How to activate/use the demo student

Tonya.M.1324

We are brand new to D2L and are in the middle of train the trainer and my faculty would like a demo student. I found several different things. One said turn this account on, another said just add a role and a user. I found this morning where you can use and API to enroll the account automatically in courses. I found other universities that allow their faculty to enroll this user in their courses. What is the best practice for this account?

Thanks,
Tonya

Stephen.R.50

Hello @Tonya.M.1324. Thanks for your question and welcome to Brightspace/D2L!

There's a few options you could explore to achieve this, but Brightspace doesn't have a specific tool or account/user to do this natively.

Here are my thoughts:

Create a sandbox for instructors, with a 'local' demo user/learner

With this method, you could set up a sandbox for each of your instructors and at the same time set up a student account specifically for that instructors use, enrolling the account into the sandbox. My recommendation for this user is to give them a username and password so that your instructor can log in 'locally' outside of any SSO you may have or be intending to setup to access your system. Instructors could log in as this student and work within their sandbox to get a feel for the system and how things look depending on their course setup.

Ensure the role switch tool is enabled

Within your Roles and Permissions tool, you'll find the Role Switch tool, which you can enable to allow instructors to switch their view to the learner role. This gives a fairly accurate representation of the course from the learner point of view. You could also enable this for other roles, such as a TA or grader role, if you have them.

Further information about Role Switch can be found HERE.

Create a 'demo student' role and demo user/learner for live course enrollment, with impersonation permissions

One thing I would caution is that if you want to start enrolling demo students into live courses, you should create a totally separate role so that the demo accounts are not counted for grades, in-course stats, data reports, etc.

For this new role, you could grant your instructor role permissions to enroll this role into their course so they can add their allocated demo student, as well as impersonate this new role directly from the classlist, avoiding the need to manage the accounts so instructors can log in with them locally.

Two cautions with this method:

• Instructors could possibly enroll the incorrect user account, impersonate it, and see other instructors courses where that account is enrolled
• You would likely want to also grant permission to unenroll users for situations where they enroll the incorrect user

Create a 'demo student' role, make it cascading, and allow instructors to impersonate it

Create the same type of role as above, but make it cascading so it's automatically added to all courses in your system. Instructors would always see it in their classlist, and would be able to impersonate it when needed. No enrollment would be necessary.

The main caution with this method is that instructors would be able to access any course offering in your system (with a slight dependence on the settings you apply for the role).

I've seen this used with another customer I previously worked with, in a higher ed setting, and it worked very well for them. You could always set up a process where instructors can 'opt-out' and you just go unenroll the user from their courses where requested.

Hope that this helps and one method could work for you. If you have any specific questions just let us know!

~Stephen