Aimed to assist students having difficulties with Daigler, Ateneo de Davao University’s virtual learning environment, the SAMAHAN held its second webinar yesterday which highlighted a discussion of the said online platform’s key features and navigation strategies.

SAMAHAN President Renz Lacorte explained that as online classes begin, difficulties in virtual classrooms could be encountered since most classes are now being held on these platforms. 

“To respond to this, since also that we have received a lot of feedback from the students to the student government, we organized this webinar to help our students learn the basics of Daigler and other virtual classrooms which we will be using now in our online classes,” Lacorte said.

Named after Fr. Theodore Daigler, SJ, the first president of AdDU, Daigler is the Course Management System (CMS) of the schools and colleges of the University which utilizes Moodle, an open-source system, as its learning platform. 

“It is not something new to the Ateneo de Davao, in fact, parang Moodle has been around for several years already except because of today’s circumstances, we’re really forced to adapt to online platforms such as Moodle and Google Classroom and the like,” Fr. Ulysses Cabayao SJ, the webinar’s lead discussant, explained.

Cabayao discussed the key features of Daigler, particularly the navigation panel. This shows the Dashboard, which is the overview of the student’s courses, the Site Home, which is the main page of Daigler that was modified to be more user-friendly, and My Courses which also shows the courses that the student enrolled in.

Daigler also has a private files panel which is a portal that allows the students to upload their files with a maximum size of 20 megabytes and an overall limit of 100 megabytes. This could be used to store important files. 

The online resources panel links the students to library sources, giving them paid access to online journal articles and other scholarly texts.

Cabayao further discussed the newly added function of the platform. 

“Just a week ago, the site administrator has activated a function which was previously deactivated, and this function is the chat function,” he said.

In addition, Cabayao stated that the feature has limitations in terms of the message circle.

Users are only allowed to message people whom they share the same classes with or those whom they have listed as their contacts. Before the user can send a message, the other party should first approve of it. 

The recorded live stream of the Webinar can be reviewed via the SAMAHAN Facebook page.