Desire2Learn Learning Environment Empower your organization to deliver engaging content, collaborate effectively, and achieve your elearning vision through a comprehensive and flexible suite of online teaching and learning tools. Welcome to elearning The Desire2Learn Learning Environment combines innovation and leading-edge teaching and learning technology to enable your organization to offer elearning where users can achieve results. Tailored to your unique approach, the Learning Environment offers your institution complete freedom: the options for teaching and learning are limitless. The Learning Environment provides the foundation for continued learning and development, plus the ability to assess your institutional effectiveness. Designed for mission-critical delivery, the Learning Environment will redefine your expectations for performance. As an Enterprise offering, the Learning Environment is scalable to meet the needs of the most demanding elearning programs, from several hundred to hundreds of thousands of concurrent users. Easily integrate the Learning Environment with other Desire2Learn solutions, including the Desire2Learn eportfolio and Learning Repository. Implementing a complete elearning solution produces higher ROI through reduced redundancies in hardware, support staff, training, and integration costs. Key Benefits Tailor Your Approach: Reflect your unique elearning style by leveraging extensive customization options. Get Started Quickly: Navigate easily through an intuitive, user-centric design and access task-based Online Help through the Desire2Learn Community. Encourage Collaboration: Promote group interaction by maximizing advanced group collaboration features and functionality. Benchmark Assessment: Evaluate knowledge and standards acquisition by harnessing the suite of evaluation tools. Save Time: Work efficiently with fully integrated tools and a user-centered approach. Make Decisions: Rely on solid data to make decisions using advanced reporting functionality. Measure Success: Assess institution, program, and user progress using a range of assessment tools and functionality. Learning Environment eportfolio Learning Repository LiveRoom Competencies Data Warehouse
Flexible Functionality The Learning Environment offers flexible functionality enabling your organization to take a unique approach to elearning. With an extensive range of customization options, the Learning Environment offers unparalleled functionality. This powerful yet flexible system is easy to use from novice to power users and offers extensive customization, user-defined learning paths, advanced course migration options, and powerful import tools. Ease-of-Migration Easily migrate from your current technology to the Learning Environment using the advanced course conversion toolset. Rest assured that your information is in good hands with experienced staff who have successfully converted thousands of courses from other LMS platforms. Flexible Content Creation The standards-based technology, found in the Learning Environment, offers your organization the flexibility to choose the best instructional materials for your users. The import wizard allows courses to incorporate SCORM and IMS content, including Common Cartridge, along with resources created in other learning systems. Our WYSIWYG editor is the only fully accessible, and embedded editor in an LMS platform allowing for simple content creation. Customizable Design and Branding The extensive customization options found in the Learning Environment empower your organization to transform your environment to suit a multitude of learning experiences. The flexible organization structure supports unlimited organizational units and a customizable hierarchy (departments, semesters, other). Granular permissions enable your organization to precisely match user roles to your users needs; the system adapts to each user, remembering preferences and frequently accessed features. Tailored Pedagogy Users have various learning styles and needs. The Learning Environment empowers users to create unique learning paths based on learning styles, interests, and comprehension. Broad support for special access settings enables timelines to be adapted for users with special needs. Since assessment can be independent of the path a user takes in their courses, the Learning Environment facilitates both instructional and educational freedom. Screenshots of My Home and Log in Portal
Collaboration and Communication Peer collaboration is a valuable source of learning that significantly enhances the online learning experience. The Learning Environment facilitates interaction and collaboration through group management integrated into a range of advanced learning tools. Group discussion areas enable group members to share knowledge and insight; group lockers provide users with a shared workspace; group dropbox folders make it easy for users to submit and receive feedback on group assignments. Take social learning and collaboration to the next level by integrating Learning Environment with Desire2Learn eportfolio! The flexible and scalable eportfolio is designed for users and built for the full-scale needs of your organization. Personal goals and achievements are linked to an active network of their peers and mentors enabling learning beyond the boundaries of the classroom. Harnessing social learning enables institutions to be more responsive and user-focused across the entire learning landscape. 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.* Discussions Course discussion areas offer a valuable forum for class interaction. The discussion tool enables rating one another s message postings, allows for offering participation incentives, and empowers users to call out key contributions. Discussions can be graded or use the industry-leading competencies tool to assess discussions using rubrics. Locker The locker tool provides storage space for users. Users can access their files from any computer, from any location. Group lockers enable users to easily share files with group members and collaborate on projects. Blog The blog tool provides a controlled environment for users to communicate and reflect. Users can read their peers blogs, leave comments, and maintain a list of favorite blogs. You can decide whether users blogs are available inside or outside your institution. *Desire2Learn clients must have Turnitin accounts from iparadigms, LLC in order to utilize this feature.
