With midterms coming up, it may be useful to review these features of D2L Quizzes and Dropboxes.

D2L Quizzes provides a robust tool to grade quizzes easier and quicker. Some features can help prevent cheating to a degree, like basic question randomization and advanced question randomization. If you want to use questions from a previous exam or quiz, the Question Library lets you copy questions to the mid-term. Connect your midterm exam directly to the grade book for faster grading. Click here for a tutorial. You can also have your students sign an Academic Integrity Pledge before continuing to the Midterm. Customize the Quiz Result display to show students what questions they got and see where they need to brush up on their studying.

Please note that if you allow automatic grading of your exam, D2L will not automatically grade written responses. Those need to be graded manually. Inform your students that the grade they have immediately after completing the exam is not reflective of their overall grade. If you want to see all of the tutorials on the D2L Quiz tool that COLI has compiled, click here.

D2L Dropboxes are a great way to receive student work in various formats but more notably PDFs, Microsoft Office files, JPGs or PNGs. You can also restrict the types of files the dropbox will accept. Attach the dropbox to the grade book or use a D2L Rubric and attach it to the dropbox for faster grading.

For more information on D2L Dropboxes, click here. For tutorials on D2L Rubrics, click here. Or sign up for one of our many workshops here.

COLI has compiled other resources on the various tool sets in D2L. Click here to access those.

The Center for Online Learning & Innovation offers a five-week mini-course for Canisius College faculty, that prepares professors to teach online and hybrid courses.  This course provides many practical tips for teaching online, but more importantly, helps faculty explore new pedagogies for active learning, social presence, and community building in courses on the internet.

The OFDC can help professors craft engaging, interactive online experiences for students that go hand-in-hand with limited use of the classroom. This spring semester, we are offering two courses, one starting on October 3rd and ending on November 4th, and a second one starting October 17th and ending on November 18th. To RSVP for either, please check out the COLI faculty development events here.

We now have a lightboard studio on campus, and are tooling it up for general use. This allows for efficient lecture recording for faculty who teach primarily using a chalkboard or whiteboard. Here is a quick demonstration of how you can teach in recordings using the LightBoard. You can view other examples of lightboard video here and here.

COLI is looking for volunteers who might try out the lightboard studio! If you plan on recording a lecture or would just like to try it out, Email us. We’ll set up times for you to record!

COLI has created several new text-based tutorials for D2L quizzes.

First, we have a quick tutorial on making some quiz questions into bonus questions. A relatively straightforward process, but not immediately apparent and therefore can be tricky to find. View the tutorial from this link here.

Next up, we have several ways to preview a quiz. This can be useful as a secondary check or to see how the quiz will be presented to your students. Click this link here to view this tutorial.

You can also import questions into the Question Library. Maybe you have too many quizzes that you are not using and want to clean up your quiz list a bit or you want to make some questions for quizzes but are unsure which quiz to install the questions. Or maybe you downloaded a question bank for D2L. Click this link here to learn how to do both.

Finally, we have a new tutorial on using the D2L Quiz Question Pool for advanced randomization. You can have D2L randomly select questions from a group of questions. This can provide a truly unique quiz for every student. Learn how to use the Question Pool from this link here.

As always, if you require additional help or have any questions, feel free to contact Helpdesk for the fastest response.

It’s always a good idea to perform software updates on any of your productivity applications installed on your laptop (or desktop) PC. With Zoom, you need to update your desktop app, and we find Zoom must be kept fairly close to the latest version to work properly. In November, Zoom is beginning a policy of only allowing a few of the latest versions to operate with web meetings. If your app falls behind this rolling minimum version, you will be obliged to update it before joining a meeting. For example, on November 5th, Zoom users must have version 5.8.6 or later.

Updating is easy to do on your laptop (or desktop) computer. When logged into the app, click your account icon in the upper right. On the dropdown menu, you’ll see Check for Updates. Here’s a tutorial showing what to expect, but it’s a pretty simple and usually fairly quick operation.

We recommend checking for Zoom updates at the beginning of semesters, before any important upcoming Zoom event, and perhaps any time you happen to be in the app to schedule or manage meetings. If you teach with Zoom, put it into your schedule to update it every week, perhaps as a routine during scheduled office hours.