Two months ago, DePaul upgraded from D2L 9.4 to version 10.3, a leap of four versions. For our department, that means we’ve had 60 days of leading trainings on the big changes in the system; discovering, reproducing, and reporting bugs; fielding angry complaints about new annoyances that have popped up in this new version; and constantly manning the phones to answer instructor questions. In short, it’s been exhausting.

But I don’t want to talk about bugs or new annoyances. I don’t want to talk about how much time I’ve spent on the phone to get through this transition. I want to talk about something positive. So to take my mind off of all that, I’m going to write about the good part of upgrades–great new features, my favorite being student progress tracking.

What is progress tracking?

Progress tracking turns your Content area into a checklist for students. Every item in your Content can be something that students can check off as they complete it, or something that’s automatically checked when the student does something in D2L, like submit to a dropbox folder or complete a quiz attempt. This is what it looks like for a student.

Students get a progress bar for items they’ve completed in a module, and a green check for modules they’ve completed, giving them a good sense of what they’ve done and what they need to do in their course.

Why am I excited about progress tracking?

• Checklists without redundancy — When we run our DOTS training for faculty who are starting to teach online, we have a student panel come in, and every single time someone on the panel mentions Checklists and how helpful they are. There has been a checklist tool in D2L for a long time, but it had to be set up independently from Content. What this meant in practical terms is that instructors and course developers would put all their content in a module, and then create a separate checklist that lists everything in Content. Any time you duplicate information in an online course, its more likely that you make a mistake. If an assignment changes, you might remember to make the change in Content but not in the Checklist.

• Checklists front and center — And completion tracking is even better than a checklist. Students can see, with a single glance at the Content page, where they are and what they still need to do, without having to go into individual checklists in individual modules.

• Adding “gamification” elements — Don’t underestimate the emotional impact of a green checkmark and a progress bar. This kind of immediate positive feedback as they work through your course site is great for students.

• Differentiate assignments from reference material — One of the standards in the Quality Matters rubric for online-course design is to communicate clearly what is required versus what is optional. It’s something many instructors overlook. With completion tracking, there’s a very easy way to do that — simply not enabling it for optional or reference materials.

How to set up progress tracking

We have a complete guide for setting up completion tracking in your course here.

What else would I like to see in completion tracking?

Completion tracking isn’t perfect. There are some things I’d like to see added in future updates.

• An “at a glance” view for instructors to track students — It’s great that students get to see how much they’ve done and how much they have to do right on the course table of contents. Wouldn’t it be nice if instructors could see how many of their students had completed a topic or a module in a similar way, instead of having to go into each topic individually? I think so.

• More options for automatic completion — One of the biggest problems I have with completion tracking right now is that if you set automatic completion on a discussion topic, it will mark as complete for a student after their first post. Very few instructors structure their assignments so that students only need to post once; in most discussions, students are required to post an original thread and respond to two others. It’s impossible to add this logic to completion tracking, so you wind up just setting it to manual. I’ve also seen instructors who want their students to keep taking a quiz until they’ve gotten 100 percent on it, but automatic completion tracking will always kick in after the first attempt. So I’d like to see more options there.

Here’s hoping that the next time we have to deal with a major system upgrade that has our phones ringing off the hook, it comes with these kinds of improvements to what’s already a great feature.