for using Google Drive to host and share videos.

Submitted by: Tyler Kron-Piatek, academic technologist, COLI

D2L Grades

The D2L Gradebook is a fairly lightweight, manageable place to upgrade courses for spring 2021 or even now in fall. There are tips for easy use and effectively transmitting feedback to students in the D2L Grades workshop and Self-Paced Training Video Set.

Students appreciate having their grades reported through D2L. Properly using the D2L Gradebook can help eliminate student-prompted conversations about “how they are doing” and repetitive procedural announcements in class or through D2L.

Use the grades tool in various ways to build a gradebook best suited to your classes and teaching. Click here to watch a tutorial to enter final grades in D2L at the end of the semester.

Recording grades in an Excel spreadsheet may seem easier but this does not report progress to students or calculate their cumulative or average grades. Export grades entered into D2L to an Excel spreadsheet for safekeeping or other purposes.

Gradebooks only need to be built in a course once. Since gradebook structure copies and other course content is copied the following semester, it will not need to be built again.

These topics are covered in our D2L Grades Workshop and are also great opportunities to ask questions about gradebooks. Feel free to make an appointment with COLI to discuss more comprehensive changes to your grading structure in D2L.

Submitted by: Tyler Kron-Piatek, academic technologist, COLI