Desire 2Learn and its content manager.

I have used Desire2Learn as my Learning Management System (LMS) for the last five years. For four years prior to that it was the inferior product - WebCT. D2L has some pros and cons. For example the recent changes to the dropbox are fantastic. I absolutely love the way I can move easily from one student submission to the next. It flows so much easier. But I have a love-hate relationship with D2L’s Content Manager.

Tracking the use of elearning content is a lot like looking over the shoulder of a student in a regular face to face classroom. Content that is trackable, and in particular content that is Scorm Compliant (a topic for another day), adds a level of student accountability that was certainly missing in WebCT. However I don’t place all my content in the manager as I find the level of organization and structure to be frustrating. I do track meaningful items of a critical nature. We all have THAT class that a student should not miss. Thus I tag the unplugged Elluminate Live (soon to be BB collaborate) recording as content and keep a close eye on some absent and underperforming students and their usage of that class recording. For example I recently had a sit down with 2 students in Physics 2204. Through a polycom conference I was able to share my desktop through polycom’s “people and content” add-on and I showed the principal and the 2 students their progress (or lack there of) with critical content inside D2L. The students were shocked but ALAS - the “jig was up”. The principal was also surprised at the level of detail of my tracking of content. But as I said I don’t tag enough content inside the content manager. I personally would like to see the quicklink feature updated similar to the recent changes with the placement of content inside the events calendar. Now that is a sensible way to do it. Kudos here Desire 2 Learn. But please clean up your quicklink feature in a similar fashion. It needs a drastic update. I would describe the content manager and quicklink tool now as “unwieldy.”

I also feel that another weakness in the content manager involves how content appears when viewed inside D2L. The screen real estate needs some added viewing flexibility. I like the idea of presenter view but how about a full screen mode similar to Youtube. Or even better - a fully scalable (slider) view mode similar to google earth. Now we are talking!

Don’t get me wrong, the D2L content manager is a faithful servant to me when keeping my students in line and accountable. In fact, it keeps me accountable as well. It is indeed an awesome feature. But it is one that can be improved upon by D2L if they continue to listen. And it seems they have done a fairly good job with that. Still I feel that Post secondary gets all the attention when designing improvements and enhancements. I feel that what we do stretches the limits of D2L. I don’t think the higher education sytems in our Province tax the features of D2L as much as we do. Maybe Desire 2 Learn should start looking to smaller operations in K12 like us. But to be honest I think we do things with D2L that a lot of organizations are not doing. Lets see how this all unfolds. Interesting times! Interesting times!