DCAD Digital Help Guides

What is the Activity Stream?

The Activity Stream shows you what’s happening in all your courses. For example, it will tell you when students submit work and colleagues add new content. Clicking a notification item will take you directly to that specific activity within your course. 

You can tailor what you see. Click the drop down menu at the top right to to filter the Activity Stream listing. You can also configure Stream notifications by clicking the cog icon. 

Courses Page

Access all of your courses from the Courses Page. You can view your courses as a list or a grid (as seen in the images on the left).

To swap between the two views, click the list/grid icon at the top left. You also have the option to search, filter or display selected courses.

In grid view, customise the course image by clicking on More options (ellipses) > Edit course image.  

To find a course, type the name of the course in the Search your courses box.

Quick Tip: Click the star icon to favourite a course i.e. courses you frequently access. This will ensure the course appears at the top of the list!​​​​​​​ 

Inside Your Course

Includes options to manage your course:

Class Register – View your class roster. Enrol other instructors or teaching assistants (if required).  

Progress Tracking – This enables progress tracking so that you and your students to see what tasks they have started, completed, or haven’t interacted with.

Course Image – This allows you to change the course image that appears in your course tile on the course overview page and at the top of the course page.

Course Availability – Set course as Open (available and ready for student participation) or Private.

Books & Tools – View Ally Accessibility Report and access tools like Encore (Panopto) recordings and Zoom Meetings specific to your course.

Questions Banks – Import question pools from duo (or publishers).

Microsoft Teams – When enabled this will create a new Team in Microsoft Teams for your course that will contain your class roster.

Add course schedule – You can manually add schedule for your module that shows all the key dates.

B. Navigation Bar

As part of the latest release, the previous icon based Navigation menu has now been replaced with a text-based navigation at the top left.  The Navigation bar also acts as a sticky menu, which means it will remain visible to even after you have scrolled down the page. 

Click on the following links to access frequently used tools/pages within the course:

• Course Content – Add, edit and view course content
• Course Calendar – Manage course calendar
• Announcement – Send/schedule cohort wide announcements (including email copies) and view previous announcements.
• Discussions – Quick and easy way to access/view/respond to all discussions in your module
• Gradebook – Assess and manage course assessments
• Messages – Send, view and respond to course messages
• Analytics – View Question Analytics and SCORM reports
• Groups – This option enables students to be grouped for assignment work, tutorials, etc.

Student Preview

The Student Preview can be found at the top right of the screen. This will allow you to access the Student Preview when you are on any top navigation page (e.g. Calendar, Gradebook, etc.). Use this to check the view the students will see, this is useful to double check you have made everything visible to the student.

C. Course Content Area

This is where you organise your course content and activities. Click the purple plus icon wherever you want to add content, the icon will appear on any line within the Course Content area.  

Creating Learning Modules

To add a learning module, click the purple plus icon on the line where you would like add the item. Click Create and select Learning module from the panel. 

Give it a title and a description. You can also add an image here as a pointer to the content.

You can include range of content items in a learning module, including, documents, files, tests/assignments, folders, video, links to websites, discussions, and journals. 

• Click the purple plus icon and add a content item
• Use the double arrows to drag and re-organise items
• Click More options (ellipses) to edit or delete the item
• Set the Visibility and/or Release Conditions

Release Conditions

With Learning Modules, you can chose to release content in sequence, by date/time, or performance (i.e. by completing an assessment). 

Content can be released to all members of the course or selected members or groups.

Remember, you can only set the Sequence condition if students haven’t started working in the module. You can remove the condition after students start working, but you can’t reapply it.

To create a document, click the purple plus sign and select document from the right hand panel. 

Give the document a title. Use the following options to build your content:

• Add Content – use the rich text editor to add text, links, images/files, embed third party tools like Talis Aspire reading list and Encore (Panopto) video
• Add HTML – embed an inline HTML code or CSS into the editor
• Upload from Computer – browse and add files from your computer  
• Upload from Cloud Storage – upload documents from your Durham University OneDrive account

Additional items have been added to the toolbar:

• Knowledge Check – use this to add a quick check question to test a student’s knowledge of the content. This can be either a multiple choice or a multiple answer question.
• Convert a File – files such as a PowerPoint presentation or Word document can be converted into a Blackboard document. This means that materials that you have previously created can be quickly incorporated into your module learning materails.
• Content Collection – materials can be added from other modules as they are stored in the content collection. This option presents a browser window, but new files can also be uploaded.