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- Upon request, COLI will install third-party extensions in D2L, after determining that the extension uses appropriate technology (typically Learning Tools Interoperability, or LTI) and presents no risk or harm to any course spaces, students, faculty, or any other element within D2L.
- Publisher plugins or extensions that require administrative work by COLI or ITS personnel may take weeks to deploy. It's successful implementation is dependent on everything going to plan as purported by the content publisher. So you should request integrations as early as you can.
- Beyond extension setup, ITS (including Helpdesk) and COLI do not provide support for digital products, content packages, course cartridges, websites, or other tools supplied by content creators outside Canisius CollegeUniversity. These publishers may include, for example, textbook or educational content publishers, database websites, mobile apps, exam operation or proctoring sites, or others with which Canisius College does not have a formal, collegeUniversity-level business relationship. There are too many and they vary widely in function, capability, and quality. COLI and ITS staff seldom have any access at all to screens that students see, and never have access to administrative tools. So publishers or vendors must provide all support for how to enroll students into online components of their packages, upload their content cartridges into Learning Management Systems like D2L, employ faculty tools such as quiz or exam builders, and so forth.
- You need a plan B, or alternative means of teaching in case your chosen digital publisher content does not work properly. COLI staff have seen publisher plugins and other content fail and publishers fail to properly remedy the problem. Publishers occasionally claim the problem is within D2L, but the API connection out of D2L is quite simple, and COLI has not seen instances where D2L has been the source of a problem.
- COLI or ITS staff will judge whether the implementation of a plugin or extension poses a risk to D2L course spaces, the D2L system, or any other web-based system supplied by the CollegeCanisius. If COLI or ITS decide that implementation requirements, or subsequent modifications to D2L are not reasonable, prudent, or practical, either at a certain point in a semester or in general, we will not implement or continue to support an implementation.
- Your students are now facing a myriad of online tools and resources across their courses. Employing systems outside D2L, Google Drive, Turnitin, or other collegeCanisius-supplied applications may be worth it, if these outside resources supply rich, interactive experiences for your students. But overly complicated systems that basically offer another way to deploy quizzes or collect file-based assignments, without substantially different features than D2L, are probably not worth it. Consider carefully whether convenience for you warrants additional learning responsibilities for your students.
- Publisher plugins, extensions, and content may complicate your course building activities in D2L. For example, you may need to manage unfamiliar structures, such as LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability). If you elect to replace course content in subsequent semesters, existing content loaded in bulk might make this a bigger chore.
- If you are relying on assessments – for example, quiz questions – supplied by the publisher, be aware that these questions and their answers may have made it somewhere onto the open internet, where students may be able to access them prior to completing an assessment in your course.
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Guidelines for Publishers
Generally, Canisius College ITS and the Center for Online Learning & Innovation are willing to install publisher tools and integrations into D2L, but there are some important things content publishers should be aware of:
- Canisius College ITS and the Center for Online Learning & Innovation reserve the right to reject any such tool or integration at any time. This means we might elect not to install it, or might disable or remove it at our discretion.
- Canisius College’s Canisius’ D2L administrators do not provide training or troubleshooting support for publishers’ integrations or tools. Canisius College ITS Help Desk does not support these tools or integrations. If students or faculty encounter problems with publisher applications of any kind, they are directed by Help Desk to contact the publisher for technical support.
- If a publisher representative becomes aware of a problem with their integration within Canisius’ D2L instance that requires Canisius administrator intervention, they should supply specific instruction to the Canisius administrator, and should anticipate several business days before action can be taken.
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