Get help activating your D2L course

Desire2Learn has been synchronized with the student information system at Vancouver Island University. In doing so the names, registrations and instructors have been automatically added to course shells in Desire2Learn. All of the courses you are an instructor for are therefore automatically avaialble in the system should you choose to use them in your courses. If you were a Moodle user, this means no more “shell requests” or “enrolment keys” or wondering if students have enrolled in a course or not. It is all synchronized automatically based on registrations in the student information system.

By default your courses will show up as 'inactive' in Desire2Learn. This ensures that your students will not see an entry for the course within Desire2Learn. The students enrolled in the course can still be viewed through the class list but do not have access to it. While the course is 'inactive' you can still work on it and develop as you wish, this work and the site as a whole will simply be invisible to students.

You may choose to make active any number of the courses you have been assigned to as instructor. Making a course active is a simple process. After logging into Desire2Learn, you will see all of the courses you have been assigned to as instructor for a given semester in the My Courses panel.



This instructor is teaching two courses this semester; ENGL 300 and ENGL 310. Note that beside the course name (Inactive) is shown to indicate the course is currently inactive. Each course will have to made active manually to ensure they are visible to the registered students once the course commences. To make ENGL 300 active, access the course home page by clicking on the course name. From the course home page click on Instructor Tools and then 'Edit Course'.



From Instructor Tools select Course Offering Information.



Once you are on the Course Offering Information page you will see about halfway down a check box with the text Course is active. By clicking this check box your course will become visible to students once the course start date has commenced.