February 2007 — News
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First Look: Desire2Learn Essentials
In addition, navigation elements at the top of the interface, as well as the look and feel and branding of the interface, can be customized according to the needs of the instructor or institution.
As a side note to this modular structure, the login widget for D2L Essentials can also be customized and placed anywhere on a school's site to provide easy access for students and other users.
Migration
For those moving from another CMS/LMS, Desire2Learn Essentials provides the capability to import SCORM- and IMS-compliant courses. t also includes a wizard-like interface for batch converting IMS-compliant packages.
Courses and course management Of course, at the heart of Desire2Learn Essentials is its course management features. From the student perspective, these features include a wide range of content, communications, organizational and assessment tools. From the instructor perspective, they also include tools for creating and modifying content, scheduling events, grading, reporting and various other features we'll touch on below.
First, the student features.
Student tools
As we saw previously on the general welcome screen, each student has access to courses in which he or she is enrolled. Clicking on a course calls up a new page that contains, once again, custom widgets for access preferences and various other features; a course-specific navigation bar; and the course content itself.
Course content itself is fairly straightforward. It can include text, links, images, multimedia and common file types, such as Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, Word documents, etc. And tis content can be organized into modules and further organized into module sections. Within the course content is a collection of tools for help, feedback, printing, discussions, and basic navigation. Below you'll see an example of a section within a sample course module.
