>> Hi everybody my name is Jennifer Parkin and I'm from the CCS Department and welcome to LMS week. We're featuring a full-packed week bringing in different LMS vendors. And I'm happy to announce our first ones today all the way from Waterloo is Desire2Learn. And I'm going to introduce them as John Baker, Adam King, David Horne, and David Baker. [Inaudible Remark] Oh sorry. >> [inaudible] name of a David Horne. >> Two Bakers. Okay. So before we begin I do want to welcome you and thank you for coming. Feel free to attend as many sessions as possible. And we've got feedback forms up at the front if you want to leave a few comments and you can leave it with me at the end. I'm going to remind you of the format. They're going to do a one-hour demo and followed by 30 minutes of Q and A. So, because they're going to cover a lot we're going to ask that you hold your questions till the end unless something is really burning. But you will have time to ask questions. And I want to remind you this presentation is being filmed and streamed for people that couldn't be here, so just be aware of that. The washroom is for everyone down this hall to your right just in case you need to exit. Otherwise, let Desire2Learn take over. Thanks guys. >> That's great. Are you using RyeCast for that streaming? Excellent. [laughter] So, it's great to see some familiar faces in the audience. It's a pleasure to be here. For us, we're trying to build great technology that really helps elevate that learning experience. You're leveraging RyeCast already, which is one of the technologies we acquired through an acquisition of David with the e-presence coming aboard with the Desire2Learn Capture. But we're thrilled to be showing you a demonstration of the technology. And we're also looking forward to working with you on some other initiatives that we're collaborating on around OUO, I'm not sure if you're familiar with that or not, and other types of projects, so thrilled to be here. Some of us had came in from Waterloo which took three hours a day by the way. But we also have a great office that's just a few blocks away at King Spadina where a number of us actually have teens, like there's 50 people there now and we're hoping to grow that. So, very excited about being here, hopefully we can build a great partnership. But we're going to jump into a live demonstration, is that correct? So, and maybe just for quick introductions again. So I'm John Baker Founder, President and CEO. >> I'm David Baker and I'm going to be the sales rep that's going to be working with you guys for a few value-- >> We are related. >> Yeah. [laughter] >> I'm David Horne I'm not related. I'm a solutions engineer and I'll be doing most of the demo. >> And I'm Adam King I'm the Director of Educational Sales for our northeast region. >> Great. So I'm going to talk--pass it over to David. I'm going to be here for a Q and A at the end. Thank you very much. >> So thanks for that. And so I'm going to go through with the demo in kind of two different phases. I'm going to be touching on a whole bunch of different things so I, you know, I'll be blasting through kind of fast here. So we're going to start up on the student side of things. So we can kind of see what the online experience can be like at the end phase as a student. And then we'll jump into the instructor side and jump more in-depth into, you know, how to build out of the course, do our assessment and those sorts of things. We'll also touch on some of the different mobile pieces and analytics pieces that exist in our ecosystem. And okay, so, we're logged into Desire2Learn--Desire2Learning environment that's our LMS and logged in as a student right now. So one thing that we can see right off the bat, is that we have applied some custom branding here. It's a big thing with Desire2Learning technologies that it's--it could be flexed by the institution to make a look and feel like Ryerson University like the Ted Rogers School of Management et cetera. So we have this idea of a custom navigation structure that can be created at the top. So we've just included a couple of different links up here and then down below at the bottom, we also have what we in Desire2Learn call widgets. So these are different clusters of information that are important to me as a student. This contain things like news items, calendar, and Google applications et cetera. And but then, we can also include things like Twitter feeds, for example. So if you have instructors that are HTML savvy, we can start pulling in things like Twitter feeds, RSS feeds et cetera, a little more interactive content. As a student, if I have the Google apps for education account, I can access any of my unread Google e-mails and calendar items or also my Google docs. I'll also touch on some of the other integrations that we have with Google throughout the demonstration as well. So up at the top is what we call the mini bar. And for those of you that are used to being on the road, just like any other mini bar, it haunts you wherever you go. And this will allow me to access any of the courses that I'm currently enrolled in from any learning system. Over on the right is my notifications area. So this is going to tell me anything that's new for me in this system, and it's clustering the three different groups. So the first area, what we call message and notification, so anytime I receive an e-mail from another student and--or an instant message, it's going to populate in here and then go ahead and click into any of these and actually open up the message. The second cluster are course level updates. So if my instructor grades one of my papers or releases a news item in my course, it's going to populate in here. And the third level are what we call chatter alerts. So chatter alerts, it allows me to subscribe to different forms and topics in the system, then when another student makes a post, I receive notification. So you know, if I find that in one particular forum, and some students are asking some great questions. I don't want to receive notification when the instructor is responding, it will populate in here. So the main idea with breaking this into three different levels is that as students, we realize that you know, if there's too many notifications, you might start treating them like spam. So we want you to be able to differentiate a little bit. So over on the right is where I can access my profile information. So a couple of things I can do, are entering my social networks, so I can enter in my Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn addresses and then anywhere around the system where another user will see my face. They can click on that and be able to see a link to my Facebook account or a link to my Twitter account. Just to be able to get a little more context about who I am as a person. Additionally, there are certain areas in the system as well where I can create public content. So it could be a blog post or an e-portfolio presentation, and I can choose to push that out to my Facebook page or to my Twitter feed via a like. So it would basically say in David Horne's news feed that David Horne liked his own presentation 'cause he's vain. And then my friends will be able to click into that and be able to access that without having to log in to Desire2Learn. So the next level is where I can actually pick and choose the different areas in the system that I want to subscribe to receive notifications for. So I can register an email address, so this could be my Gmail address for example, and then a mobile number as well. And then down below I can actually pick and choose the different areas in the system that I want to receive notification from. So as a student, one of the things that's going to be important for me is I want to receive notification whenever a drop box or assignment folders, coming within two days of being due, maybe the same thing with quizzes, and then also the ultimate one for students is I want to receive notification when a grade item has been released. So that assignment just got graded. Well, let's get an email and maybe a text message as well. In the very bottom, I can also choose to exclude courses. So if there is a course you're enrolled in that you really just don't want to hear a notification about, again, you can pull that from the feeds so you're not getting beat over the head in treating these things like spam. [ Pause ] Lastly, one of the big things we do at Desire2Learn and value strongly is accessibility and we'll talk more about this as we go on today. But one of the small, subtle things that makes a big difference for users that use screen readers is the ability to change your dialog settings. So by a dialog, I mean, a secondary window. So for those of you that are used to using web applications, sometimes we'll click a link and a pop-up will open or what we call a dialog. A dialog is when a new box opens up in the screen and then the background shimmies out. So the issue with that second type of pop-up if you will, is that screen readers don't interact well with them. So as soon as we close that square, the screen reader loses context of where it is. So we allow our users to be able to turn everything in the system into a proper pop-up so that as soon as that window is closed, the screen reader remembers where it is and it's a lot easier for those users to be able to follow where they're at. Okay, so next we're going to navigate into a course. And we'll see that a course--the look and feel of the course can really change, to be reflective of the content that's in this course. So in this particular case, my instructor has kind of created some custom branding for my astronomy course. Now, an example of another type of course on the page that can be created is, where there are created services scheme whipped up here for Ryerson. So here, we've kind of included a little more interactive content on the course homepage so that we can actually kind of navigate through some of the different--I was going to say propaganda but marketing materials that you have on your web site here. Then I can click into some different areas and you know, hide and show some different images and that sort of thing. So it really can be flexed to bring out the flavor of that course of the institution. As a student, a lot of my time is going to be spent taking a look at my calendar. So the calendar Desire2Learn acts as what we call an aggregator, so that basically means that wherever I access the calendar from, I can see a list of all of the course calendars, for all the courses that I'm currently enrolled in. So for those of you that are used to using Google Calendar, it's going to look and feel kind of similar to Google Calendar, especially when I switch into month view. So I can see my different calendars kind of superimposed into the same calendar view. I can turn them on and off. We also have a week view, day view, and then agenda view is going to show me a list of what is up and coming across all of my courses in the next, in this case, seven days. And I can do a quick print off, so if I want to create a laundry list of what I have to do in these courses over the next seven days, I can print off an agenda view. And then we recognize that most of you are probably not going to be using the LMS calendar