myCourses was updated on Wednesday, May 24, 2017 to a new user-interface and theme developed by D2L, the myCourses vendor.

We summarize the Key Features, Changes, and Additions here.

My Courses Listing

The biggest change has been to the My Courses listing on the home page of myCourses. Courses may not appear automatically for all users depending on how many courses they have access to.

A visual walkthrough is available to show you the quick steps to find all of your Fall 2171 courses and pin them to you home page. https://wiki.rit.edu/x/lQNSC 

If you need assistance with this please contact us in Academic Technology Support. We are glad to walk you through these steps or quickly pin your courses for you. Our hours of service, contact information, and online chat are available at http://rit.edu/tls/contact.

We have provided feedback to the vendor and have seen some development being made on the My Courses listing. Over the summer we have seen updates made to their changes for the presentation in Grades and Dropbox.

Key Features

• Works across computers, tablets and smartphones
  
  • Adapting to different screen sizes to provide a great user experience on computers, tablets, or smartphones.
  • Nearly a 100% feature parity with the full computer experience for native myCourses features and tools depending on your device and any restrictions caused by its operating system.
  • No additional app download required. Access https://myCourses.rit.edu from your web browser.
    
    
• Modern and clean design

  • Less cluttered and simpler to navigate.

  • Redesigned icons for clarity.
  • Increased consistency across tools.

Changes

Beyond the user-interface and theme update, the majority of the tools on myCourses will continue to work as they have before.

The significant changes are:

• New My Courses list and course navigation
  
  • My Courses widget shows courses pinned by the user with an option to view all courses.
  • Course updates are displayed as a total number following the course title. Details on the specific updates can by found on the default course home page in the Updates widget.
  • The top navigation bar has a course selector icon which allows access to pinned courses, recently accessed courses, and a course search throughout myCourses.
    Course selector icon
    
    
• General navigation changes
  • Navigation in a course has moved from two bars at the top to a single bar on the desktop and wider screen tablets.
  • Tools and links which do not fit on the one navigation bar will have the right-most links placed in a drop-down menu titled "More >" at the end of the navigation bar.
  • On smaller screens, navigation links are accessed through the mobile navigation hamburger menu icon to the top left.
    Mobile navigation menu
    
    
• Revamped Quiz Question creation experience
  • The experience of creating individual questions was streamlined for many question types with the most common features of questions brought to the forefront.
  • Custom Weighting is now an option, removing the confusing 100% weighting for the correct question.
  • A live preview showing what the question will look like to students is displayed while editing.
  • All other quiz configuration remains the same as before.
    
    
• Dropbox Folders default to a "draft status" of being hidden from users to prevent students from seeing assignments while the instructor is creating them.
  • This is indicated by a hidden icon in the list of Dropbox Folders.
    Hidden folder icon
  • The status of a folder can be changed in two ways:
    • From the List of Dropbox Folders, click the action menu arrow next to the folder title and select Make Visible to Users from the menu.
    • When creating or editing the folder go to the Restrictions tab and uncheck the Hidden from users checkbox. Save your changes.
      
      
• Surveys and Chat removed from the default navigation bar, can be added optionally by the Instructor.
  • With the vendor's change to a single navigation bar these lightly used tools were removed from the default navigation bar.
  • Instructors can choose to add the tools to the navigation bar in their course by customizing their Navigation bar.
  • Homepage and Navigation Bar - Instructor Documentation

Additions

• Accessibility Checker

  • The accessibility checker gives you a way to ensure that the content you author in the HTML Editor conforms to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and the Federal Section 508 accessibility standards.

  • Accessed through the Accessibility Checker icon at the lower-right of the editor.
    Accessibility Checker icon

Additional Information

Additional information is available on D2L's website at: https://www.d2l.com/products/user-interface/

Academic Technology Support

If you have any questions, please contact Academic Technology Support referring to http://www.rit.edu/tls/contact for our contact information and hours of service.