in the College of Engineering
in the College of Engineering
ICON, a course-management system, was made available to the entire campus for the fall 2005 courses. All College of Engineering courses are automatically created in ICON. Until the instructor activates a course, the files and content are not visible, so just because an ICON course site has been created does not mean that you must use ICON. The College encourages using ICON to help administer courses and for FERPA compliance in posting grades.
ICON is a product created and supported by Desire2Learn (D2L). You see the Desire2Learn logo when you edit course content.
View the right and roles for Instructor-Designer, TA-Designer, TA Levels 1 and 2, and Course Builder. If the TA is known to OSIRIS, that person is assigned the role of TA (High Level, L1).
ICON Quick Reference. This 2-page PDF quick reference guide for ICON was created for the College of Nursing. The instructions are concise. There are sections on Uploading Course Files; Content Links; Discussions; Gradebook; Dropboxes; Quizzes; and more. Print copies as you need.
ITS has installed version 8.3 of Desire2Learn's product that we call ICON. Try it on their test server. Issues and questions you submit are being kept in this wiki. ITS will upgrade the production version of ICON to 8.3 on Thursday-Friday, 29-30 May.
Known Issues are available in the ICON quick links section (shown at right) on the ICON login page.
8/07
Version 8.1.3 of ICON was installed in early August 2007. One big improvement
from the previous version is that homepage layouts, NavBars, and custom
widgets copy correctly from one course site to another. Another is that
the URL path
to quizzes has been changed so quizzes should be more secure
than previously. Also, this version officially supports the Firefox browser
.
8/06
A new version of ICON was installed in 8/06. Improvements include a formula column and formula gradebook type
and a "Library Reserves" tool, a Course Tools widget, which
is only visible to instructors. This tool grants access to your site's
Content area by Reserves Librarians from your area, who can then add library
reserves materials directly to your course site. Please note that you still
must make direct contact with Library Reserves; using the tool simply grants
the technical access, it does not let the libraries know what materials
you need.
By default, your ICON course created and populated from Registrar information is unavailable to students; that is, they cannot access it even though their names may appear in the Classlist.
To make your course available:
- From the Course Home, click Edit Course in the NavBar.
- Click to place a checkmark in the Active? textbox.
- Click Save Changes.
At the end of the semester, you must deactivate the course when you no longer want students to have access to the course ICON site. Making your course unavailable at the end of the term allows you to keep the students data without allowing them access. To make the course unavailable (students can no longer access it from their MyHome page), click to remove the checkmark from the Active? textbox in step 2 above.
see http://icon.uiowa.edu/onlinehelp/setup/course_availability/
By students: Do not put answers and other files on your ICON course site until you are ready for students to have access to those files. You can store files containing sensitive information in an ICON development site or on a network drive, your hard drive, or an engineering class share drive. See Known Issues #36.
By other instructors: Instructors can add other (co-) instructors to their class with the Add Participant link in the Classlist too; set the rights of the person added to Instructor-Designer. Note that an Instructor-Designer will be in your classlist and grades.
If you do not want other co-instructors to show up in the classlist or grades, ask Diana Harris, 335-5121, to add an individual as Support Staff, which can see course information but not change it.
The calendar does not handle repeating items such as office hours. You must add all repeating items as individual events.
For course sites created after 11/05, the classlist is a widget that can be used by Instructor and TAs. By default it is not part of the course NavBar.
By default, ICON labels course content as "Unit 1, Unit 2,...". You can change the enumeration to be A, B, C, or I, II, III. Additionally you can replace or remove the word "Unit".
- From Edit Course, go to the Content area.
- Click the link Content Display Settings on the left.
- Choose the Enumerations tab.
- Select Override and change <b>Unit to whatever HTML you prefer. The <b> makes the text boldface, so you could do something like <b>Lesson or <b>Week or " " to remove any text.
- In the Enumeration column use the pull-down menu to change to a different numbering format or "no enumeration".
- Click Save Enumerations when done. Go to the course site and view the content page to see your changes
The default action for course creation is to create one ICON course site per section. If you want courses merged into a single ICON course site, please tell Diana Harris, 335-5121.
You cannot upload .exe files to the ICON course. Make any such files a .zip file(s) and then upload. Use WinRAR (Windows) or GZip (Linux) for that task.
You can create a course as a development site and copy it to a live course at the appropriate time.
When an ICON on-going development course is created, by default the course is set up as active. Usually that isn't a problem because there are no students enrolled in the course, so no one can see the course content except the instructor/designer. You can easily set the course to "inactive" by unchecking the Active? checkbox from Edit Course link in the NavBar. See Activate above.
You can use email to send a message to individuals, groups, or sections. See the ICON help for details and known issues.
The running grade formula incorrectly calculates a student's grade when using weighted grading. See Known Issue #12.
The Guest Student role is exactly the same as the student role, with one exception: since guest IDs are not governed by the Hawk ID system, they have a local password, and therefore need a way to change their passwords locally. Therefore, Guest Student has the password change tool turned on, where as normal users don't. The only time that role needs to be used is when you create a guest ID, used when the person does not have a Hawk ID. When you use the Create New User option, it automatically generates an ID in the guest format, which is g#_name.
When an instructor uses the "Manage Groups and Sections" button in the classlist tool, TAs can have their enrollments inadvertently changed. This generates errors when the TA attempts to work with sections in the gradebook. [Known issue #11.]
Workaround: DO NOT USE the "Manage Groups and Sections" tool, since it is impossible to tell when the problem has occurred. Instead, use one of the following two methods to adjust section enrollment:
1. Unenroll the student from the class entirely, then let the overnight processes re-enroll the student in the correct section. Contributions such as dropbox submissions and discussion board posts will not be lost. To unenroll the student:
A. Click the "Edit Course" link in the upper-right part of your navigation bar.
B. From near the top of the screen, click Registration.
C. Find the student you wish to unenroll and check the box next to his/her name.
D. Click the icon that looks like a diploma with a red X. That will remove the student from all sections of your course. Assuming the student has filed the appropriate paperwork, the overnight enrollment process will place him/her in the correct section.Or, you can write or call Diana Harris, 335-5121, or write icon@uiowa.edu to adjust students' enrollments.
Instructors cannot take the pager off a course template. However, you can disable the pager during quizzes. To turn it off, open the quiz, click Expand optional advanced properties, then click Disable Pager Access.
When you role switch to the .student view, what you see is mostly what a course student sees. You cannot take surveys or quizzes, but the course content view is accurate. See the on-line help for more information.
Changing the start and end date (from Edit Course) has no effect on registrar-related courses. The only thing that affects visibility to students is the Active box.
There is a course template for College of Engineering courses, illustrated above. You can choose a template by logging into the course, then clicking the small “E” in the upper left corner of the template (circled). The Edit Navigation Bar screen that opens has the template selection at the top center of the screen. Select “.College of Engineering” to use the template shown.
There is an abundance of on-line help with ICON. From the ICON home page, there are links to an ICON FAQ, on-line help, and ICON help for students. On-line help covers how to get started using ICON, how to move files from another ICON or WebCT site, and each of the components of ICON, such as calendar, content, class list, discussion, gradebook, and quizzes.
Within the college, you can get help from Diana Harris, 335-5121, or Sarah Williams, 335-5753.
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