as your primary calendar. So you can go ahead and take this iCal feed, it's a URL, copy that and paste it into Google Calendar, and then you're automatically going to have a live one way sync between the LMS calendar and your personal calendar. So that if the instructor crated a new event for me in the course, it would automatically get pushed into Google calendar. So I'd have that in my personal calendar. Some additional things my instructors can do for me when they're creating calendar events. One, they can actually choose to link to the content directly from the calendar event. So here, my instructors created an entry for a Wednesday lab session. And just a quick reminder for me to please have read the article, sunspots in the solar cycle in preparation for Wednesday's lab. So from here I can actually click into the content and be able to interact with it, find out what the professor is talking about. And then here, they've actually assigned a seating chart for me. So the seeding chart is the first tool that Desire2Learn actually designed to be used in the classroom by an instructor when they're teaching. So the idea here is that as my instructor is teaching the class, they can actually look out on to the seating chart and be able to add notes about the students as class is going on. So if I found that you know, John was answering some great questions I might click on his face and then be able to add some notes in there. It also allows instructors to fun things like the Harvard Law School method of teaching where I can cold-call on my students and track who has answered questions recently just to ensure that people aren't falling asleep. Also, filter based on attendance as well. So it can be a nice tool for instructors to be able to track of faces with the names and record some more information about the students. So next up, I'm going to take a look at the course structure and what learning path that the instructors created for me. So I've gone into our content area. I can access any of the bookmarks I have created in my course content but in the table of contents I can actually see how the course is laid out. So I can see different units and modules that have been created for me. So we have our solar interactions on earth, sun spot classification system et cetera. Then underneath each of the individual lessons or lectures that have been created, the instructor has the ability to create adaptive learning plans. So here I can see that the recent sunspot activity, I can only see this activity once I visited the content topic called the introduction. Then down and below in the solar system, I can see that I can only access this once I posted a message to a discussion forum. So in this way, instructors can kind of scaffold the student experience to ensure that you know, I'm completing this before moving on to the next level. And if the student achieves below a certain grade on this, well, I want to release this to them to more, speak to their personalized learning needs in the environment. So as a student, when I click into any of my lectures, this is going to open up what we call the content viewer. So this is what the student will use actually to cycle through and read the content in the course. So I could do things like add a bookmark quickly, and then I'm going to blow this into a full screen reading view, just to give content a little more prevalence here. Then I can go ahead and actually interact with all of the different content in the course. So not just the content itself, but also do things like interact with the discussion posts. So discussion posts in Desire2Learn can come in a variety of different forms. So we can have moderator-regulated discussion forums or any post made by a student has to be approved by a moderator before everybody can see it. And then we can also have group-related discussions as well. So if an instructor is creating group assignments for me, they may give custom discussion boards for each group so we can communicate with each other, upload assignments and be able to mark as group members as well. In this case, my instructors opened up the discussion board for peer review. So I can take a look at my peer's comments, maybe give them a rating out of 4 or 5. Instructors can also rate posts and entire discussion forums using rubrics. And I'm going to jump over quickly into, and this is our 10.2 environment. So, this is our release that is coming out in one month and this takes a look at our new user interface for our discussions tool. So, we slightly change the way the discussions are presented. So, if I go into a discussion in 10.2 and we'll see that the layout is more in common with what you are used to seeing in Gmail for example. So, our discussions are actually organized based on thread or conversation. So, I can see that two conversations are currently happening. The most recent entry will bubble up to the top and then pure bolded. It has been made by Meghan Aarons and then if I go ahead and click into this, I can see list of all the responses that have been made today. Anytime I want to just hover over a user's image, it's going to pull up their [inaudible] system. It allows me to send an e-mail and a pager message, etc. If they have their social networking information in there, I can also see that. Just to get an idea of who this user is, but I'm going to go ahead and just reply to this thread. So, anywhere in Desire2Learn where I can add text for example, we utilized what we call a Rich Text editor. So, this allows me to put a variety of content into my response. So the first thing I might do, because I like multimedia a lot is use a crudely-named, insert stuff framework. That's what happens when the developers name things. And so this will allow me to insert a variety of different media into my workspace. So if I'm having a particularly good hair day today. I might choose to record a video now. So this is going to use my webcam and actually allow me to just go ahead and record the response directly in place and embed that into my area. In the same away, I can access any of the videos that have been recorded using Desire2Learn's lecture capture technology. But I'm just going to go ahead and do a quick search of some YouTube content here. I laughed because a Metallica video always comes up here, but we'll just go ahead and pull this more related video into our response. And so, this will just embed this into my response and allow me to insert that. So additional ways that I can pull a content into any of the rich text areas include the quick link frameworks, where I can create links to anything that already exists in Desire2Learn or an external URL. Any of your images, for those of you that like to use Microsoft Word and get frustrated when you copy a bunch of things in Word and then paste into a Rich Text setter and the formatting goes all over the place, we have paste from Word function. So, you can just go ahead, paste in here. All your formatting will be retained and those extra tags will be gotten rid of. For the mathies in the room as well, we also have a variety of different equations that we support. So we have a Rich Text visual equation editor that would be similar to what you are using in Microsoft Word, but we also have support from MathML and LaTeX equations as well. And the last thing with discussions as well, is that as an instructor, if at any time, I want to remove an entire form or an individual topic or a post by a student, I go ahead and do a quick delete. But I can also choose to restore any of these deleted items at any given time, just through one interface. So if for some reason a post was needed to be deleted because it was inappropriate or you know, a topic just wasn't considered appropriate to release at this point, we can go ahead and restore those. Okay, so let's jump back into our day of life as a student. So the last thing that I'm going to be willing to want to do before I log out and take a look from the instructor standpoint, so I want to take a look at my progress. I want to see how I'm doing in this course so far. And so this is going to show me across all of the different tools that the course has broken down into. How am I progressing? So in our summary view, I can take a look at all of the grades I have received to date, hover over these and be able to see the different items that have been assigned. But then I can also drill in to specific areas as well. So if I want to take a look at all the content that I have interacted within the online environment in a more detailed fashion. It's going to break down all the different units in the course, tell me the number of visits I've made over all the time spent, etc. but then I can actually expand this and see how much time I've spent in each individual topic. Useful for the student to see how much they've done in the course so far and how much is remaining. Also useful for the instructor to see what content is actually being used. Now as a student, the other thing that's going to be really big for me is well, how do I access the environment from a mobile device. So first of all, you may have noticed that when I showed--when I showed the initial log in the screen, the width of the screen was 960 pixels. And that width was chosen strategically so than on any tablet device, you can access the full learning environment without having to do any horizontal scrolling. Now, if we're trying to access the learning environment from a phone for example, like my iPhone, in the same way when you try to access like globeandmail.com from your iPhone, it kicks you to a mobile-friendly version of the website, we do the same thing. So this is going to give me a simplified view of the learning environment that will look fine on my phone. It will allow me to access any of my upcoming events and news items. Then I can also see the list of tools in the system that I might just want to access when I'm waiting for my boss. So, I can check out and read through any of my content, add bookmarks, I can read any discussions and actually be able to post to those discussions from my phone. My news items and my calendar items are also at my disposal from my phone. Now the last thing that will show form the student side is our student-centric iPad app that we call Binder. So Binder's design is a way for students to be able to take their content with them on the go and personalize that content. So I'm logged in to learning environment, I'm opening one of my lectures and I'm going to choose to send this to the Binder. So what this is going to do in the background, it's going to package up that lecture and then it's going to send it over the cloud, so every company has the fancy cloud diagram. This is ours. It rotates. And then when I go into my iPad, I can see notification that I received something from Binder, it will open Binder, it's going to tell me everything that's new, it's going to be organized by course and also the date. I can go ahead and open that lecture that I just downloaded to Binder and here we go, I can read it on the iPad. I can see where it fits in the course structure. I'm going to bookmark this. That goes back into learning environment. I can highlight things, underline, add notes. And then finally when I'm done, I'm going to mark that as