February 2007 — News
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First Look: Desire2Learn Essentials
2/27/2007—This week Desire2Learn introduced a new course management/learning management system--Desire2Learn Essentials--targeted toward smaller institutions: those with fewer than 5,000 users, including K-12 schools and districts, virtual high schools, colleges, universities, and e-learning programs. We have an exclusive first look at this new system.
The new tool, called Desire2Learn Essentials, offers functionality similar to that of D2L's large-scale Desire2Learn Learning Environment, along with customization features designed to enhance experiences for students and faculty alike. The hosted solution (hosted by Desire2Learn) is designed to deliver full-scale features but in a compact, modular design that can be customized at virtually every level of the interface--from the welcome screen all the way down to individual courses.
We'll take a look at these features from two user perspectives: student and instructor.
Interface
This "modular" interface is based on interface elements contained within "widgets." These are, essentially, blocks of information and links contained within modular sections. The screen shot below shows one possible configuration on a D2L Essentials home page.
This page contains six such widgets: a welcome box, which olds user preferences and other settings; an Updates box, which can contain notifications for users; an Events box listing due dates, new tests, etc.; a central News box, which contains a welcome message, general instructions and other information; a "MyCourses" box listing courses in which the user is enrolled; and a User Guides widget, which, in this case, contains links to PDF-based user manuals.
Each of these widgets can be fully customized to include additional information (or no information at all. For example, here we see the Updates box containing information just about e-mail messages.
And here's a version of the same widget containing e-mail messages and alerts regarding discussions and quizzes.
