Saving Discussion Posts

When downloading or saving student submissions, it is imperative to maintain the privacy of student records, which should be saved on campus-housed, password-protected network storage rather than on local hard drives or portable storage devices.

Questions about how long student records may be retained should be discussed with the UWM Records Officer.

To save Discussions, an instructor must either copy-and-paste into Microsoft Word or another word processor, or print posts to a PDF file.

1. On the D2L Course Home page, click [Discussions] on the navigation bar.

2. Click on the name of the Topic you wish to archive posts from.

3. Change view options to "All Messages" under "Unthreaded"

4. Increase the "posts per page" to the highest number as possible -- typically 50.

5. To select all posts, click the checkbox at the top of the list of posts, to the left of the headings. The background of each message title, name, etc. will turn green.

6. Click the [Print] icon (looks like a printer) at the top of the page. A window will appear with the text from all posts.

• If Adobe Acrobat is installed, you can also select the [Print] button in the window to open the Print settings window for your computer. Select [Adobe PDF] as your printer.

• If you use other PDF software, use that software to convert the posts to a PDF.

• If you have Microsoft Office XP or higher for Windows, you can also print the document to 'Microsoft Office Document Image Writer" which will save all pages as a multi-page TIFF file.

• Alternatively, you could highlight all text, then copy-and-paste into Word or another word processor document.

For technical assistance in using Adobe, MS Office, or other software, please contact the UWM Help Desk.

D2L 9.2.1 SP3 – September 2011

Downloading Dropbox Files

Downloading files from the D2L Dropbox

When downloading or saving student submissions, it is imperative to maintain the privacy of student records, which should be saved on campus-housed, password-protected network storage rather than on local hard drives or portable storage devices.

Questions about how long student records may be retained should be discussed with the UWM Records Officer.

1. From your Course Home page, click on [Dropbox] in the main navigation bar


2. Click on the name of the appropriate drop box folder.


3. To select all files in the folder, click the box at the top of the list of students –or– click the box beside the names of the student(s) whose files you wish to download.


4. Click on the [green circle] icon to initiate the download.


5. In the popup window, click on the blue hotlink; the link name will include:

• your folder name
• the word “Download”
• current date and time
• the file extension “.zip”

6. In the new popup window, click on [Save File].


7. Choose a location on your computer (e.g., desktop) where you will save the .zip file that contains your drop box files.


8. Click on [Save].


IMPORTANT NOTE: Additional benefit when following the above procedure!

• When any or all files in a D2L Dropbox are selected for download, they come out as a zip file. When the individual file (or files) are extracted, the filenames will begin with students' last, then first name.

• On the other hand, if you click on the file in the Dropbox, then just open it and save it to your desktop, the file retains the name given by the student. If many students have uploaded files called "Assignment 1" it will be impossible to determine which belongs to which student ... so we don't recommend doing this!

D2L 9.2.1 SP3 – October 2011

Download Course Files

1.  Go to the D2L course site

2.  Click [Content] on the your course Navigation bar.

3.  On the left, in the "Content Area" menu, select [Manage Files].

4.  A list of files included in your course will appear. To the left is a list of folders.

5.  At the top of the list of files, check the box to the left of "Folder/File." This will select all files. Each folder and file will become checked, and their background will become blue.

6.  At the top of the page, on the upper right corner, select the [Zip Files] icon, which looks like a carpenter's vise.

7.  Although there will be no indicator on the D2L page that the "zip" command is being executed, all selected files will be compressed and compiled into a Zip archive. Look at the bottom of your browser window for a progress bar.

8.  When the "zip" process is complete, a pop-up window will prompt the user to [save] or [open] the .zip archive file.

9.  [Save] your file to a secure location on your computer, or to a network drive where the information is regularly backed up.