being read so that my instructor in the online environment knows that I've interacted with this content and have completed it. So again, Binder is a way for students to be able to personalize their learning experience, so I can take my content with me on the go, interact with it in a way that I'm comfortable with and then also have that information sent back up so the instructor can report on it. So that's going to be it from the student side. So next we're going to log in as an instructor and take a look at how we can actually start building over the course, managing every course and doing things like assessment with communication. [ Pause ] So the instructor experience for the most part looks very similar to the student, just that I have more at my fingertips. So we're going to start off by going back into that same course and back into that content area. And so now we'll notice as an instructor, there is more options for me to begin actually flashing out the structure of this course. So the first thing a lot of instructors want to do with their course is well, how do I upload this syllabus? So in our course overview area, as an instructor, I can include a brief description of what this course is all about. And then maybe actually just want to upload a syllabus file from my desktop. So here I'm actually going to take my course syllabus, drag and drop it into the environment. It's going to take us second to save that and then it's actually going to load it and render it in place as well. So anywhere in Desire2Learn that we can actually add files as attachments and we support drag and drop, so it's a pretty complex syllabus as you can see. But that's--that's as simple as adding files into the system is, it's just drag and drop. And then when it comes time to actually you know, start uploading lectures that I may have created offline; again, we can do the same thing. So I have a couple of extra reading assignments that I want to release to my students towards the end of the course. These are going to be supplementary materials. So, if I had some students that were really struggling on a given quiz, and I just want to give them some extra hints or some extra things to dig into before the final, I'm going to go ahead and upload these as supplementary assignments. And we'll take a look at how I can start assigning release conditions to this. So we've dragged and dropped these in place. And here they are at the bottom of my course. So the first thing I can do, I can give a quick description, so we'll call this extra reading. We won't worry about my spelling. Nobody's going to hold me into that. And then I can choose to add some additional restrictions, so I may give this is as--start date, end date, but the thing I want to do is add or release condition. So I'm going to choose that--we're going to release this to students in the class that achieved a score below, let's say 70 percent on our first quiz in the course. And we'll go ahead and create that as a rule. So now this has been added as kind of a supplementary material to be released to those students that really struggled on that first quiz. So again, just a nice way to create a kind of an adaptive learning environment for students that are progressing through their course. So in addition to uploading things from my desktop, I could choose to pull in any existing items that I've created in any of my other courses. So at the start of this semester, and I'm just looking to pull in a whole bunch of things from last semester's shell, I can go in to add activities and add those activities individually, or I can quickly go into copy course components and then maybe choose to copy all those components over in bulk. So I can go ahead, do a quick and we'll grab our biotechnology resources here into an astronomy course, why not. And then I can do a quick select all of all of the components or drill into individual ones and just pull in maybe the content or just pull in the discussion boards, et cetera. And that can be done throughout the semester. So, it's just a quick way to copy all your content over. [ Pause ] Now as an instructor, once I've kind of built up my course a little bit and actually want to see what it looks like from a student perspective. In the same way as a student, when we click and turn item as an instructor, it's going to pull up that student view of the content so I can actually see what the final thing looks like from the perspective of the student. Within the course as well, we offer instructors what we call a role switch widget. So if you actually want to navigate through the entire course as a student or as in this case a teaching assistant as well, I can go ahead and switch roles into a student and then be able to just interact with the entire course and see what the generic student in the system would see. Taking it one step further, we also often--an impersonation tool. So if there's a case of a grade dispute for example, or a student is saying that you know, this quiz wasn't released to me when you said it was. Instructors or administrators, depending on permissions can have the ability to actually impersonate that student and be able to see exactly what that student was seeing on the date that they argued they couldn't see something. So for the students in the room, you didn't hear that. For the instructors, it's there for you. Okay, so next, let's a take a look more at the assessment side of things. So I'm going to start off taking a look at the Gradebook. So the Gradebook has a couple of different views for instructors. And this is what we call standard view. So, standard view, this is going to organize the names of all of the students or all of the participants in the course along the left hand side in the vertical, then all of the different grade items are along the horizontal on the top. And those can be categorized as well. Now one thing you'll notice, with us in particular is that as we scroll from left to right, the names of the students aren't frozen to the left. And this is done explicitly again for screen readers. So screen readers don't interact well at all with frozen panes. So, what we do instead is--I don't know if we've done it here, yes we have. So we repeat student names as you go from left to right to accommodate screen reader users. Additionally, we also support custom grade schemes. So in this case, I've created a grade scheme that's highlighting to me, I need the students that are performing above or below the class average. So our students that are really killing it or showing up in this darker blue, while the students that are really struggling are showing up in this darker red. Also, any of the student--any of the grade items that involve the students submitting something for me to mark, those submissions are going to show up as icons that I can then click into and actually start marking without having to navigate away from the Gradebook. If there's any instructors in the room who are you know, you love Excel and are hell-bent on not using the LMS Gradebooks, collegiates there, you can go ahead and import your Excel Gradebooks in CSP format directly into the LMS. Any of the extra columns that you may have created in your Excel Gradebooks can automatically be created on the fly. We can also export and to CSV format as well. [ Pause ] In terms of calculation options, so some instructors like to choose and teach in a way to create scheme. Others prefer points, so there's support for both. And then for cases where you want to do something like add and drop the highest and lowest assignments in the course, you can use the formula and then define your own kind of custom-grade scheme using basically an equation editor. As an instructor, I can also choose what final grade is going to be released to my students. So is it going to be the calculated final or the adjusted final. The adjusted final allows me to overwrite the calculated final. And then we can also determine how we want to treat ungraded items. So are we going to drop those from the final grade calculation? Or do I want to give my student kind of a look at what's ahead left in the course and treat those ungraded items as zero? So the whole philosophy with the Gradebook is we want to give our instructors the ability to teach the way that they want to teach. Switching over into spreadsheet view, this allows me to do a lot of rapid marking as an instructor. So I can use my whole Gradebook just with my keyboard. So if I just want to quickly enter some marks, and tab from left to right, I can do the same thing also going up and down, and this allows me to kind of rapidly do my grading. [ Pause ] So when it comes time to grade any of these individual submissions, I'm going to grade an assignment submission. So it's going to open up in a new pop up or a new window and this is our assignment grader interface. So this is an assignment that a student has submitted to me to grade. I can view the file that they submitted to me, click into it and I can actually scroll through the contents of the file on the left hand side. Over on the right is my marking area. So in this particular case, I can be grading this assignment using a rubric. So rubrics in Desire2Learn can be one dimensional and two dimensional in nature. So this is an example of a two-dimensional rubric that we've created so we have our different levels of achievement across the horizontal on the top. And then our criterion or criteria are going to be along the vertical on the left. So I can go ahead, give a quick rubric score here. And for any of these, I can also choose to record feedback as well. So if I want to just give some additional textual feedback to the student and I need the levels of the rubric, we can also add that in place. [ Pause ] That's going to generate a score. And that score can automatically be imported into the Gradebook. And then finally at the bottom, I can also choose to again, add additional feedback. So maybe I want to quickly use my web cam to tell my student that they really did a great job in this assignment and personalize the feedback a little bit more. That sort of feedback and multimedia feedback can also be added. Now lastly, as instructors, you're probably well aware that some students are keeners, most are slackers. So for the students that submit things early, you may just want to record their feedback when it comes in, but then choose to release everybody's feedback at the exact same time. So every time you record feedback in Desire2Learn, you can choose to save it as a draft. And then once I have done marking all of my students, I can do a quick select all and then choose to publish all of that feedback all at the same time. So students are getting all of that feedback at the same time and they're not talking to each other or being able to see, you know, student got this, student et cetera. [ Pause ] Now, I'm going to go ahead and go into our drop box folder view. And the thing I want to talk quickly to is our integration with plagiarism detection software called Turnitin. So as an instructor, when you're creating an assignment folder for the first time, there's a check box for you to enable plagiarism detection or originality checking. So what this does is that anytime a student submits an assignment for