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Introducing Creator+

  • 3 Min Read
John Baker
John Baker

CEO and Board Chair

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A Complex Learning Landscape

It’s no secret that the world around us has become more complicated. Learning has, too. In my conversations with leaders in education and business, I hear how the new global landscape is creating new challenges for learners and educators. University leaders, for instance, are concerned with the learning gaps they’re seeing—with students less prepared to start their post-secondary education. And CEOs are struggling to provide the learning people need for career development, especially in new hybrid working environments.

It’s not for lack of effort, however. Educators and learning and development professionals have shown incredible adaptability and resiliency over the past few years. But the reality is that they’re burning out—and so are their students.

And these are just the challenges of today; there will be more to come as we continue to implement asynchronous learning models that leverage technology. This means that the tools we adopt now must not only help us tackle today’s issues but also help position us to handle the ones to come. They must help us build learning experiences in our classrooms and companies that are more personal and meaningful—and more human.

How do we do that? We help educators become creators.

More precisely, we let educators get creative.

Introducing Brightspace Creator+

This week, we launched Brightspace Creator+.

Creator+ gives educators the tools to connect even more with learners by creating compelling, accessible, and mobile-friendly content independently, quickly, and easily—without any coding or software experience. 

We worked with more than 80 early access clients and with experts in the field to get crucial early feedback for how we designed Creator+ and made sure that it is as familiar to anyone who’s already using Brightspace as it is welcoming to anyone new.

And we future-proofed it, making sure that educators can not only create compelling content with ready-made templates and interactive elements—but that all they’ve created can be updated easily and quickly when the need arises years from now.

With Creator+ you can easily measure comprehension and keep learners engaged with a variety of practice exercises and question types; easily insert interactive elements in courses; and completely reimagine learning with video elements, including multi-language auto-captioning, with the D2L Capture App—and students get a new search capability to support their studies.

As always, here at D2L we’re serious about accessibility. I’m proud that we’re taking a new approach to building hot spots to make them more accessible. With an invisible grid overlay that integrates micro alt tags, our hot spots allow screen reader users to benefit from the same contextual insights and spatial relationships that sighted users have access to.

More Human Learning

We can’t solve new problems with old solutions, and we need to address today’s complicated learning climate while at the same time readying ourselves for whatever comes next.

That’s why we made Creator+. We want to give educators, whether in schools or companies, the creative tools to tackle today’s problems and prepare for tomorrow’s challenges. We believe that by putting all that we’ve learned at D2L into the creative hands of educators everywhere, together we can help even more people reach their full potential.

And we’ll never stop working to make our tools even better. We’re focused on continuous innovation to empower creators with more options to create content quickly and easily so they can spend more time building personal relationships with learners. 

At D2L, we’re invested in making learning more inspiring, personal and human. 

Written by:

John Baker
John Baker

CEO and Board Chair

John founded D2L in 1999, at the age of twenty-two, while attending the University of Waterloo. D2L is a global software company that believes learning is the foundation upon which all progress and achievement rests.

A strong believer in community involvement, John devotes both his personal and business efforts to supporting young entrepreneurs who are developing and applying technology to improve society worldwide.

He was appointed to the Governing Council of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Member (Entrepreneurs’ Circle) of the Business Council of Canada, Business Higher Education Roundtable, Past Chair of the Board of Communitech, and is a board member of Canada’s National Ballet School.

John was awarded the Meritorious Service Cross, the EY Entrepreneur of the Year (Ontario for Software and Technology), Young Alumni Achievement Medal from University of Waterloo, and Intrepid Entrepreneur of the Year in Waterloo Region Hall of Fame.

John graduated from the University of Waterloo with an Honours B.A.Sc. in Systems Design Engineering, with First Class Honours and an option in Management Sciences.

Twitter: @JohnBakerD2L
LinkedIn: John Baker
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Table of Contents
  1. Introducing Brightspace Creator+
  2. More Human Learning