You have a discussion board due at 11:59 p.m., a test to complete by 9 p.m. and an essay that is supposed to be submitted to the dropbox no later than 10 p.m. You log in to complete all of your work that morning, and the website you need is offline.
The program Desire to Learn, or D2L, is a site with good intentions that are executed poorly. The site has had too many mishaps to be seen as reliable in the eyes of students who count on this program to turn in assignments they spent hours completing.
This program has the ability to drop students who take online or hybrid classes an entire letter grade if they do not to turn in completed assignments to the appropriate dropbox.
APSU students spend hours a week on campus either sitting through lectures, making flashcards or in the library finishing essays. A college student’s work is never complete, and when they get home they are expected to log into D2L to receive a new list of assignments to add to their to-do list.
When you are accepted at APSU, you are given a username and password which gives you access to the online side of campus. Many professors use this site, even if they are not considered an online course.
Since the program is set up in a way in which everything is at the professor’s discretion, not all courses are uniform, which makes navigating through assignments a task all in itself. For new students at APSU, the site is a struggle to understand. Many students do not know about learning tools on D2L, such as the group setting. Peers assigned to your group may not understand how to get to the group discussion board or how to find out which group they are in, putting the students behind and causing a drop in the overall grade.
“My concerns about D2L consist of D2L crashing in the middle of a test, making me not able to take the test again because of the crash,” freshman psychology major Arnicia McWhorter said. “…[and] not being able to submit a homework assignment because D2L is not working.”
Many students communicate that they want to see a difference in how the site is run. “During Summer 2018, if APSU decides to renew its D2L contract, our APSU community will have to adopt the new version of D2L referred to as Daylight,” the Director of Distance Education and overseer of management and operability of D2L learning management system Denise Celeste Robledo said, suggesting changes may be coming in the near future, but they are not a given.