assessment, will either automatically or manually, depending on your preference, be sent over to Turnitin and Turnitin will take that assignment submission and compare it against this originality database. What it's going to send back to you as an instructor is something like this. So this is telling me that Frank's submission for assignment number one has been deemed 83 percent plagiarized by Turnitin. So that's pretty impressive. And so if I click into that, it's actually going to take me into Turnitin and show the results of that originality report. So 23 percent original, and then any of the areas that Turnitin identified as being plagiarized, are going to show up as red. So it's a nice tool for instructors, especially for those writing assignments, to be able to see quickly, okay you know, this is original or it's a chance that our student probably plagiarized this. And if so, where were those plagiarisms coming from? Lastly, one small little tool that is nice for instructors that saves some time is if I want to do a quick download of all of the student's submitted assignments. It's going to package it up into a zip file for you to be able to take a look at off line. Then when I go ahead and open that zip file, we'll see that all of the student assignments are organized by student name, the date of the submission and then finally, the assignment name. So you're not getting 80 different assignments that all say assignment number one and you don't know from whom they came so it saves a little bit of time. Now in the same way in our 10.2 release, some of which I showed earlier, we also have the ability for instructors to be able to take these assignments, annotate them. So you could annotate them in Microsoft Word for example. And then, zip them back up and upload them and will automatically assign all of those assignments back to the students to whom they came. And then give them to the students as feedback when you publish the feedback to the students. [ Pause ] So continuing on with assessments, let's take a look at online quizzes. [ Pause ] So, in terms of the different types of questions that you can build into your online assessments and quizzes, there's a wide variety of them. And all of these support automatic grading and with the exception of long answers so even your short answered questions, you can set up to be automatically graded by looking for specific keywords and student responses. Any of the questions as well also support multimedia and all components of the question in the quiz. So if I'm adding some question text or giving a response area to a student or a hint, I can include multimedia in there. So if you want to have an image, have a question based on an image or a video for example, allow students to upload media, that can all be accommodated. Anytime I create a question, I can choose to have it stored in a central question library which I can then reuse across all of my quizzes. But going back to the theme of adaptive learning, if we have students writing a quiz that have special needs, so perhaps they take longer to write a quiz or perhaps they just were unable to write the quiz at the normally scheduled time period. I can give each of those students their own special access to the quiz. So I might give them their own start date and end date, maybe assign a special time period or grace period. And this can be done on a user by user basis. So I can add kind of exceptions for each user that needs their own special access for that quiz without having to create a new quiz each time. [ Pause ] The other thing I'm going to want to check on to as an instructor is how our students are doing on my quiz. So the tool also comes with a statistics engine. And, so this gives me three different slices of stats. Most basic are user stats, so how did users score overall in the quiz? But then I can drill in a little bit further and see, well on a question by question basis, how were students actually responding? Were they getting tripped up on any of the answers that I threw in here or were they nailing them? Are any of these questions potentially misleading? [ Pause ] Lastly as an instructor, we can also customize what a student sees after they finish the quiz. These are what we call submission views. So, a submission view will allow me to pick and choose what questions are we going to show to the user or to the student after they completed the quiz. Am I going to show the right ones, the wrong ones? Am I going to show them what the answer is? Do I want to show their class averages, et cetera. So again this could be done on a quiz by quiz basis. And also real time feedback can be given as the user completes the quiz as well. [ Pause ] One thing I'm going to show before we move on to communication is our Assignment Grader app. So, we took a look at Binder which was our student-centric iPad app. And now we're going to take a look at our instructor-centric iPad app. So, I'm just going to connect this to the VGA. Hope this doesn't ruin the presentation, your recording. [ Pause ] And there we go. So, the Assignment Grader is meant as a way for instructors to be able to take their student assignments with them on the go. So we didn't think it was fair for students to be able to take things with them on the go, uniquely. So we wanted instructors to be able to do the same thing. So the idea here is that, if I'm going to my kid's soccer game and it might be a little boring, they might be shooting on their own net. I can go ahead and download all the student assignments from across all the courses that I'm teaching and then be able to grade off line and then send all of that information back up online when I come online the next time. So, here I'm seeing a list of the different courses that I'm currently teaching, my Latin course, my user-centered design methods et cetera. Then I can see all of the different assignments that exist under each of these. So, we'll click into one of this. We can see a list of the student's submissions and then that same interface that we were used to using before where we can actually read through the student's submission on the left and then access the grading interface on the right. It's also available on the iPad. So again I can go ahead and give the quick score and then also use a rubric as well directly from your device. Save and record that. We can also use video as well. And then after all this is recorded for all of the different assignments, the next time I come online, we can port that back up into the learning environment. And we'll leave that. >> I'll just go ahead--with mobile in general is a very strategic focus for Desire2Learn as a company where investing heavily in innovative solutions like Binder and Assignment Grader. So, we have a team of 30 and growing dedicated mobile developers. So, again, I just wanted to make sure that that message resonates that we're investing heavily and focused on developing really, really innovative teaching and learning solutions on Tablets and Smartphones. >> So before we jump over to communication, I'm going to take a look at how my class is progressing as a whole. So this is our Class Progress Tool. So this is going to show me all of the students that are currently enrolled in my course. And give me some summary information on how the entire class is doing. So, for each of the students, I can see the amount of content that they visited, the number of learning objectives that they've created or completed. So Desire2Learn has a learning objectives engine. We call it competencies. And it allows you to create your learning outcome structures across all of the different levels of the institution. So you can have your institution level learning outcomes pushed down the program heads, pushed down to the departments and then finally tied into your actual content and assessments by your instructors. We can see their activity and discussions and also in grades as well. And then if I really want to drill in and see, well, let's see how, Cesar is doing. We can go ahead and actually see that detailed view as well. And as an instructor, one of the areas that I may want to go into and take a look at is their log in history. And there is a view for this as well where we can see kind of spikes overtime and I can look and see if the kids are just logged in for the quiz, or if they're actually getting in there and interacting with the content on a regular basis. Okay, so next let's switch over into communication. So we already saw discussions from the standpoint of a student. In terms of being able to develop and build out web conferences or synchronous communication tools where I can communicate with my students one on one in a virtual environment. We offer a tool that we call Online Rooms. So this allows us to integrate with Adobe Connect, WebEx and also Blackboard Collaborate. And through this, as an instructor, I can go ahead and create a meeting room for students. This can also be opened up for students to use as well. So, let's just call this lab 2 session. [ Pause ] And then I can give the availability dates to this, define some events, properties in terms of who can access this room and when. Then I can go ahead and add attendees and assign their roles within the room. So the end game of all of this is that anywhere in Desire2Learn, where we have that rich text editor, I can include a link to this meeting room and give that to my students. So, when they click that link it's going to automatically launch their Adobe Connect session or launch their WebEx session. They can meet in real time, record it and even display those recorded links, or the links through recorded meetings within the learning environment as well. [ Pause ] Now, if I'm just looking to create some assignments within my course, for students to kind of have their own spaces to work with each other, I can go ahead and create a number of different groups. And these groups can be used across all of the assignments in my course and I can give each group their own discussion area, their own locker for uploading files and being able to download them and then also their own discussion areas so they can communicate with each other. For any of the assignments submitted by groups, I need only grade one assignment for the group and that grade automatically goes for all group members. [ Pause ] Now if I also want to be a bit of a big brother in the course, I can create what we call Intelligent Agents. So, an Intelligent Agent is basically an automatically generated email that will go out to students whenever they have achieved or not achieved some sort of criteria in the system. So, let's say this is called log in history. So, I can go ahead and create and assist automatically generated email that is going to send out to users who have not logged in for at least 7 days. And in my message, I may include and personalize this by adding what we call replace strings. So these are pieces of text that will automatically populate with things like the user's name or the course, or the time and the date et cetera so that I can automatically have an email that says "Hey, David, I noticed you haven't logged into the system for 7 days." And we can also do the same thing if the user is struggling on a quiz. Automatically send them some remedial