Introduce Yourself!

[Desire2Learn Staff: Sarah-Beth]

Introduce yourself and get to know your fellow Valence Community Members.Let us know what brought you to the ValenceUsers forum and what experience you have using the platform. Names and employer identities are optional. 

[Brian Smith]

Hello Sarah-Beth and Valence Community Members,

My name is Brian Smith and I am the Manager, Learning Management System and Learning Technologies at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario, Canada.

We currently deploy two Desire2Learn products - Learning Environment and ePortfolio.  I will be watching this forum with great interest to see how fellow administrators are extending these platforms and other innovative applications of the valence capabilities.

[Desire2Learn Staff: Sarah-Beth]

Hi everyone! My name is Sarah-Beth Bianchi, and I'm the Community Manager for the Valence Community at Desire2Learn. It's my job to ensure that as Valence Community Members, you have what you need to make the most out of the Valence platform. I'll be one of the staff moderating this forum. Looking forward to meeting each of you on the forum, and at future Valence Community events!

[Joseph Price]

Hello everyone :)

My name is Joe Price and I am working as a consultant with Gwinnett County Public Schools near Atlanta, GA. We are in the process of deploying D2L Learning environment to our 135 schools and 180,000 users. We have been using HT and OUX to provision users and other LE objects. Going forward, we are going to be looking at creating custom applications to process and provision users and relationships manually using Valence.

Thanks to the D2L team for creating this group as a resource for expanding our environment.

[Janel Moore]

Hello everyone.

My name is Janel Moore and I am the primary technical D2L admin at Eastern Illinois University.  We had our first pilot group on D2L during the Fall 2012 semester and went fully to D2L for Spring 2013.  We are pursuing Valence now to push profile images from our data source system into D2L profiles, particularly for students.  I don't know what else we may try to do later.  That is the near term goal.

[Desire2Learn Staff: Sarah-Beth]

Welcome, Janel! It'd be great to hear more about your project in the Hall of Fame topic once you're ready to share.,

[Desire2Learn Staff: Sarah-Beth]

Hi Joe - It's great to have you as part of the Valence Community. It would be great to hear more about how Valence is being used in your K-12 school system once you're ready to share. We have a Hall of Fame topic to collect those stories from Community Members like you.

[Desire2Learn Staff: Sarah-Beth]

Welcome on board, Brian. Like you, I'm looking forward to hearing what others are doing with the Valence platform. 

[Christine Gregory]

Hi, my name is Chris and I work for Illinois Virtual School.  I'm here because I am worried that I need to be understanding Valence sooner than later, so I'm checking in to see if I can wrap my brain around it.

[Desire2Learn Staff: Viktor]

Hi Christine,

Thanks for introducing yourself! If you have any troubles with learning to use the Valence Learning Framework APIs, then asking questions in this user forum is the best place right now to start: if you have a very specific question which seems like it could be solved with a concrete answer, then I'd also encourage you to ask the question on Stack Overflow and tag it with 'desire2learn'; but, if your "question" is more like "I don't get how Valence auth works -- can someone help me with that?", then that's the kind of thing you're best off asking in his forum.

As a general lookout -- the authentication mechanism around the Valence Learning Framework APIs is probably the most difficult conceptual hurdle to get past -- I would encourage you to search through the forums for past posts about the auth stuff, and look through the blog's archive for similar things, as well as quite carefully reading the basics/conceptual page on the IDKey Auth scheme (in fact, I'd also recommend carefully reading all the basic conceptual topics).

[Nathan Lounds]

Hi, my name is Nathan Lounds and I'm a web developer at Michigan State University.  I'm here to glean information about how Valence is and can be used to meet the needs or instructors and learners.  I've used Valence a little in the past, but would like to use it more moving forward.

[Desire2Learn Staff: Viktor]

Hi Nathan; welcome to the Valence developer community. If you have any questions to help you learn more about the platform, feel free to ask them. If you'd like to frame those questions to help you work through use-cases, I'm sure there are folks here who can offer suggestions on how to use the platform to accomplish your goals. Cheers!

[Lynne Whitley]

Thanks Sarah-Beth for your presentations and information at Fusion. I'm glad to be joining you all in this group. I am the Associate Director of Instructional Technology for Georgia Virtual Learning. Our team is currently rewriting all of our web services pieces using Valence to get ready to upgrade to 10.3. I appreciate the opportunity to learn and share.

[Desire2Learn Staff: Sarah-Beth]

I'm glad you could join us at FUSION and that you got some good info from the sessions. I look forward to seeing you and your team on the forums as you continue to work with Valence.

[Samson Chung]

Hello Sarah and fellow Valence community members. My name is Samson and I am the Learning Management System Specialist at Durham College, Oshawa, Ontario, Canada. 

We are hosted with D2L and since Fusion 2014, I've been wanting to find some time to join this community.

[Desire2Learn Staff: Sarah-Beth]

Glad to have you in the Community, Samson. Looking forward to hearing what you're working on and answering your questions along the way.

[RamSundar Sundarkumar]

Hi Sarah and others, I am Ramsundar. I am a Student Innovation Fellow at Georgia State University (GSU). I am working on a project called Deliberation mapping tool, which would eventually be integrated into D2L of GSU. I want to be a part of this community, so that I can bet to know D2L better.

[derek....@mediacurrent.com]

Greetings! I'll be writing a Drupal integration over the next coming months, unless someone can point me to an existing module! The goal is to scrape upcoming courses from the D2L instance. Wish me luck! I'll be back with questions I'm sure. If anyone knows of existing Drupal implementations, please advise!

[Brian Looker]

I did not mean to not introduce myself sooner--one of those situations where I thought I'd done something, but then find that I had not.

I'm the Eportfolio Specialist at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh. I've spent much time with the ePortfolio part of the Valence API, and I've found the Python SDK and samples very helpful.

Aside from extending ePortfolio capabilities, I'm currently helping with a project that pulls out instructor, semester, course information to use in accessing other online resources. I also have ideas for different things to try, like working with the Google Drive API to facilitate transfer of files to D2L's Dropbox or ePortfolio, all of which is limited by time. That's probably enough time spent on an introduction, actually. I find this group to be very helpful--thank you to those who manage it.

[Desire2Learn Staff: Sarah-Beth]

Welcome to all our new members - Ramsundar, Derek and Brian! It's great to hear of the interesting work you're each doing with the platform. Best of luck, and let us know how we can help. And, we look forward to hearing about the expertise you gain as you get more experience through your projects!

[Jerry Walthall]

Hi Sarah-Beth,

I'm Jerry Walthall the Director of Distance Learning Technologies at Trident Technical College in Charleston SC. It was a pleasure meeting with you at Fusion 2014 in Nashville. I'm just starting to use Valence so I'm excited about being a part of the Valence Community!

[Desire2Learn Staff: Sarah-Beth]

Welcome Jerry. Glad to have you join us! I'm looking forward to hearing what you accomplish as you dive in to Valence!