Synchronizing with Desire2Learn Top Hat allows you to synchronize with your LMS, Desire2Learn, to make it easier to communicate between the two systems. The main reasons why you might want to implement this integration are: •
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Add your student roster automatically to Top Hat from D2L Push your grades from Top Hat to D2L in a few clicks o This is opposed to manually exporting and importing your gradebook via Excel Allow students to check their Top Hat grades from either D2L or Top Hat To get started, please make sure you have your course set up on D2L and you have an account on Top Hat. If you don’t, please visit tophat.com/prof to get started. Create a Top Hat Course Once you have an account on Top Hat, you can create a course during the registration process or by clicking on the Create a Course button as shown below. We recommend using the same naming convention used in D2L for courses. The format is: SEMESTER NAME AND YEAR_COURSE CODE_SECTION NUMBER For example, if I were to be teaching Training 101 (section 1) for Fall 2013, the recommended course name would be F2013_TRN101_L01. You can optionally include more information to make your course easier to find on Top Hat. Course Settings Now that you have a course on Top Hat, click on the Settings menu towards the left hand side of your page to open your Course Settings window.
Under Course Settings, go to the LMS tab and click on the button to authenticate with D2L. This will redirect you to d2l.ucalgary.ca and you’ll be able to enter your username and password as seen below. Once you log in successfully, you’ll be taken back to Top Hat’s Course Settings menu and will see a list of all your courses on D2L. Select the course and click Next, you are now ready to sync with D2L! Simply click on the Sync button to start the process. Once you’re done, you can click Save to exit the menu. Student Manager Your students will be automatically added to the pending list if they don’t have Top Hat accounts. You can click Email All to invite all your students automatically. If they already have existing accounts on Top Hat, they will be automatically enrolled. You can keep track of your student list by clicking on the Students tab in your course and checking the Enrolled and Pending tabs as seen in the figures below. You can remove students by checking the box next to their names and clicking on the Disenroll button. To remind students to sign up on Top Hat, you can click on the green Invite button next to their names in the Pending tab or click on Email all to remind everyone. Desire2Learn Grades Now that your Top Hat course is linked to your Desire2Learn course, you can log in at d2l.ucalgary.ca and go to ASSESSMENTS > Grades to see a list of all your graded items. You will notice that there’s a new item for Top Hat, set to a numeric type with one maximum point. This will be the translation of the average on Top Hat, meaning that if a student has a 50% average, they will get 0.5 points out of 1. You can change the maximum to 100 if you prefer to see 50/100. The grade will update every time you click “Sync” in the LMS tab in your course settings. You can now modify this item as needed and it will show up like a regular graded item for students on D2L. If you have any questions, concerns or feedback about the Top Hat’s integration with D2L, please let us know! You can reach us at [email protected] or (888) 663-‐5491 x 1.