materials to their email address. I'm going to talk to the [inaudible]. Yeah. So, the last thing I'll do, I think, before we wrap this up is show quickly our, how we work towards achieving accessibility in our platform. Actually, I do need sound. So- [ Pause ] Yeah, that's a rich text editor, yeah. Yup, okay. So the video I'm going to show is, from our accessibility team in Desire2Learn, and this is kind of how we approach accessibility within the company. [ Pause ] >> [Background Music] You might remember me from such films as using a learning management system like a screen reader. Back then, my focus was on my student's experience navigating Desire2Learn. But now, I work here. So my job is to help make accessibility even more awesome. My first priority is testing. So, basically I see things as they're being built. If there's a problem, I get to go "what the heck." So you don't have to. So now I can sit down with designers and developers to find the solution before it goes live. The really cool think about working here is they understand my input and if they don't, they sit down with me until they get it. I've always said that if you're going to school, your focus has to be on doing your school work, not struggling to get the interface to do what you want. Desire2Learn is always trying to work ARIA into as many places as possible. The great thing about ARIA is when it's done correctly; it can make the experience of a screen reader user just that much more seamless and cool. And so you'll know pretty much instantly whether either changes were made successfully or whether you made a mistake. And if you have made a mistake, you can get directly to where you made the mistake and fix it and go on. I also get to play with IOS apps and make sure that they work well with--for voice over users. And it's really cool to be able to make a suggestion and see it implemented in the next build or like in a couple builds down the road. Here are a few new features that I think are really cool. Take a look at the minibar on the top of the page; you can bop from course to course quickly without having to go home first. You can check and know almost instantly whether you aced that quiz, whether you have an email from your professor, or whether your group mates have given you that feedback on that artifact that you put up in e-portfolio. Also links that are related to each other are grouped together. So you don't have so many links to slog through. But the cool thing about these groupings of links is that you know that they're menus and you don't' have to guess and wonder, does that open a group of links or that's just one link? Where did my content go? The Spell Checker is really awesome. Most spell checkers I avoid because they just don't work very well with screen readers, but this one's really accessible. So, feel free to use it and enjoy. If you do encounter a problem, feel free to let us know, saying that you use a screen reader or you have used other access technology is not a kiss of death. Good luck in your studies and all the success in your future. [ Music ] [ Pause ] Okay, so I think that takes us up to the one hour mark. And so, I believe the next half, or sorry. >> I think John's going to give a quick little walk through of what's coming in Desire2Learn. >> Shouldn't we take some questions as [inaudible]. >> Yup. >> Okay. >> Sounds good. >> You guys have been the quietest group that I think I have ever presented to, so. [laughter] You must have a few questions as we go--as we're getting setup. >> Sir? >> Go ahead, Bryan? [ Inaudible Remarks ] >> There is another vendor who wants to charge for their mobile app. So, I want to know if you are charging for your mobile app or if it's all included in one thing? >> All I'm able to show you is all are bundled into the same product. >> Yeah. >> And our philosophy on the mobile experience is that if your primary way of delivery is mobile in the future, which we think is going to happen either this year or next year, you shouldn't be charging for that, that's going to be something that's free for the students to leverage, so it just-- >> Okay, we have a question. >> Go ahead. >> We have a question from--a bunch of questions actually from the online audience. >> Okay, great. >> One of them is can I paste the URL in calendar for IOS? >> So, you should be able to do the synchronization. The calendaring function should work across all platforms. IOS, I've got a MacBook that I used--that I synchronized with it. It should work with--Outlook as well, not just Google calendar. So it should work across different platforms. >> Anything that supports iCal synchronization will support that link, I mean in, so. >> Yeah. >> And there's also a--building on that, there's a really neat toolbars that have been built initially by Harvard Business School, but then, has been now propagated to all of the client base for both Chrome and Firefox, where you can actually see what's coming up the next seven days, the next you know, the next days. You don't even have to log in, should you get notified of something that's happening. >> I have two questions. The first is for Turnitin and if an instructor wants to use Turnitin, students have the option to opt out. So can you just not do Turnitin for one student? >> Sure, you can also have that so that you use them in only certain pieces of work to Turnitin. >> Okay. >> Instead of having that--have every student's work submitted throughout. >> That's great. And then also, we don't give our students their final marks. So we want to give them all the marks for all their test, but we don't want to see final marks. So can you do that just not show final marks? >> Yeah, you can hide anything that you don't want to have the student see, you can just have hidden. >> And for those release conditions and the full flexibility and roles and permissions behind our system, really gives you that full customization on how you want to teach your course. So, you know maybe you do have some courses that are going to your release notes, some other final grades, they can do that while in your course, you don't, so. [ Pause ] >> Another question is do you plan on developing the Binder app for android devices, specifically tablets? >> So android, yes, specifically for tablets. We've also developed some really neat new mobile phone stuff. But we haven't rolled that out yet. So android, we're expecting May 7th, it's like that. I think it's around May seventh. And then we're also hoping that we'll have a windows eight version that falls through it behind which will work on both the desktop as well as on the tablet devices. We're not just IOS, if that helps. There is also an android version of the assignment grade that are coming as well. >> Hi, I had a couple more granular questions about the accessibly features, I mean, I could assume from your video but I don't want to make any assumptions. When uploading images, is there a prompt for all text image descriptions? >> Yes. >> Yeah, okay great. And the video notes, is there any integrated captioning options? >> We give an option upload on the actual captioning, or you can actually use a service called caption sync that we've also integrated. >> That's great. And one more--a couple more questions around that if you don't mind, quick ones though. Customization of quizzes, I like that you can have the, you know, the time allotted and stuff, but is there other customization you can do for like can you give an alternate version of a question that's more visually-formulated? >> Sure. You can, you can also--there's also--I think what David was talking about with the impersonate, you can actually take the quiz as a student. So if you're assisting the student through the quiz themselves over the phone or in other mechanisms, you can actually help them through that quiz, which is quite often used for people that have certain disabilities. >> Yeah. And last question, the little question marks that you have to explain what your features are, those are accessible too [inaudible]. >> Those are absolutely. >> That's great. >> There's a great report that was just done by Indiana University which is not yet a client so you can treat this non-biased. That talks about how we rank relative to all of the other LMSs on the accessibility. It's something that we're very, very proud of. We've spent the last 14 years building technology to help overcome those barriers. And there's a--in the new version of our system. I think, yeah, here it is. I watched the presentation at one of our regional events that showed how they would download the accessible templates that we had on our website so you can download them today using Blackboard, using any other system. But it was--we saw that it took between 26 to 40 clicks to actually get them set up and running in the course. And so on the next release, we actually have the ability if you have those accessibility templates that are designed for mobile--they're designed for screen readers so that when you go into the HML editor, you actually, instead of just having the blank page, you can actually pick one of the templates and start building your syllabus or start building a lesson or start building an educational resource based upon a template that's been designed for accessibility too. >> So we're even going as far as--we didn't show up but like in the color picker, it'll tell you if you picked the color that's got the wrong contrast ratio. >> And too with our accessibility team, if you'd like to have a new ID for conversation about what we're doing. >> I have a question about the--sorry, I have the question about the interactive component. >> Yes. >> I've work in the library and then I am aware that some instructors like to use digital textbooks. >> Yes. >> And then they are using some kind of software which allow the instructors to annotate certain things and the students to comment and other students to interact so, is it something that is available? >> So, we do have that available so both the assignment-grader has the ability to annotate on top of the documents, as well as Binder has the ability to annotate on the documents. And the nice thing about the next release of Binder is that it will work for pretty much every type of document that you have and everything from HTML pages to PDFs to Word documents same thing with the assignment-grader. And on the textbook integration, we partner with pretty much every publisher that's in North America, including a bunch that are in Europe, to be able support all the textbooks, both on the Binder platform. There's one hole we're working on but we'll have all of them available through the eTextbook platform of Binder for students as well. Go ahead. >> For students with learning disabilities, are they able to change their text color and their background color? >> So we designed a system so that the color contrasts are appropriate when they change their own--they can change their own font, font size. They can change certain preferences but I don't think they can change the course colors, no. >> Okay. And then I have one more, yeah. Can you prevent printing a page so the student was taking an online quiz, you don't want them to print that necessarily. >> There's an option that says, written in the interface, don't allow