I’m guessing you noticed some changes when you logged into the D2L Community site as of July 16, 2012. If you didn’t notice a change, then you’re probably a first-time visitor. The first thing you’ll notice is that the widget-based home page has been replaced by a website using the Custom Home Page feature in Desire2Learn.
Change #1 – We will continue to build out this Public Website over time, while we continue to use the Community Learning Environment (LE) for some things as well. Over time, we hope to migrate most of the Community to this public site.
Change #2 – Website Embedded in D2L Community Learning Environment (LE) as a Custom Home Page. Whether you’re logged into the LE or not, you’ll see the content on the public site. If you don’t need to login to access things behind the LE password (discussion forums, for example), then you can access the public site at Desire4Community.
Note: this URL is temporary and will be replaced soon with a single URL for both the public and private sites. At that time we will have single sign-on (SSO) operational for the two sites.
Change #3 – Guest Authors wanted for this public site. Check out the page with more info about why you might want to be a guest author for the Community.
Change #4 – Build-with-Barry collaborative projects. Okay, I’m not so sure about the name for this new feature, but I am sure about what I hope to accomplish with it. There seems to be a never-ending list of projects that e-Learning professionals need to accomplish. Have you built that stellar orientation module for new online students? No, then let’s do it together and share it with the community. Would you like to have a high-quality student satisfaction survey but you’re not impressed with the commercial options that are out there? Then let’s build one together. How about a tutorial about academic honesty? The list goes on and on.
Change #5 – Fresh content every day. This is my goal, although accomplishing it will be somewhat dependent on getting enough guest authors on board. I’ll be contributing some articles, but I really want this site to have the vibrancy that only comes from many different perspectives and many different ideas.
Change #6 – Another goal is to have over half the content written by D2L clients. I do expect to have some great articles written by D2L employees, as well as guest authors from the educational community who maybe have no connection to D2L. However, we first and foremost want to hear from the user base. Faculty, instructional designers, D2L site admins, college administrators, and others who make up the highly-skilled D2L user group.
Expect a whole new design within the next couple of months. The crack staff of design professionals at Desire2Learn are cooking up a whole new look-and-feel for the Community sites, both the public site and the LE site.
Expect SSO within the next couple of months. We know it’s a bit of a pain right now to have two different logins, but we’ll get that taken care of when time allows.
Barry serves as the Sr. Community Manager at Desire2Learn. For more information, read his post titled: Desire2Work @ Desire2Learn. For 16 months prior to that date, he was an independent contractor and consultant with a focus on e-Learning and educational technology. Prior to that, he worked inside higher education for 27 years as a faculty member and administrator.
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