Embedded Files
Online Faculty Development Course
Creating Your Own Content
Creating Your Own Content
The easiest way to communicate content that you create on the web is text, written or copied.
Email
Email
Everyone at Canisius University (and much of the world's population) have email addresses, and students are obliged to check their email regularly. Email can convey files as attachments as well as text.
You have more efficient ways to email your students, instead of just entering their email addresses every time.
You have more efficient ways to email your students, instead of just entering their email addresses every time.
D2L allows instructors to email students directly from the Classlist, and D2L's email blank helpfully installs students in the "BCC" area to ensure privacy between students.
Plus, listprocs allow for classwide emails outside D2L.
Check out the resources below for information on both:
But email has drawbacks that are not obvious until one tries to teach with it. Sometimes-for whatever reason-students don't seem to receive every email sent by instructors. (By contrast, it's much more likely that the professor, students, or both, would be aware if something were wrong in D2L such that a predictable news item didn't appear.) Students complain that they receive too much email, which is a plausible complaint. Email systems struggle to handle larger attachments (over 5mb). Lengthy email threads with multiple respondents can be confusing and difficult to search.
Plus, email communications don't scale very well. If you plan to collect assignments from thirty, forty, or seventy students, they will flood in among all the other correspondence you receive and then oblige you to spend time organizing them all.
Email is probably best when the message is procedural or deviation from course procedure, rather than as a means to convey course subject matter. Examples include:
a summary of course activities coming up this week, as a reminder.
a short reminder of a special event that is different from regular week-to-week activities, such as a synchronous web meeting featuring a guest speaker.
an announcement of a change in schedule, such as a moved due date or synchronous web meeting.
But keep regular emails short, to the point, and to one a week at most. And it's best not to rely solely on email for this; post such messages in the course News Tool as well (and in the syllabus, tell your students to keep an eye on that).
The D2L News Tool
The D2L News Tool
D2L includes a news or announcements feed where you can regularly post short blocks of text, images, or video, to keep students updated on course events. Like email, this is generally for procedural messaging instead of lesson content. Unlike items in the Content area, news posts are by default organized by and stamped with date and time.
If an instructor simply tells students "regularly check the news feed" this can be more efficient and reliable than email. If they wish, students can turn on notifications that automatically forward an instructor's news items to their own email or even as text messages, to their mobile device.
The D2L News Tool: Simple but Effective.
Downloadable Files
Downloadable Files
These are the digital equivalent of traditional staples in college courses, such as syllabi or worksheets. They are packaged in document formats that pre-date the internet, such as .pdf or .docx, and so are more easily downloaded for use offline. They are usually the first thing a new instructor puts into D2L. Students might print them or read them off screen.
These are perfectly fine and, if you've used them in the past, you can keep using them while gradually exploring other modes of content delivery. However, you may decide that building content that lives on the web, in pages or sites, is worth phasing in as a replacement.
Microsoft Word is a global standard for text composition. If you trade files with students, .docx is the best format.
"Flat" Web Pages
"Flat" Web Pages
Since the earliest internet, most web content is text, and web pages were inspired by paper media. You can quickly create blocks of text on pages for your students, within D2L, Google Sites, a blog, or various other content management systems. And text can be enhanced with images, diagrams, or embedded videos. These can be the bases for lesson content. You might even build a course syllabus into a D2L web page. Both you and your students can download these pages as .html files, which can be opened in web browsers for viewing or Microsoft Word and other word processors to convert or reuse.
For Canisius faculty, D2L's Web Pages are the easiest to use. (What you are reading now is built in Google Sites. We'll talk about a bit more in a minute.)
You can create web pages in your D2L course within seconds. Although D2L's editor doesn't have the sophisticated features of website builders like Google Sites or WordPress, it's often enough if you are writing your own lessons.
However you convey procedural content, keep your text short and concise. You want students to focus their time and effort on things that matter most. For example, trim lengthy, rambling assignment instructions down to a few sharp paragraphs, so students can quickly move onto reading the academic journal articles necessary for completing the assignment.
Where students must read at length, such as in online lesson content that you write, consider augmenting the text with images, diagrams, and short videos that collaborate with the text. Give students multiple ways to grasp the concepts conveyed.
One Particular Method: Course Handbook
One Particular Method: Course Handbook
Most online course spaces feature lots of files in a (hopefully) well-organized structure. Faculty add or replace files semester after semester, gradually modifying the course.
However, another method of course organization is the Course Handbook. Here, all documentation, including the syllabus, assignment instructions, and perhaps reading assignments such as articles or scans, are included in a single, downloadable book. Weekly modules refer to pages in that book, which may be dozens or even over a hundred pages long. The value is simplicity: for students, the answer to any question is either in the handbook or in a D2L FAQ discussion! While the professor must periodically make edits to this handbook, that's fairly easy to do in a master .docx file, and after that, only one file needs to be uploaded and replaced in D2L.
If you are planning an online, hybrid, or multi-modal course for the first time, this may not be the method to use, since you may not have the entire course ready by the first day, and you may need more flexibility while teaching the course. But you might adopt it for a course you've taught for several semesters, where things are more predictable, and mid-course changes are unlikely.
You can build a navigable PDF handbook using Adobe Acrobat. To the left is a link to a guide for that.
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