printing of page. >> Great, thank you. >> Or, right clicking copy, things like that. Yup, go ahead. So I'm taking a few questions, you chime in if you want. [laughter] >> To follow-up on that printing question. >> Sure. >> What types of options are there for being able to export content? I can think of lots of examples but for instance, the video feedback, if I as the instructor want to allow a student to put that on their, I don't know, LinkedIn profile or something as a testimony if I do that kind of thing. >> Well, I'm not sure which version of Capture you're using, do you know? So it was like--so there's a newer version of Capture but I think even in the one that you're using, 7.3 has a concept of being able to take that embed code and be able to share it on any website. Same thing with video note, same thing with all the media that was switched in the platform, there's the ability to share that quite easily. In our system, we have the ability to export in all the different standards. So we support the importing content form IMS course packaging, Common Cartridge, SCORM, et cetera. And we export at the standard's formats as well. And then you can obviously just drag and drop the content in and out as well using things like WebDAV. >> So you talked about integration with Microsoft Office. You can annotate things, automatic messages will be, you know, sent to the student. What about with Google docs? I'm watching our graphs increase as Google docs is used more and more. You know, we're starting to make annotations in it and so forth. You know, what level of integration have you built in? >> So, the current version has the app that would show the Google docs integration. We also have Office or Live@edu at the current version. The next release that we're doing on May seventh will have a really deep integration with Google apps so all the docs, all the calendaring, all those functionality. We'll also have a pending--we're hoping that sometime this summer, it might be hopefully for our user's conference in July, a really nice tight integration with Office 365. Their APIs just came out, their dev teams are working with our dev teams. We're just trying to push that along as quickly as possible. We also have Microsoft link fully integrated if you're using that or not, that'll be free for our clients. So that's another synchronous tool that you can leverage. And then we've also just bought a company called Wiggio. So Wiggio is going to be free for our clients. It's a platform to support document collaboration and group collaboration. If you want to check it out, it's just wiggio.com. >> One thing that I didn't show in the demo as well is that students can access their Google Docs when they're submitting to an assignment as well. So, if I've been working on the same Google Doc with some group members, I can actually access it directly from the drop box tool and be able to submit it from within the LMS. >> You want to log-in to see them again? Go ahead. >> I have a few questions related to instruction interface. >> Yeah. >> The first one is--can an instructor selectively make some of the course content public to all users who have access to the system and the rest of the content only to students enrolled in the course? >> You can. In the current release, that's--so just a workaround to allow for a guest access. So for example, we hosted a MOOC on the future of higher education, where not only could it be for anybody in the core--in the system, but that could actually be for anyone in the world. Now, in the next release, you'll have the ability to have like, just simple kind of concept around guest access, instead of having to have like a special workaround for this automatic authentication into that course. [Inaudible Remark] So the answer--the short answer is you yet, by the time you implement, you absolutely, you have that ability, yes. >> The second question is you mentioned that you can restore deleted forum postings. And how far back can you retrieve those deleted-- >> As far back as you wish. So, unless you do a purge of the system, which the most clients won't do at first, you know, five years plus. Some of our clients have content around for 10 plus years. You should be able to go back and restore from even previous offerings. >> Next question is, for the student view, is there a true student view? You can do everything that a student can do including taking a quiz? >> Yes. And then here's the--using Google Docs integration, to submit an assignment from Google Docs as well, as an example of the student-- >> My next question is about the video multimedia feedback. So it's wonderful that you can record multimedia as feedback. But in terms of back-end storage, how do you do a storage, and if you need to back up the course and restore it-- >> Yeah. >> Do all those feedback come with the course? >> So, you can--there's multimedia purge as well. So, if you want to delete some of the content from previous offerings, you can. So, if you don't want the video feedback to be around but you may want to keep the written feedback, you can select delete purge, just the video feedback as well. We give you free storage up to a certain amount, which no client, individual client has yet to exceed. Don't try. [laughs]. And, you know, in the case of Binder, we give a gig of storage in the cloud and in the case of report portfolio, we do 2 gigs. In case of this, we give a hundred megs for video feedback. That's free. So there's a lot of additional storage that we're providing and no additional cost to the client. And then, if you're hosting it yourself, you can try to set quotas or setup your purge strategy for how you wish to do it too. >> And my final question. You didn't mention this but I saw links or ePortfolio in drop box. Were those integrated with the external applications or are those are built in functionality within Desire2Learn? >> So, our drop box tool is built-in absolutely and then the ePortfolio is a module that you can select to go along with this. So most of our clients in Ontario are adopting ePortfolio to support that lifelong learning journey. Similar to the OUO, premise is the support workforce development, continuing that relationship as soon as beyond the graduation at the university. That's the premise behind the ePortfolio. And there, you get 2 gigs of storage in the cloud. Provides a lifelong access for those students and alumni as well too. And then dropbox.com and SkyDrive are also going to be integrated in the next release, this May. And also into Binder as well. So, since I have documents in Binder, it will become a real Binder. It will be, you know, take content from the LMS or Learning system. Take content from your own documents, merge them together, create a great learning activity or resource that you can carry with them. Binders also, we see them, teachers using it as well, not just students. Just in case. Instructors can use it as well. It's not just a student tool. >> I have a quick question. I hope--for the student profile, I saw their look, some of them have picture and so, so. Students can setup their own privacy settings like what to show to the whole class or not? >> That's right. >> Okay. Yes. [ Pause ] >> Hi. I'm from the library and we have a lot of third party products that we would need to integrate into, into this like. For example, we use ARES, which is for our course readings. And maybe other widgets that we might create in house that'll be open source. And I'm just wondering, what's your integration experience with these third party systems? >> Well, luckily, we have got a lot of experience such as with ARES. Given the other work that we do with--I think we have them with half of the both secondary educational institutions in Ontario that are leveraging their platform now. So we've done ARES integrations. We also have the repository technology, they can harvest in thousands or millions of open educational resources from anywhere in the world. You can tie in the library integrations through that as well through SRU. I'm not sure if you support SRU with--we'll get technical later. [laughs] But we serve a whole bunch of open standards to allow that interoperability between the library system and the learning system. And then you can also create e-reserves, reading list, all kinds of other types of activities within the learning environment. Sir? >> You said OUO, several times but there's probably nobody in the room who knows what that is. >> Ottawa University Online. >> Right. And so Ryerson's actually a member of that. We're one of the seven universities. Five of the seven use Desire2Learn. So, if we decide we don't like Desire2Learn, what are your strategies for getting stuff in and out of it? Can you talk about your OUO work a little bit? >> So the hope is, that OUO will be on one platform. And we're the group that sort of help the--a number of the initial core institutions get together and actually put that proposal for the government. So, working with the provost and presidents with a number of universities. So our strategy is to be a supportive partner to really help drive the execution of the vision behind OUO. And we're thrilled to see Ryerson as part of the mix, absolutely. So there's--the initial four were Waterloo, McMaster Laurier and Guelph. Ryerson, Brock if I'm not mistaken and New York also are coming on board too. Do you want me to add more to that Bryan or? And then another strategy is that we support open--so we didn't talk about it but we can import courses from blackboard and there's no cost, it can be done just a few clicks. Just grab the file, click import, it comes in. You can review the content. We also have a bulk utility that can import content from Blackboard and then we also freely allow you to export content out of our system. So whether, it's an OUO or other instances of D2L. And you can import it to the Ryerson implementation. Big believers in standards, I think we're one of the few Canadian companies that are actually on the standards organizations. We actually sit on the board of directors for IMS, really active on the accessibility standards, all kinds of other efforts as well. Go ahead. >> Hi. I was just wondering about exporting the Gradebook and permissions in the Gradebook. So, if you have a class of a thousand students, can I limit the TAs. And when I download them, I only download 5 assignments instead of 500 or anything like that? >> So that's a great--so one of the things that we didn't show is our ability for TAs. You can set TAs up to see their section or all sections. So you can--and then when you're viewing the Gradebook, you can actually see it by group or by section as well. Same thing with the Drop Box, same thing with the other tools and then you can download just that section. >> Can you anonymize the status or like for--like we're interested in testing without the instructors knowing the student name for example. So, something like that. >> So there's what we call blind marking. So, in there, you can just check a box and say blind marking and then you go through the marking of the activity for that student. And you don't see their names or pictures or things like that. Yeah. We have a lot of check boxes in the system. Go ahead. >> I have three questions. One is, is this LMS