hello we are Western Michigan University today we will be talking about e-learning success kits using D2L as a resource Hub hi I'm Harold Watkins pronounce Heim assistant director of educational technology support services at Western Michigan University joining me in presenting will be my colleagues Kristen haruk Lauren McMullen and Linda Zia over the course of our presentation we will touch on the following five agenda items first ideation why we needed a resource Hub second using D2L as a resource Hub how we use D2L to turn our idea into reality third building written content Insight on how we went about creating our written content guides fourth building audio content again how we went about the creation and insertion of these types of media and lastly the future use of our resource Hub and how we plan to expand on it to start our presentation you can stay here with me Harold Watkins and we will start with our first item ideation of the resource Hub the first question you might have is what is an e-learning success kit we want you to think of it as a knowledge base that works as an interactive course for students they navigate through content just as they would experience any course content through D2L which about 90% of our courses at Wu have the other important aspect is this is where students are able to practice different tool areas such as discussions assignments and quizzes they can start threads and posts turn in assignments using various submission types and practice taking a quiz without the stress of being in an academic course so why do we need it the answer here is long and convoluted frankly but the short answer is this we had a revolving door of knowledge based Solutions over the past 5 to S years we started using web pages in our CMS moved to zenes as a true knowledge based provider then switched to Salesforce as a University deciding to consolidate to a singular system Salesforce is a great tool as many of you know however while it's robust in some things a knowledge base is not one of them you have to know exact keywords in order to find articles and have a basic understanding of the terminology this doesn't always bode well for new students so we aim to give them a different and easier Solution by placing all of the knowledge directly into the system that they spend the majority of their time in as many people say you practice how you play and for ease of use we found D2L to be the best solution to our problems now that you know a little bit about what we consider a resource Hub I want to talk you through how it came to be as a master student in educational and instructional technology I began researching technology needs at Wu what I found was that there was a significant Gap in support for students further research led me to the following things first a national survey showed an average of 70 touch points for students with their needs in education with only 68% of students being satisfied with the level of support they receive this is from Felix 2023 and I will provide resources at the end of the slideshow if you're more interested in the entirety of that research this goes to show that we offer far too many different support services for students and they become overwhelmed so this was a point of emphasis that whatever we created needed needed to be existing already and work to reduce the number of possible touch points for them them second when students have a sense of agency in autonomy they are more likely to be motivated engaged and develop a sense of purpose and ownership Z 2023 and again that U article is going to be at the end in the references This research helped reiterate that if we could take a weakness and turn it into a strength it would Empower students in their academic work and ease the burden of Technology struggles across student faculty and staff support areas as well lastly one of the most requested items from the oit help desk that support students with D2L in our instructional Technology Center who supports instructors with D2L were support materials for students faculty often talked about how they would spend too much time worrying about teaching about technology functions and missing time to teach about their actual subject matters with that information I decided to prototype a COR shell in D2L that could meet the needs of everyone involved following my graduation I approached leadership with my idea we had a few implementation and support questions that needed to be answered first before we could do this first who would support this as I mentioned we have two areas one that supports students and one that supports instructors and administers the LMS D2L our help desk was unable to take this on but our instructional Technology Center saw the benefit and decided they could so why the instructional Technology Center Center first they had the knowledge to do this each member of the team whom you will meet later had a functional knowledge of how to best create support materials it also helps their client tell of instructors because they can focus on teaching their content instead of the technology a win-win for both parties the last question is how do we make this sustainable we know that D2L is constantly updating so we had to create this with the future in mind coming up our team will tell you how we did that before we talk about how our content is made here's where the course stands today with the creation and launch of our course we have seen tremendous activity in a short amount of time this course launched in Fall of 2023 and today has 901 students enrolled all of which willingly did so through the Discover tool with that we have 611 tool interactions on our main tools 110 threads 273 posts 142 submitted documents and assignments and 215 quiz is attempted not only are we seeing participation but we have seen Community grow as well there are dozens of posts of encouragement wishing people well in exams and curiosity about school break plans this is definitely not something we imagined we would see but has been a great unexpected outcome lastly