Hit the online message boards and found an answer to my questions last week about how language and conceptualization is different in D2L.  It feels like culture shock to me.  The things that are the most similar can ironically cause more problems than things that are clearly different.    I’m gonna steal and not attribute source to protect anonymity.

Desire2Learn (D2L) has a hierarchical structure to a lot of it’s tools, and the term “topic” is a general catch-all term for a unit/thing that users view or interact with.

For an example, in the content tool, there are modules and topics. A module is similar to a folder on your computer, it’s a container for files. A content topic is most often a file (word file, powerpoint, pdf, etc) that people access, but can also be a link (either to a URL, like google.com, or a link to another part of the course, like a quiz). So, in content, a topic refers to a file or link people access.

In the discussion tool, there’s a similar hierarchy, with similar terminology. A forum contains topics, topics contain threads, and threads contain replies. A forum can have multiple discussion topics (i.e. week one forum > monday’s discussion topic), and a topic can have multiple threads, with multiple replies. Threads are discussion posts people (students or instructors) start, and replies are other people’s responses to the thread. In discussions, a topic refers to a place that can have multiple discussion threads under it.

http://help.d2l.msu.edu/angel-to-d2l-conversion/angel-to-d2l-terminology and http://help.d2l.msu.edu/angel-to-d2l-conversion could be helpful with moving from Angel to D2L.

And from one of those links:

ANGEL to D2L Terminology