integrated with Google Search? >> So we do have a Google Search widget that you can put into the system. Yeah. >> With the Gradebook, is there an administrative level above IE? Can a program chair look through student's grades for the entire program? >> So you--this is where your design comes in. We have an unlimited organizational structure that you can set up and we also have an unlimited number of roles you can create with about, I think it's between to 500 to a thousand permissions on each role. So you have the ability to create any role that you want and then you have the ability to define what they can and can't do with the system. Yeah. >> And lastly, regarding copyright issues. What kind of customizing can be done at the upload stage regarding creating options that instructors can choose, such as click-throughs, controlling the upload environment through D2L? >> So, we did a lot of work with a number of--like the other universities in Canada on--for example, the access copyrights, the whole issue. So, with the repository, you have the ability that when you're uploading, it automatically tags it with creative comments, or other rights attributions. Same thing with your importing or bringing in content, it will actually put the proper reference for that resource. You can filter based upon creative comments or freely available. There's all kinds of rights management within a platform. And then with Binder we respect the rights so, if you want that content to be deleted after a year. The content gets deleted after a year. Go ahead. >> I guess, further to the question about copyright, one of the things that--that we're interested in doing is, I guess when people upload. >> Yeah. >> Kind of reminding them of sort of their copyright responsibilities? >> Sure. >> And also making a claim as to whether they have the copyright, on that document or not. Is that something that can be done in D2L? >> So we can in the repository. No question. So that's where you're putting in to a place where you're going to share it from one offering to the next. And you could force some through a workflow that goes through that repository mechanism, where you're having to tag the rights attached to that document as you put it up. You know, we could in the theory, apply that to any document that they put into the system. But we haven't gone that far yet. It's a great question, the way that we put it around the repository was so that if any--if you're planning on sharing that resource, that you are forced to go through those right--that rights attribution. But if you're just putting into your content of your course, we haven't gone to the extent of like forcing that workflow. That makes--somebody could you--would you like that done? >> Yes. >> Okay, so we--we'll put that as like an R&D thing that we could work together on, yeah. And by the way, do you have a team or a lot of developers that work on that technology, that are literally like 15 blocks from here. Short blocks, not the big city blocks. >> Hi, I just have a question about that integration. >> Yeah. >> With a third party software like ARES. 'Cause currently the problem that we have is, you know, when instructors copy something? >> Yeah. >> Like copy the content from another course, they thought that they can copy the course ratings within the areas over. >> Okay. >> Well in fact it cannot be because, you know, things have to be cloned from the ARES site. >> Yeah. >> So I wonder, you know, whether that is something that can be--'cause this is a lot of confusion because they--they thought they copy everything including the discussions and so on, but not the question--content because it resides in another database. >> I got you, okay. So, so you can create it--like we've seen a lot of our clients do that in integration with ARES, in particular. And so you can setup rules, so that it automatically creates copies of like content ARES, as well, based upon your creating a new course offering with the same content. We create rule-based engines for--trying to reduce the administration from copying from one semester to the next semester, to the next semester. So you can create new course shells automatically. You can automatically enroll, you can copy all the rules and release conditions and content over. The real question is like, it's more on the administrative side on the areas, which is making sure that you've got that same workflow kicked off there. Where then it re-provisions that content and links it to the new course code, new course offering. But all the APIs and all of the interfaces to do that, is they're just a matter of doing initial integration work to make sure it's tightly done. And then LDAP is a standard integration that would do a single sign on [inaudible], you know, CAS. We can--the lists goes on. [laughs] There's a lot of nice integrations that we've done around authentication too. >> For the rooms that the instructor creates for the student discussions, is it possible that the instructor can't look at that room? So that the students are, you know, free to discuss privately, you know, whatever they want about the course? >> Yeah absolutely. So you'd set that up typically inside of the course structure, like you can have clubs, you can have like study areas. Laurier has a spot where they have--where students connect and share group notes, so that taking notes in the class. So instead of like fighting the notes tools that--where you pay for your notes, is--you know we're going to include that into the--to the learning system. And just that way, we can manage it a little bit more appropriately, versus sitting out on some third party tool. >> Yeah, in a big piece of the Wiggio acceses-- >> And--Wiggio's a great [inaudible] yeah, you're right. >> Yeah, you can set up the ad-hoc groups so students can just get together, pull up their web cams and have a conversation that way too. >> So we--David's logged in to Wiggio here. But here you can have like different events, conference calls, virtual meetings, chat rooms, you can setup all sorts of ad hoc groups. No cost, and for the students they can have this outside of the traditional classroom experience as well. So if they were working in a project together, they can leverage it as platform too. Now we were planning on rebranding this before we started talking about it. But--and pulling it into a proper communication but the news broke on the Wiggio acquisitions through Techtron shut just a few weeks ago. So--but you will see this nicely tightly integrated to the learning system too. >> I have two questions. One is, do you have any integration with tools like the assignment calculators there being built. I noticed that there was the ability to see a calendar in upcoming events. >> Yeah. >> But learning strategists often see students when they--when they're up that bottle neck where they have five or six assignments to do within a short period of time 'cause they haven't looked far enough ahead. And they haven't planned backwards to get some benchmarks. So I guess--I'm wondering if--if profs who are using this can--it would populate the calendar in such a way that the assignment calculator would be easily accessed. So a student could go into a calendar. See an assignment that's due in like five weeks, and click on it and could access, it would automatically populate in an assignment calculator from the day they're viewing it, to the day that it's due. And then it prints out benchmarks for the student as to what tasks they need to do over that period of time. >> Yeah, so in the system you can say, okay over the next 7 days, now there's no assignments in this case but they would have been listed here, so like assignments are drop box submissions, or quizzes. And it would actually have the link material to that quiz as well. So you'd actually associate, here is the resources, here is the rubrics. Here is how much time we would recommend you spend on a quiz. And you actually have it categorized for you. So in the next week, I know I need to spend six hours in this quiz, three hours in that assignment. It's all right there. >> Is there a way though for the student to see the whole semester? So yup, put them on the calendar so that they can see within a two-week block, they have five things to due. And then I guess the other thing would be whether or not they could click on any given day and interface within assignment calculator that is separately build in a lot of the universities to see what the--what the things they have to do for that particular assignment. >> Yeah we don't have an assignment in this one but here's the two week block and if there was an assignment it would have like here's the--you just basically include that instruction in there so how much time, what rubric is all those types of activities, is that what you were saying? Now like--there may be a tool that you're referring to, that's a third party tool, that as long as they can pick that iCal feed, they can feed it into that right calculator and off it goes. >> Okay. >> There's also APIs built around all of the calendaring functionality. So restful interfaces, so that--that their pretty tool could potentially even tie-in if you give it permission to play within the data that's in there for the student. >> The other question was--the other thing that learning strategists find is that some students really don't have a lot of experience with note-taking. So one of the things we would--we've been dreaming about is whether or not there'd be a way to have a master note taker in a class, to demonstrate note-taking in a way that could be scaffolded. So, the first run-through, the note taker is actually taking live notes, and the students are actually seeing how notes are being taken, can actually copy or be--have access to those notes. But each week, then the master note taker would be not taking as--they would be leaving out aspects of the note taking right so, the students after then start to ramp up and learn how to take notes. So it's using modeling, but it's using modeling in a particular way. Is there any way that you can--that there's anything built in this that could accommodate something like that? >> So like--I think the Laurier example that I gave is one of those where they don't have that rigorous program where they say, the master note taker takes everything and then starts reducing it. But that's like just an approach that you can take without note taking experience. And then it's up to you. Do you want to share that on a screen like this, maybe while the, you know, the lessons that are happening on the [inaudible] screen. It's really the approach that you need to take in that classroom experience or in the, you know, it's a great idea. I'm just wondering like how we could also leverage Binder to support this too because in Binder, you can just write on top of the documents. Perhaps we could just setup a little quickly for us to just share those. 