Hello, and welcome to this overview of the
Desire2Learn—or D2L—system at
Northeastern Illinois University. D2L provides a media-rich environment to
support NEIU’s face-to-face, hybrid, and online
courses. Log in to D2L via
http://neiu.desire2learn.com. Use your NEIU NetID and password. This is your personal home page on D2L. Let’s look at the elements of this page, and tools
that you can use here. The very top of the screen is a mini-toolbar that
always displays on the screen. It contains . . . a link to get back to your personal home page, a course-selection menu, Pager, Update, and Chat message alerts, and your profile area (this is also where you log out
of D2L). Also on your personal home page is a
navigation area, where you can get into your
ePortfolio and the Help feature. The content on your personal home page
consists of . . . the News tool, the Calendar tool, the My Settings tool, and the My NEIU Courses tool. Each of these tools displays brief snippets of
content on your personal home page. Some tools have a drop-down action menu that
can take you to the tool on its own screen. You can roll up and expand any tool display by
using the chevron on the right side of the tool’s
title bar, like this. To enter one of your courses, click on the name
of the course in the My NEIU Courses tool. This is the home page for an individual course. Notice that the navigation area now contains
some drop-down menus for . . . Assessments (including links to the Dropbox,
Quizzes, and Grades areas), Communication (including links to
Discussions, Groups, and Email tools), and Resources (with links to course Content and
to your individual virtual Locker). We’ll come back to these main areas later on. The content area of your course has two different
kinds of displays. The home screen of the course looks like this,
with . . . an Updates section to show you what has
changed since the last time you logged in, the Calendar tool for just this course, and a Tasks tool your instructor can use to alert you
to course milestones. There is a course-specific News tool, and the
same My Settings area that you saw on your
individual home page. The main tool on this screen is the Content
Browser tool. By clicking on the name of any specific item
within the small display on your course home
page, you go to the Content Map screen. The Content Map screen contains the min-
toolbar at the top, but not the navigation area. To get back to your course home page from
here, click on the name of the course in the
course-selection menu . . . or the Exit button in the display pane. The Content Map screen shows all of the
materials for the course in an outline format. The titles of Modules or sub-areas of the
Content Map are placeholders. Click on the name of each item at the lowest
level of the outline to see that item in the display
pane or download it. Let’s go back to the course home page and look
at three of the drop-down menus in the
navigation area. To submit content to your instructor, or to take a
quiz or test, click the Assessments drop-down
menu, and select the desired tool link. For example, click Quizzes, and then click the
name of the quiz you want to take. Click the Start Quiz button, and begin. Oh, and take note that the blue button indicates
the most common thing to do next—D2L guides
you in this way! To take part in the class conversation, click the
Communication drop-down menu and select
the desired tool link. For example, click Discussions, and then click
the name of the discussion Topic to which you
want to respond. From here, you can Compose a message or
Reply to the current Topic. Finally, the Resources drop-down menu
contains links to many course areas, including
Content. This displays the Table of Contents screen,
where you can click any item in the course and
go back to the Content Map screen. There are many other tools in the D2L
environment; we’ve looked at just the main ones
here. You can see downloadable and printable PDF
Quick-Guides for all of the tools in D2L . . . by visiting the D2L page of the Center for
Teaching and Learning, or CTL. Thank you for watching this overview of D2L at
NEIU!