Course Management Tools
The powerful, robust, and easy-to-use toolset found in the Learning Environment empowers your institution to design, develop, and deliver effective courses where your users can achieve results. The extensive functionality enables you to decide to what extent users will be assessed and monitored, and the seamless integration between the tools ensures your time is used efficiently.
The Learning Environment includes a fully-featured email system that your institution can configure for internal messaging only, or integrate with any existing IMAP system including: Microsoft Exchange, Groupwise, Lotus Domino and Sun iPlanet. The email tool automatically associates messages and contacts with course offerings, and facilitates continuous communication with the rest of the user’s experience.
Schedule
The schedule tool provides an integrated calendar to help users stay on top of course work and upcoming deadlines. Users can share scheduled events with peers and courses, and view the availability of others. Dates can be added to users’ calendars through a variety of course tools, and administrators can add system-wide events to inform users of scheduled downtime, exam periods, and other important events. The schedule tool can even import/export with other calendar systems such as Outlook or Google.
Dropbox
The dropbox provides a convenient way to submit individual and group assignments from a computer or directly from the locker. Reviewers can manage submissions, provide feedback, markup documents, and grade or assess assignments using rubrics, all from a single location. Plagiarism detection compares submissions against continually-updated databases and generates easy-to-interpret reports summarizing the originality of the submitted work to promote academic honesty and encourage proper citation. Online markup and plagiarism detection are enabled through integration with Turnitin.*
*Desire2Learn clients must have Turnitin accounts from iParadigms, LLC in order to utilize this feature.
Gradebook
Gradebook enables novice users to get started quickly, while offering the powerful feature set required to support the demands of the most advanced users. The setup wizard streamlines the process of configuring the gradebook, and provides flexible setup options that empower your staff to implement the grading system that works best for their individual course. To save time, grades can be entered in a simple spreadsheet-style interface or imported from Microsoft Excel or other LMS's.
Classlist
The classlist tool enables options for setting up manual registration by users in their course or to quickly import multiple users from a text file. Advanced roles and permissions can allow for distributed administration of enrollment and user management functions for a course. This tool also provides a valuable means of tracking user progress through the course; this allows for identifying users who are falling behind and early intervention to ensure user success.
