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Flexibility and scalability

Higher education institutions are understandably scrutinising every investment. Although many have a desire to invest in their future and do things differently, any spend needs to offer flexibility and scalability.

Brightspace can help support multiple delivery models and formats. It offers 13 1EdTech open standards integrations for greater interoperability. D2L’s commitment to 1EdTech product certifications and open standards means you can have more choice and flexibility to connect Brightspace with thousands of products to help create a better user experience, reduce cost and better enhance data privacy.

D2L’s microservices-based architecture can help make Brightspace faster, flexible and scalable. This also can make it easier to integrate APIs or access the platform across more end-user devices such as desktops, mobile devices and wearables.

User experience

One of the last things you want when migrating to a new LMS is low faculty adoption rates and a complex user experience for educators and students. With teaching staff stretched for time and resources, everyone should both want and be able to use your platform.

Brightspace can support the full software adoption lifecycle, meaning no matter the technical expertise of your team, we can help personalise the user experience of our platform to help cater to your institution’s needs.

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“The swift but smooth transition from Blackboard to D2L Brightspace in six months exemplifies the ease of use, and D2L Brightspace features make it easy for teachers to create effective digital courses.”

Steven Trooster


educational advisor,
Radboud University

Steven Trooster

“I have immense pride in our significant stride in the National Student Satisfaction rankings. A few years ago, we were 102nd —far from an ideal place. We’re now fourth in the country in terms of overall student satisfaction. That has been driven in part by our outstanding performance in the ‘Learning Resources’ section, which involves virtual learning environments, digital tools and resources. D2L Brightspace has been enabling us to provide a consistent and exceptional student experience that achieved these impressive results.”

Chris Trace
previous head of digital learning,
University of Surrey

Chris Trace

Access and accessibility

Universities should cater to their students’ needs by recognising diversity with respect to factors such as ability, age, gender, language and culture. Brightspace can help enable this by delivering an experience that can reach each learner. Brightspace’s flexibility of the organisational structure and the roles and permissions tools can allow administrators to manage learning in various ways for different types of learners, without creating burdensome workloads.

We offer multiple opportunities to help create spaces that support collaboration and social learning practices. Communities can be created for cross-functional groups—with discussions and project areas that can support asynchronous collaborative exercises. Additionally, multiple discussions can be created so users can browse and participate in relevant forums.

Making the learning experience more accessible helps students, including those with temporary or situational barriers, to using an LMS or participating in learning. Embracing inclusive teaching methods can also help to attract and retain a more diverse range of students and may deliver higher outcomes for learners.

We integrate the latest global accessibility standards into our product processes and openly report on our compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 Level AAA standards. D2L demonstrates leadership in accessibility through a strong commitment to transparency and standards-based certifications that support higher education institutions at scale.

Personalised learning

Modern learning experiences should offer maximum choice and flexibility without sacrificing personalisation and scalability, and Brightspace is equipped to help facilitate this. Release conditions can help create custom learning pathways. By attaching a release condition to an item, learners cannot view it until they have met the associated condition—like needing to have viewed all content on Topic 1 before gaining access to Topic 2.

Intelligent Agents can also be used to help support positive reinforcement or flag any potential issues. For example, emailing learners whose grades are below a certain level or automatically checking in with users that haven’t logged in for a certain length of time. This can free up time for teaching staff to focus more on research and driving better student outcomes and less on admin-intensive tasks. We believe your LMS should improve staff well-being and job satisfaction as well as communication with your students—and that’s where Brightspace can shine.

Learn more about our commitment to accessibility

“A key decision that influenced moving to Brightspace was the flexibility of the platform, as the look and feel was more enticing than our previous VLE. The personalisation we can achieve with intelligent agents and the mobile friendly app are excellent features too.”

David Haggath
learning technologist,
North East Scotland College

“Brightspace has transformed our approach to education. Its sleek, modern interface combined with powerful editing tools enables us to create high-quality, consistent courses that automatically adapt to any device.”

Danny Ball
digital learning manager,
LIBF

Content experience

A truly unique and differentiated part of our offering is our end-to-end content management experience. In Brightspace, you can own all stages of the content management experience—from creation to effective management/sharing, through to delivery via a modern user interface. Tools like these can be crucial to helping save time and money, and increase learner engagement, retention and outcomes.