our instructional Technology Center staff monitors content regularly to make sure that the content is working and interactions are friendly and safe spaces for all of our enrolled participants next I'm going to pass it over to Kristen haruk to tell you more about how he implemented this at Wu thank you hi I'm Kristen huk pron on she her the senior instructional technology specialist at Western Michigan University in the instructional Technology Center in the ITC we are the One-Stop customer service Bas for online Technologies including D2L during this part of the presentation I'm going to chat about how we took the idea of the Student Success kit resource Hub course class shell whatever you want to call it and made it a reality the first thing that we thought about was shell creation so what we did is we created our shell using our generic template in D2L and had a clean slate and kind of started from there then we had to figure out what areas in e-learning we wanted to utilize so we decided to leverage both the content area in each of the assessment pieces dropboxes discussions and quizzes to not only show students what a course could could look like but also get some practice in detail if they wanted we did all of this by following best practices supported by D2L and our instructional design team to set up what a typical course would look like for students knowing that every instructor does a little bit different but we wanted to show and utilize those best practices we focused on the news items navigating through g2l each of those assessment pieces the discussions dropboxes and quizzes as well as outside tools and software that students may see in use in class some examples of what we have here at wer in our media site I clicker WebEx and teams once we had that all laid out we really went through and decided what each module would cover and what specific area tool would be included and include both written and video instructions and you're going to learn a little more about how we did that in some later presentation along with the that we did practicing if the tool allows it so when we first launched we had a lot of written steps step-by-step instructions of how um a student can access the different areas and work with them now we are building in and adding more videos and continue to do that and continue to build on the toolkit every single year so that we can add more to help enhance the student learning each module gives the students the ability to learn learn the best way for themselves and it really apply that knowledge it's important to note that the ITC where we work does not provide day-to-day support for students in any of these areas that we are training in D2L there was a need and therefore Harold came up with a vision and we've expanded and implemented that throughout the university using the self-registration system So currently students do self-register themselves but we saw the loophole like Herold has mentioned and we really wanted to fill that Gap we included where they should go to get help because it wouldn't be from us so they might hear our voices or see our faces but it wouldn't be us that they'd be coming to so we wanted to include where they would get help and in our instance that's at the oat help desk that has both students and professional staff that help students walk through e-learning and all sorts of tech from everything from you know modem issues to uh support with their classes we also included outside help articles from Microsoft WebEx and Etc so that we didn't reinvent the wheel they're the experts in their specific software so we wanted to utilize that to our um advantage and not reinvent that wheel overall our success kit is a trial and error adventure for the ITC day to-day we work with instructors primarily in D2L and the team takes those cues from instructors on what the students need and implements them so if we talk to an instructor and they say hey we really think students should learn about this we do go through and Implement that in the succcess kit so that students students can learn a little bit more about that once we had our success kit set up with the modules and all the practice and all that we wanted to spread the word of how students can get into this and how instructors can learn about it so we first set and utilized e-learning to do news items we had one news item released specifically to students and that goes out each semester to say hey you want to get some practice you want to reinforce what you've learned in e-learning sign up for the success kit we also did one for instructors showing them what where they could send their students to sign up for this cesit as well as encourage them to encourage enrollment in in this so that they can be better prepared for their classes the biggest one was probably Word of Mouth everyone we talk to on the phone or we meet with an appointment we push the success kit to instructors so that we kind of can spread that word um as well as sharing this with the help desk so they know it exists and other key departments on campus um that might really have students who would um benefit from our success kit we've had some great experience and some great feedback from this and some instructors are actually requiring students to participate in the kit as part of their class and they may award us some extra credit or something of that nature to get them engaged and um get these you know all of this knowledge applied in their courses so that is how we kind of took it from idea to the real world and implemented it and again again always an evergoing process but I bet you'd like to see what this is all about so I'm going to go into our success kit and show you a little bit of how we set this up knowing that you have flexibility to do it your own way here is our e-learning Tech success kit so when you come in we try to do you know as much as we could to welcome adding the student banner and also what the success kit is and then where they can get help here on the right hand side we ALS o treated this just