October 2021 Updates for UCalgary Learning Technologies

Here are some of the updates to our learning technologies that happened during October that may be relevant to instructors.

eLearn 

A sandbox provides a place where you can play with and test features in D2L. We have added documentation on using a sandbox, testing if you have a sandbox and requesting a sandbox. 

Brightspace/D2L 

You can now drag and drop, and copy and paste images in most non-grading areas (content, discussion posts, etc) with the Brightspace Editor. An update at the end of November will allow drag and drop in all places.

YuJa 

The video player has been updated to make watching a video more streamlined and it is now possible to download videos with the subscript captions “burned in”. There have been several updates to the video editor, mostly related to editing captions. In particular it is now possible to edit captions in several languages at the same time and to find and replace text within the captions. There have also been upgrades to the editor’s performance.

Zoom 

Chat will look a little different, showing your profile image or initials next to what you contribute to the chat. This should help make it easier to identify people in chat.

Other changes include that you can now control other meeting participants presentations. Originally you could share full control of your computer, this limits sharing to slides and works with most presentation software such as Microsoft Powerpoint, Google Slides and Apple Keynote. This should help in situations where several people are presenting but only one of them is sharing the slides. Additionally, now when you disconnect as host and reconnect, you will now be offered the option to remain as co-host or participant, which should help reduce distractions in some meetings.

These updates are available in Zoom version 5.8.3.