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Starting later this month, you can restrict what file types students are allowed to submit to a D2L Dropbox.

To do this, go to the Submission and Completion section in the D2L Dropbox Editor screen. Then, find the dropdown menu titled “Allowable File Extensions.” You can choose from one of the following categories (for specific file extensions each category can accept, please visit this page):

No Restrictions: Default choice; all file types are accepted, including zipped files.

Annotatable Files: Any file that you can Annotate in D2L. This includes Word files, PowerPoints, Excel spreadsheets, common image files, and various other text files (Rich Text, Open Document Files, etc.).

Files that can be previewed without conversion: Files that D2L does not have to convert to be viewed. These are mostly web files.

Images and Videos: Any common image, audio or video file (note that video files can not be played in a D2L Dropbox Submission unless they are embedded. Otherwise, videos must be downloaded to view them).

Custom File Types: Any file type you specify by using the file’s extension are accepted. You can specify multiple files by separating the file extensions with commas and putting a period before the extension. For example, if you only want Word DOCX or DOC files and zipped files, it would look like:

.docx,.doc,.zip

You can specify uncommon file types as well. For example, Python, JavaScript, C#, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. Note that these files may need to be downloaded since D2L may not allow them to be previewed in the Dropbox Grading page.

For a step-by-step tutorial on how to do this and more information, you can go to the D2L: Restrict File Types for Dropbox Submissions wiki page. You can also find this tutorial in the D2L Self-Paced Training for Faculty and Staff under the category titled Collecting Assignments in Dropboxes.

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