like a class would be so when we're looking at this news item here you're going to see exactly what this is but also educating on what the news items used for and pointing out the ability to use notifications everything else here on the homepage is standard to what they would see in a course their help Widget the calendar and the we have a University Library widget as well then the big place where we utilize content uh we have all of the different modules so you're going to see navigating e-learning tools Etc Etc so we leveraged both um like we said the um written and video instructions here and students can navigate through each of these areas reinforcing where they go for help in every case and then reinforcing you know practice in the different areas of assessment as well as where they can find more information about our thirdparty you know software that they have available to them media site I clicker webx and teams and again we included as much information as we could without having it overloaded so we set it up like what we would assume a course would look like in D2L modules we don't have any dates we don't have any T and dates and times and things of that nature because we really want students to be able to come back and go we don't ever unenroll students so they can come and go if they need information maybe they're in their third year and they're wondering oh I remember that thing about dropboxes they can come into our eling true tools and go into dropboxes and see you know what that was and again we're constantly updating and constantly moving through things they can see who's in the class with them as a class list as well as participate in discussions and we have a lot of students who actually have been participating in discussions um and doing that and kind of interacting with each other so we've had a good um turnout there as well so this is our e-learning success kit and what we did to implement this in e-learning and make it a reality thank you hi I'm Lauren McMullen groun sh an instructional technology specialist at Western Michigan University I am covering our process for building written content into our Student Success kit I'll be discussing the following points how we chose to format and attach our written content the thought process behind our kits documentation and using d2l's content area to help centralize information specifically from Salesforce but also also from other information software for our students so first off how we chose to format and attach our written content what we found in D2L is that their creative file option is a reliable tool for creating visually inviting and practical content it can be found under the new button create a file we appreciate and use the features like headings bullets Auto numbering we' found that this tool allows us to create content that is screen reader friendly and easy to adapt to the look and order that we are going for to show you how that looks I'm going to switch over to student view and I'm going to be a student that is curious about the discussions feature in my D2L course I come here to discussions you'll see that the first option is our written content interacting with discussions made using the creative file tool if I'm a student the inclusion of both written materials and audio as will be discussed by my colleague Linda up next allows for multiple Avenues of taking in information where one may be less preferred the other may be more familiar or accessible to my needs or preferences perhaps I'm someone who really appreciates being able to take notes we recognize that we get a very small portion of our students students attention and likely when it is most applicable to what they're doing if they're not sure how to leave or reply to a discussion post that's when they're going to come searching for us it is a favor to us all being concise and to the point while still informative and effective written material is also a convenient form of information to share across multiple modalities of communication it is also flexible as we look to the Future of how we might build or present the content that we already have my final point is how using D2L helps us centralize information specifically from Salesforce while you won't see the Salesforce as its own module you will see that we've included documentation from our celles Force for students to access because students spend most of their remote instructional time in D2L we found that this incorporation is helpful to them as well as to us we've also found in addition to this create a link feature which can be found under new create a link the upload files feature has been a great way for us to also include other file types such as PDF and word docs in the D2 L content area we find that this is especially useful when linking to other learning software information material for example our campus often uses media sit iclicker WebEx Microsoft teams and other help resources including library and student heal linking out for media site though allows them a HomeBase which we hope allows them more security as they learn I'm Linda Zia pronouned she her an instructional technology specialist at Western Michigan University in this section I'm going to talk about presenting recorded content using D2L more specifically the process behind why we chose to create video-based tutorials how we insert video content into a course shell using insert stuff and using media integration as a recording tool and video player plus alternative recording software and upload methods you may be wondering why we create video content in addition to written content many people describe themselves as visual Learners and may prefer a clear demonstration as accomplished through videos rather than following written instructions our video tutorials help viewers to follow our instruction step by step while the visual aspect helps them see exactly what and where to click to accomplish their desired task additionally a video link is easy to share out and easy to digest many students may wish to watch before doing so