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Volume 9, Number 9: Summer 2003

Desire2Learn's UW Debut:
Some Courses are Now Using the New Platform

by David Wirth, Desire2Learn Project Manager
and Tammy Kempfert, TTT Editor

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Since adopting the Desire2Learn platform as the UW's common eLearning system last winter, the UW D2L Implementation Committee has been working to put the new product into use. Under the direction of David Wirth, the implementation team has staged a carefully considered transition for faculty and staff, giving special attention to training, course conversion, and improvement of D2L functions. D2L now runs on an Application Service Provider (ASP) maintained by D2L staff, which was set up expressly to facilitate training and as a temporary production environment for summer courses.

To initiate the conversion to Desire2Learn, UW System has employed a “train-the-trainer” model. By building expertise among support personnel on each campus, learning technology centers will be better equipped locally to train faculty and students involved in eLearning programs. In April, more than 60 Learning Technology Development Council representatives and eLearning site administrators attended training courses held at UW Learning Innovations in Madison. The first of two courses addressed teaching issues, while the second addressed administration issues.

Meanwhile, a new D2L Learning Objects group is collaborating on the development of D2L tutorials, which campuses can share as their training efforts continue. At an event called SCO Days in Madison recently, the group identified 100 D2L tutorials or learning objects needed for faculty training, which they will develop and make available soon. A central web site will house the learning objects for UW System staff to use as needed.

According to UW-Whitewater’s Lorna Wong, who heads up the D2L Training Subcommittee, training efforts differ at each institution. She says, “The more ambitious campuses started to conduct their own local
training for selected faculty who deliver summer courses using D2L. Other campuses use the ASP as a playground to get familiar with the system, to find areas that need modification to fit our needs, and also to do training for faculty who want to develop D2L courses for the fall semester.” By Wong’s estimate, approximately 25 summer courses systemwide are already running in D2L.

At UW-Whitewater, a six-hour training course introduces D2L features, points out differences between D2L and the previous platform, and teaches faculty and staff how to deal with converted courses. Wong says the initial training efforts, consisting mostly of veteran course management system users, have gone well. “Once they get over the hurdle of the different look and feel of the system, they start to appreciate the flexibility and neat features offered by D2L,” she says. “A few have decided to re-do their course … to take advantage of the new organization and features.”

Heading up the D2L course conversion effort is dot.edu’s Charlene Douglas. She says the Conversion Subcommittee “has spent a great deal of time directly working on the Blackboard, Prometheus, and WebCT
conversion tools.” Each of the tools, which convert online course content into D2L format in large batches, have made steady progress and should be ready for campus use soon.

As Director of dot.edu, Douglas has also been heavily involved in the installation of the D2L product. She says dot.edu will continue to provide services around several learning management systems--including D2L--for UW-Milwaukee, Milwaukee Public Schools, and other non-UW customers. The central utility at UW-Madison’s DoIT will provide services for all other UW institutions. “Dot.edu is completely installed and running well,” she says. “We have UWM and MPS up and running, learning about the new tool, and working out the bugs.” She adds that the Madison utility’s installation also came off successfully.

Alan Aycock of UW-Milwaukee serves on the D2L Functional Subcommittee, whose main purpose is to look at the system’s user functions and make suggestions for improving them. He says his committee recently
submitted a “long, long list” of requested fixes to D2L, which D2L has promised to resolve for the fall semester. “It’s not amazing that we’ve asked for a lot of changes, and it’s not a deficiency in D2L. It’s just a matter of fine-tuning the software to minimize the adjustment faculty and site administrators will have to make,” Aycock maintains.

“We’ve been trying to set up D2L so that the expectations of users are relatively in tact, so that people aren’t saying, ‘I used to be able to do this [in Blackboard or WebCT], but now I can’t.’ Since Blackboard and WebCT differ from one another as well, that adds the additional challenge of meeting both users’ expectations,” he adds. For example, Aycock says, in asynchronous discussion forums, Blackboard has an archive feature that allows users to move messages into an archive area, a feature D2L did not initially have.

“Many of these differences are just the result of the company operating out of a different country, where things are done differently,” Aycock explains. For its Canadian customers, D2L staff currently handles many of the administrative tasks; however, UW campuses will look to their site administrators to manage those
responsibilities. Shifting administrative functions to individual campuses has become one of the improvements D2L has agreed deliver by summer’s end.

To date, Aycock, Douglas, and Wong all report that their committees have progressed as scheduled, and they remain satisfied with the responsiveness of D2L staff. Douglas says of D2L, “Every email is answered, every request is handled, and every problem solved in an extremely timely manner.”


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