Blog from April, 2018

Faculty and instructors are encouraged to attend one of two Zoom Preview Sessions hosted by Instructional & Technology Support to highlight Zoom functionality. Sessions are offered Wednesday April 25^th and Thursday April 26^th at 1:00 PM in Boyer 235.

Zoom is now available to all University faculty staff and students for web meeting and conferencing from https://millersville.zoom.us/.  Additionally a link is provided from the D2L University menu to Zoom; however Zoom is not integrated into individual courses as Collaborate was.

Collaborate and Collaborate Ultra will be turned off on June 30^th 2018.  Faculty teaching this summer will not be able to use Collaborate or Collaborate Ultra after June 30^th.

Faculty who built student assignments using Collaborate functionality will need to become familiar with the features of Zoom and may need to redesign assignments accordingly.

Zoom resources may be found at https://wiki.millersville.edu/display/instructdocs. New resources will be added to the wiki as they are developed.

Image Library

• Hundreds of new images of more diverse age, gender, ethnicity, culture and educational subject have been added to the library from which instructors may select course tile/banner image.

Assignments

• When grading assignments all rubric dialog boxes now open as pop-up windows.

Discussions

• When an instructor is grading a discussion, the Assess Topic dialog box opens as a pop-up window regardless of the dialog box option the instructor had set under Account Settings. As a result, the instructor can move the Assess Topic dialog box to another screen and continue reading discussions or navigating through a learner's discussions on a different screen without closing the Assess Topic dialog box.

Grades

• New bulk feedback option allows instructors to select a set of students and leave a single feedback description to be seen by each selected individual.
• Replacement strings may be used in feedback left for multiple students at once.
• Grades can now be sorted by "users with feedback" and "users without feedback" using the search options for a grade item.

Groups and Sections

• Instructors can now create sub-groups, based on Section or Group enrollment, within the Groups tool. When creating a new Group category, the Restrict Enrollments To option now allows enrollment of the category to be based upon previous enrollment in a group or section.
• If a parent section or group is deleted from a course, all related sub-groups are also deleted.

Manage Dates

• Dates will now display for the following activities:
  - Quiz submission view names and dates
  - Topic unlock dates
  - Forum unlock dates
  - Checklists
  - Surveys
• The following objects have been renamed:
  - Grade Object reads as Grade Item or Grade Category
  - Module reads as Content Module
  - Topic reads as Content Topic
• The Discussion Forum icon has been changed to reflect that it is a container of other things.
• The Grade Category icon has been changed to reflect that it is a container of other things.
• Dates in the Due, Start, and End columns are clickable and instructors can launch the Edit dialog box to make any changes.
  

Role Switch

• Instructors who use the switch roles to view their course as a student will now see a visual indicator of the role on the navbar as a reminder to switch back.