Course Management 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. 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. 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. Email The Learning Environment includes a fully-featured, secure 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. 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. 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
Measurement and Assessment Assessment plays a critical role in the online learning process. The Learning Environment includes an unparalleled suite of measurement and assessment tools to evaluate outcomes and perform formative and summative evaluations of the effectiveness of instructional programs. Competencies and Learning Outcomes Provide assessments aligned to standards to determine level of outcome from the individual through the institutional level. The Learning Environment facilitates easy tracking of user progress by leveraging the organizational structure to share competencies across multiple courses. You can assess organization, program, and course-wide competencies and learning objectives through quizzes, dropbox assignments, discussions, grades, and surveys. Rubrics Rubrics enable your organization to define transparent assessment criteria and create structured feedback. The Learning Environment supports qualitative and quantitative rubrics with unlimited achievement levels, empowering you to create assessment mechanisms to any degree of precision. You can use rubrics to manually or automatically evaluate academic performance on activities linked to competencies, standards and learning objectives. This is conducted through a variety of course tools including quizzes, dropbox assignments, and discussions. Rubrics can even be shared through the organizational structure. Intelligent Agents Define criteria and set up notifications to recognize user achievements and identify at-risk users with the Intelligent Agents tool. Notify users and other interested parties to share milestones or to recommend actions to ensure future success. Screenshot of Competencies Tree User Progress and Attendance The user progress tool acts as an all-in-one view of all interactions users have with a course. You can easily create and print progress reports and share with users and parents. Quickly understand usage patterns and compare the progress of an individual user to that of their peers. Users can also see how they stack up against the rest of the class and progress toward achieving standards. Use the Attendance Register tool to track attendance with custom schemes, and flag users when there is a cause for concern.
Measurement and Assessment Survey Capture valuable course or organization-wide feedback from your user community with the survey tool. The survey tool supports anonymous responses to ensure accurate and honest feedback, integration with course content, and a comprehensive range of standard question types. It is combined with the ability to email custom invitations and specify the number of responses. Self-Assessment The self-assessment tool enables users to test their comprehension of course material and receive immediate feedback. Self-assessments support the full range of questions available in quizzes and can be quickly assembled by reusing questions from the consolidated question library shared with the quizzing tool. Quizzes Users can be assessed using the quizzing tool, which includes a complete toolkit of question styles that can be adapted to any pedagogy. Questions can be created with varying difficulty and randomized within a quiz. Align questions to standards to evaluate user progress. The question library allows for storing questions in a common location where they can easily be shared or reused. To ensure quality, quizzes can be previewed before making them available. Quizzes and questions can also be created and managed using third-party tools, such as Respondus. Data Warehouse The Data Warehouse is a powerful, robust tool which enables organizations to perform critical business intelligence initiatives. Organizations can use third party applications and data analysis tools to mine and shape data to fit their specific needs. The Data Warehouse makes this data readily available. Full documentation is provided on everything that is logged. A basic web-based reporting interface enables the quick and easy development of reports and charts. Additionally, reports can be filtered based on an extensive set of variables. Would you like to learn more about the power of the Learning Environment? Visit www.desire2learn.com today! Desire2Learn Incorporated Info@Desire2Learn.com www.desire2learn.com Desire2Learn, its related logo, and LiveRoom are trademarks of Desire2Learn Incorporated. 2009 Desire2Learn Incorporated. LE 84-02 - 2009