Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

D2L CD 10.7.10 update for March 2018

Posted by Andy Freed

Guess what: The Manage Dates tool will now update due dates!

Sorry, getting ahead of myself. I know you’ve been waiting for that one since like 2014. But here are some highlights of changes to D2L Brightspace coming on March 28th, 2018.

Manage Dates

You can now manage Due Dates in Manage Dates. This has been a shortcoming of the tool for years and has generated a grumble or two with our help desk. So there you go. Finally.

LaTeX input in quizzes

This one has a much more limited impact but in a recent update, the LaTeX equation editor disappeared from the quiz. Now it’s back.

My Courses widget uses enrollment dates

There’s another subtle change to the My Courses widget that orders courses in a slightly different fashion. The explanation is somewhat complex, so I’m just going to share what D2L has used to describe the change:

• The My Courses widget shows manually pinned courses followed by current enrollments, then future enrollments (if they are available or visible to the user) for a total of 12 enrollments. Note that more than 12 if all the course enrollments might appear if they are all manually pinned.
• The Course Selector drop-down menu shows manually pinned courses, followed by current enrollments, then future enrollments (if they are available and visible to the user), and finally, past enrollments (if they are visible to the user).
• The View All Courses navigation drills down into the courses by showing manually pinned courses, followed by current enrollments, then future enrollments (if available and visible to the user), then past enrollments (if available or visible to the user) as the default sort. If the user changes the sort order, the filter does not separate pinned courses from other courses based on sort order, filters, and search terms.

Excel docs no longer converted by Document Conversion Service

In a previous update, Excel documents were automatically converted to PDFs to view online instead of downloading. This annoyed a lot of people who wanted to open Excel docs in Excel. Because Excel.

A few missed updates

And here are a few features from the last update we forgot to mention.

• When a user wants to start a quiz, clicking the start button actually starts the quiz. They no longer have to click an additional button to confirm they want to start.
• When you insert an image in to HTML, you now have the ability to make some minor adjustments with image editing tools. As you can see, you can do things like rotate, flip, scale, and add a description.
  
• Quizzes can have due dates now, which means students can submit quizzes late.

Online Rooms / Collaborate Ultra improvements

In addition to the changes coming to Brightspace, there are a few updates for the Online Rooms tool (aka Blackboard Collaborate Ultra). A complete list of updates can be found on the Ultra Release Notes page.

• A number of small updates to the interface improving accessibility of the product
• Better bandwidth management for sharing applications
• Dial-in only option lets you get phone info without having to log in to the meeting.