Content creation

D2L’s unique high-impact course authoring tool Creator+ can unlock more potential for instructors and course designers to help create engaging and highly accessible learning experiences whilst helping students with formative knowledge checks and interactive practices. With over 50 interactive content types from H5P, there is more to help inspire, activate and engage learners.

Content creation cycle

Content management: distribution, sharing, tagging, versioning and templating

Today’s educational content creators can rely on a fragmented array of tools for course design, authoring, sharing, collaboration, content management and delivery. Content delivery teams need to see that there is a safe and organised home for all your content. It should be easy to find and share content when building modules and easy to see where content has been reused with the ability to measure reuse rates and cost savings. D2L aims for content management and distribution to bring these disparate and disjointed workflows into a single elegant solution.

A truly unique and differentiated part of our offering is our end-to-end content management experience, where you own all stages—from creation to effective management and sharing, through to delivery via a modern user interface. Tools like these can be crucial to helping save time and money, and increase learner engagement, retention and outcomes.

Brightspace can offer a sophisticated set of tools that can support administrators, and curriculum and content developers in delivering more improved and effective learning experiences to the masses, no matter how many programs or courses your institution offers.

Brightspace can offer better support by using some of the following methods:

  • Powerful structure

    The powerful organisation structure in Brightspace can allow for a safe place to develop content

  • Roles and permissions

    Granular roles and permissions settings can safely allow your small and medium-sized enterprises access to the courses in development.

  • Templates

    Push to deploy module templates for the start of university terms.

  • Live updates

    Deploy live updates (including to selected modules only).

  • Knowledge management

    Versioning, taxonomies, metadata search and reporting

  • Content management

    Versioning of pages, files, text and media content

  • Workflows

    Approval workflows

“We want the LMS to be a place where learning happens—an active learning environment—not just a repository for PowerPoint files.”

Steve Bentley
strategic learning technology advisor,
University of Huddersfield

Steve Bentley

Content delivery

Today’s learners are often pressed for time and require quick, easy access to content. Brightspace can offer a robust video experience that can help enable instructors to deliver content effectively and allow learners to better engage with it. Instructors can provide feedback through video, audio or text with features like timestamped feedback in video assignments helping to enhance clarity and engagement.

Media files can be integrated throughout the learning process—whether it’s practicing and demonstrating real-world skills through video assignments, hosting virtual classrooms, sharing quick video or audio messages in discussions, or providing feedback from both instructors and peers. Brightspace can foster a strong sense of community, seeing that learners feel supported and more empowered to achieve the best outcomes.

Harnessing the potential of AI

D2L utilises AI innovations that can increase efficiency and better streamline processes, while keeping humans at the heart of the learning and teaching experience. D2L Lumi is a tool that can support at faculty level, helping to power intelligent workflows and enable faster content creation—from auto-generating captions for video to automating FAQs, building quizzes or suggesting ideas for discussions and assignments.

45%

increase in course completion.

30%

reduction in course development time

26%

increase in overall test scores with adaptive learning models

Advanced analytics

The use of analytics can help you understand the data available at your fingertips and make decisions that can positively impact student success and the overall quality of the education that your institution provides. With the help of Achievement+ you can align activities and assessments with learning outcomes, and better report on mastery or achievement at various levels of your institution—all through a centralised dashboard.

Brightspace can help put data and measurement at the heart of the teaching and learning experience to better enable conversations around usage, engagement, adoption, assessment and more. You can access course- and programme-based analytics for students and instructors via built-in User Progress Dashboards, Class Progress Dashboards and Inline Tool Reports, as well as system-wide analytics through our Data Hub or APIs. Data Hub can provide administrators with the flexibility to extract raw data from over 100 datasets to filter, aggregate and transform the data or push into a business intelligence solution to help create interactive visualisations.

D2L’s advanced analytics tool, Performance+, can provide a strategic view through rich visual dashboards and an integrated business intelligence tool to help measure adoption, engagement and achievement—both within individual courses and across the organisation. This can help administrators and educators act on insights quickly to keep everyone on track.

“Moving to a next-generation platform, which is intuitive to 
use with a modern look and feel, has driven improved student engagement. The analytics tools are great in helping us measure engagement.”

Nicky Bates
senior project manager,
Brunel University

Nicky Bates

“Our success with the D2L Brightspace platform is clear from our end-of-year exam results. We’ve boosted our pass rate from 75 percent to 100 percent in just two years.”

John Allport
Professor of Automotive Engineering,
University of Huddersfield

John Allport

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Deliver personalised educational experiences that inspire progress and achievement for all