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Michigan State University
Michigan State University

D2L Help

D2L Work To Do Widget

The Work To Do widget provides learners with a summary of assigned learning activities from all their courses that are overdue or have an upcoming due date or end date. You can add the widget to your organization homepage to aggregate data from all courses, and to course homepages to show only due and overdue learning activities from the course.

The Work To Do widget displays the following learning activities:

  • Assignments
  • Checklists
  • Content
  • Courses
  • Discussions
  • Surveys
  • Quizzes

By default, it displays overdue items from the past twelve weeks and upcoming items in the next two weeks.

Regardless of the time range, the widget will display a maximum of 6 items. If additional items are available, they can be seen in the full-screen view by clicking the View all work button. On this page, all items with due/end dates for the upcoming semester can be seen.

FAQs

A. No. The focus of this widget is on actionable items, work to do, not work that has been done. With the exception of Modules, once an item has been completed, it will disappear from the widget. If you want a Module to disappear from the widget, we recommend adding an End Date.
A. By default, it displays overdue items from the past twelve weeks and upcoming items in the next two weeks, with a maximum of 16 weeks. Regardless of the time range, the widget will display a maximum of 6 items. If additional items are available, they can be seen in the full-screen view via the “View all work” button. On this page, all items with due/end dates for the upcoming year can be seen.
A. Most likely, your user role needs the new permission to view the widget. Contact an administrator to enable this permission.
A. In most cases, no. However, dates are handled slightly differently if you’re using the original Content experience or the New Content Experience (aka Lessons). In the original Content experience, it was possible to assign Due Dates to Discussions and Modules. In the New Content Experience, these dates are no longer supported. Therefore, the widget does not display Discussions with Due Dates. It does display Modules with Due Dates, but Modules are not automatically removed from the widget upon completion.
A. There are three reasons an overdue item might not show in the widget. It’s either outside of the range set by your D2L Administrator (defaulted to 12 weeks in the past), it has been completed by the learner, or its End Date has passed. If an item is overdue, but it also has an End Date that has passed, the item no longer appears as Work to Do. This is true for the End Date of the individual activity or the entire course.
A. Yes. If a student has a different due/end date due to Special Access, the student will see their individual date in the widget.
A. If the course is active and started but the activity’s start date is in the future, the activity will appear in the Upcoming section of the widget, but it will not be clickable and it will have a label to indicate its start date until the date has arrived. If the entire course has not yet started, the activity will not appear in the widget.
A. Pulse displays work to do in a more graphical week-by-week view, and it doesn’t explicitly call out overdue work. Also, Pulse includes Calendar Events in a separate tab, and Pulse allows users to add their own tasks to the work to do view. On Homepages, you’d need to use the separate Calendar and Tasks widgets for these items.
A. Add the visibility setting and/or release condition to the individual activity in addition to the module. It is a current limitation that these settings do not cascade down from the module to the activities within it. It is on our longer-term roadmap to address, but in the meantime, these settings must be associated with the individual activity in order for them to be respected in the widget and other tools.
A. Each widget has its own unique benefits. For instance, the Updates widget includes items like ungraded assignments and quizzes, making it a more useful tool for instructors, whereas the Work To Do widget is geared towards learners. The Calendar widget does not display course activities with due dates when on the Org Homepage, but it does display activities with due dates when on the Course Homepage. So, the Calendar and Work To Do widgets can live in harmony on the Org Homepage, but they may display some duplicate items when both widgets are on the Course Homepage. And lastly, the Tasks widget shows tasks manually created by the user for the user. Unlike the activities displayed in the Work To Do widget, Tasks are not assigned by an instructor.

MSU Documentation