video tutorials in conjunction with notes from written content can help improve overall understanding and preparedness now let me walk you through our process for adding video content to the modules in our success kit first I should explain that Western Michigan University uses the media site platform to provide video streaming hosting and video capture services to the university community we use media site for screencasting audio and video recording and uploading existing media for easy sharing in D2L media site is integrated in D2L providing a personal video library for each user second there are actually two methods we use to present recorded video and audio content in our modules one method is to create a link feature in a module we click new then create a link in our mediaite library we click share presentation to copy the quick link back in our module we paste the link in the URL section add a title and then click create usually we will add the word video before the title so users are aware that the link contains video content in our module we will now see a clickable link with our chosen title once I click it I will be able to watch the video in a new tab the second method is the create a file feature that we use to create written content in this method we embed a video or audio player into the web page so viewers can interact with recorded content directly within D2L to do this we click new then create a file enter the title of the video again we add video to the beginning so students are aware that it is not just text on the web page but a video they can watch this is especially important because both the link and the web page method label content as link or web page not as a video back in the file we're creating this is where our media site integration really comes in handy in the editor toolbar we use the insert stuff button which resembles the play pause record and stop icons from here scroll down to find and click the media site integration under add existing media click presentation from here media site will link to a user's personal video library showing the most recent presentations first we can search our personal libraries for the correct video under the video click add to the course and select player only we opt for the player because it appears as a video embedded on the e-learning page insert the video then click save and close viewers can watch the video directly within D2L with all the player controls they have the option to make the video full screen as well without having to jump to a new tab finally as mentioned earlier there are many alternatives to Media site that can be used to record and upload audio or video content in D2L for example in this post-pandemic world many of us may be familiar with video conferencing tools such as zoom webx and Microsoft teams all of which allow you to record your face and your screen and save it to cloud storage or personal devices with these options you can either share a link to the recording as demonstrated earlier or you can download your recording as an mp4 file and upload it directly to a module using the D2L upload files tool in a module click new upload files then search for the MP4 on your computer's local downloads or within a cloud drive like one drive or Google drive if you choose this method D2L will label the video as a video in your your content Additionally you can use video platforms similar to media sites such as panopto which can also integrate with D2L lastly you can use platforms such as YouTube to record store and upload video content you can do this using the create a link function or you can create a file like I demonstrated earlier and AED a YouTube video using the insert stuff button furthermore as you can see there are a variety of other options in insert stuff including flicker films on demand and Alexander Street video but these options may depend on what is provided by your institution the videos we use in our success kit ultimately prove quite useful as I reuse them often across courses and success kits for variety of needs the videos can also be used to promote the success kit to instructors who then share the video and information with their students now I'd like to pass the Baton back to Harold who will look at the future of the success kit thank you Kristen Lauren and Linda this is Harold Watkins again and I'm going to go through the future steps for our success kits our success kit continues to grow we are always adding new content content and making changes to our materials as new tools or changes to tools occur within our systems we continue spreading this to faculty department and University committees making sure that they know about this kit to pass along to their students we've increased promotion making sure that this is in additional newsletters and giving it to university-wide promotional sites in Fall of 2024 we're going to begin enrolling all first year undergraduate and graduate students into this course so they have access to it right away without having to self-enroll we're going to be creating new versions of this success kit and the first one that we're creating is going to be a teaching assistant and graduate assistant version we're going to begin having Student Success coaches working with our dual enrolled students and hopefully this can grow to have Student Success coaches that work with students all across campus as well well first and foremost thank you for watching our presentation if you have questions please feel free to reach out to us all four of us that presented in this video are going to be at Fusion 2024 so if you see us please feel free to come up and ask any questions that you have if you're watching this for Fusion on demand you can email us at w-c wm.edu or Herold n.w Watkins w.edu the references that I mentioned earlier in this presentation are going to be available on the next slide if you have any questions or more interested in those articles feel free to check those out or you can email me about my research on this topic at heral n.w Watkins w.edu thank you