'Cause they're all just little adjacent rest-based, you know, components that can just be shared easily with other students as well. >> Another feature that we introduced in our 10.2 release is the ability to create content templates. And so, if I were to go into, see if we're still there, there open here. So anytime an instructor wants to create some new content, you can setup templates where they could pull from. So, for example you may have a template for week one note taking. Week two note taking et cetera, and then those could be created as things that students can work from within the system to begin kind of taking their notes. >> You know there's a number of other pedagogical tools that we built in as well. So we've got a first version instructional design wizard which we're about to put another spin on, that we worked on as synergic three, a collaborative project with the University [inaudible] NRC. We're about to kickoff hopefully another version of that. There's also--if you look at the drop box--I'll talk to--whenever I talk to teachers that are great teachers, I try to ask them, so what makes you a great teacher? Both my parents are educators, my grandfather is an educator, and one of them was John Smallwood, so he's--he teaches English Literature. And he said, when I do assignments I don't think of them as an endpoint. I think of them as a journey. And so I look at the feedback that are left in the previous assignments and then I leave my new feedback and I comment on, you know, are you still playing soccer and the students are amazed that I'm paying, you know, so much attention to them. Well then, we introduced in this release, the ability for you actually to see from one click see all of your feedback that you left that student on that previous assignments. So you can actually--so he's like, you know, saving--that saves him a lot of time, just makes his job a lot easier. And little things like this assignment grader Terry Anderson in Alberta talks about how leaving audio feedback and video feedback takes about 43 percent less time than writing it. So if you can save, you know, half the time or so of grading assignments, you know, that's more time that you can put in personalizing it or creating new experience. So those productivity tools are really important too. >> You were going to tell us about some of your future plans? >> Yes, okay, that's a nice segue into this. We'll go very fast. So one of them is around, well--we'll call--branding as insights, is our predictive modeling engines. So I'll just give you like a little walkthrough video of that. So this is, rolling out this May 7th, it's already been in beta testing with a number of our clients. But here I can actually see successful potential risk--at risk, most of these institutions in Ontario, they'll have a huge, you know, retention problem. But there is still no harm in actually trying to help elevate when it comes through all students. So here Eric is in the drop at risk. You can actually look at different data visualization, so then when I look at all of these grades, what I can do is, who doesn't like graphs that spin around, so I can just click on those, see on the detail. There's a lot of information that was packed in there. But then I can also look at like Kate who's normally a great student. And so, as she's going through all of her courses she's falling off in history. And so we actually predict almost to the decimal place what the grade's going to be an 18-week course, leveraging and predicting modeling algorithms. So she's not doing well from a social perspective, we can look at the sociogram, see how well she's connecting to all the other students. And so, you can leverage those indicators where that predict a model to be able to figure out what kind of intervention or what kind of planning do I do with that soon. So just like you would in a classroom, you could see very easily if people are isolated or if they're not participating, or if they're, you know, not getting that key concept or the light is not coming on. We're trying to do that now with insights with our predictive modeling engine. So we've got six PhDs, a whole bunch of master students, just working away on all the data science behind all of this. We've published papers on it. There's all kinds of resources, you can check it on the analytic side. Doing a lot of work around, learning outcomes, I'm not sure if you're doing work yet on the outcomes, but, Guelph and others are where what we're doing is we're mapping every outcome down from the program level all the way up to the university down to the content and assessments. And then with the click of a button you can generate reports. You can get quick little mapping. You can do item analysis, leveraging the system. Not this release, for the next release, we'll have the item analysis as part of the base offering as well with the quizzing engine. And then if you don't like what you see, you can build on it. It's a real platform. So we spend-I'd say, we had a vision for this being a learning platform for probably 13 years. It's only really been the last two years that we really, truly executed on that, restful interfaces around everything, you can check it out, code.google.com, look for Desire2Learn Valence. And the goal is we want to be the most open and extensible platform in the marketplace. We're just though because you get a Moodle that's completely open. But we can win on the extensibility side. So you can take the upgrades, you can take the releases and we can build a really nice ecosystem around building components and sit on top of it. We've had hundreds of different applications built on this. We run an edge challenge which is put at students, which is designed to give away about a hundred thousand on price money. Because what we heard was-students had no trouble complaining with our educational experience, but we wanted to give them an outlet for them to be able to say, okay, well do something about it. Build some technology build some resources that will actually have an impact on educational experience. Or if you don't know the code, just pitch an idea on how to improve it. And the great ideas float to the top and get awarded. And that's--well, if you want to do it know more, just one more slide. We're also doing a lot of work on predictive modeling for students picking their electives. So, as they're going through, if they're struggling through, like let's say engineering's elective, they're looking for electives in engineering, we'll actually give them a five star rating on how well we think they're going to do in the class and how important it is for their program. So, they can go, well that's going to be a tough course for me, but it looks like one that would be really applicable for my major. So, the idea behind eCompass was really, you know, helped with the career pathways. Or sorry, the degree pathways and then next will be career pathways. >> Question. >> Okay. >> Okay. >> No pressure. [laughter] >> This may not be a good question. >> It's okay. >> It's related to your operation. As [inaudible] your--Waterloo student, on the end of January, the system was down for like three days-- >> I think that's a great question. >> So I just wonder what the real cause for that instance and then what is the action plan for like preventing it from the future happening? >> Well I think that's a fantastic question. So thanks for making the toughest question the last question by the way. So you're referring to the--we had an outage with some of our clients with one of our data centers this January. In some cases, it lasted anywhere between six hours to three days. It was the most significant outage that we'd had in the organization's history in 14 years of doing this. That was a painful experience for us. And then the worst part about it was it was--as we're transitioning into our investment of many, many millions of dollars into new infrastructure, to allow us infinite scale and growth and next generation of all this technology. It was that new infrastructure that was causing the problems. So we had a breakdown with the communication between our new NAS storage devices, in our file virtualization layer, and it caused a pretty significant issue for clients. And so what we've learned from that is that--we had a QA stack. It did not identify the issues. So we revised how we test that QA stack, which has basically a full replication of what we have in production. We're building closer relationships with the vendors that we have. We're improving our testing procedures. We're improving training for our staff. We're improving basically the implementation of like ITIL standards across the organization for change management, for all kinds of other tips and activities. There is a lot of effort going into taking our SAS operation up to the world class that we want it to be. And just, the unfortunate part is, if you want to do a Google on machine account password resets on new--well I shouldn't name the vendor. On this NAS box, that was the actual root issue attached to the problems that we're having with that device, was that every 15 days on the dot, it would reset, which is--wasn't supposed to be doing. >> Is your system cloud-based system? >> Yes. >> I see. Now let's say for example in [inaudible] a student accidentally delete something, there's no warning. So how easy we recover? >> So, if they delete something? Almost every interface where you delete something has the ability to go in and undelete it. So where there is something that doesn't have that interface we go to, like a tape backup or through one of the other machine backups that we have. And we can restore it from either physical disc or from tape. >> They're letting me to sneak in one supplementary question. >> Thanks. These are all great questions. You know the tough one, the earlier one right? >> For your analytics. >> Yeah. >> These normative analytics and predictive analytics and so on that you just talked about, where does--what's your normative database for this? Where do you get all that? >> Well what's interesting is the database that we used to make the predictions actually is generated from previous offerings from the courses. And--so the more previous offerings that you have, the more accurate the predictions become. So we're actually doing machine learning versus--and we do have some baseline data that we use to build the models. So if you have nothing, it won't be, you know, horrible prediction, but the more data that you put in to the system the more accurate the predictions are. >> So it's not--so it's institution-based? It's not based on your entire customer-based or anything like that? >> So we're asking a few customers if they're wanting to share, to help us with benchmarking across. But right now, it's within your own institution. >> Okay great. Yeah. Great questions. We just want to thank John, David, David and Adam for coming from Desire2Learn, and that was a great presentation. Thanks to all of you attending and to those watching through streaming. I just want to point out that this is our only session for today. But we're back tomorrow at 10 a.m. where we're actually having a faculty from Wilfrid Laurier come and speak about their experiences and how they're using Desire2Learn. And today is a--tomorrow is a packed schedule as well. So I hope you guys show up for as many sessions as possible. So, again, we have feedback forms if you'd like to provide some feedback about the sessions to us, I'll be waiting in the corner over there. So thank you. >> Thank you and hopefully you invite us back. So, thank you. [ Applause ]