Customer Stories
Helping Engaged Students Achieve their Dreams
The LMS at my university wasn’t user-friendly and made life quite difficult for us as students. That really showed me that choosing the right LMS is key for any educational...
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Reimagining the education system
Brightspace proved to be the optimal framework to fundamentally change the way we provide education to students. Mike Sturmey, Associate Director of Digital Learning Environments, Victoria University Challenge VU aims...
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A clear vision of learning for all
One of the main things that attracted us to D2L’s Brightspace platform was its rich accessibility options. Laura Hendrey, Learning and Development Coordinator, Vision Australia Challenge Aiming For Better Accessibility...
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Using Brightspace to implement a unique CBE experience
Challenge As a leading teaching hospital in Australia, Epworth Healthcare is responsible for educating the next generation of health professionals through its medical, nursing, and health professional education and training...
MORE THAN 1,000 ORGANIZATIONS IN OVER 40 COUNTRIES AROUND THE WORLD RELY ON D2L TO HELP THEM TRANSFORM LEARNING.
Brightspace impact on Ontario teachers and students
All K-12 public school teachers in Ontario have access to Brightspace as part of a provincial virtual Learning Environment. A few of those teachers shared how they’re using the LMS and what they love about it. D2L and the Ministry of Education have an 11-year partnership, with the goal of supporting technology-enabled learning in Ontario. Every school board in Ontario has a Technology Enabled Learning and Teaching (TELT) contact, who support teachers using Brightspace. If you’re an Ontario teacher, contact your school board to learn more about your TELT contact and how they can help. You can also check out the Brightspace Community. For useful teaching and learning resources, you can also subscribe to our blog, by clicking “subscribe” and entering your email address.
Making high education affordable to all with new pilot program
The average cost of a private, non-profit four-year university degree is $31,231 across the U.S., while the cost for a public four-year school hovers around $10,000 per year, according to the College Board. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York puts student debt at more than $1.3 trillion, meaning it has reached a crisis level. University can be a prohibitively expensive proposition for some people. Many lower-income students often find themselves working part- or full-time in order to raise sufficient funds, or they face other barriers to entry, such as lengthy commute times because they have to live at home. This demands flexibility of their schedules, which offline courses are often unable to offer. In all, this is creating a system that is inaccessible to many who have a desire to learn, says Dr. Jodi Henderson-Ross, Assistant Professor of instruction at the University of Akron. While online learning has often been hailed as a solution to some of these challenges, there remains a stigma associated with the space. “Rightly or wrongly, there’s an assumption that online learning isn’t as academically rigorous,” she says. Against this backdrop, the University of Akron wanted to change that.
RIT's student base created a unique need for highly accessible software
Making content accessible is always important to teachers, but for Sandra Connelly, an assistant professor of Life Sciences at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), accessibility can take on different meanings. For one student, it meant literally being able to access the material. With videos being hosted on YouTube, he was unable to view them being based in China. This presented an interesting problem: while she'd been steadily moving her class material online, how would students, who have restrictions on materials, regardless of their location, be able to access everything?
Smith School of Business re-engaged faculty & cut back on administrative burden
When it came to their learning management system, the IT staff at Queen’s University’s Smith School of Business used to spend much of their energy just keeping the lights on. The Business School used an LMS built in-house, and it simply sucked up too much time, says Troy St. John, associate director of IT for learning technology and application development. When the school switched to Brightspace, it was like a weight had been lifted. “The custom solution we had in place required a ton of resources dedicated to keeping it up and running,” he says. “We didn’t get a lot of time to add new or innovative things professors asked for. So they kind of stopped asking.” Brightspace’s Valence API gave the IT team a new digital sandbox, allowing them to build cool and useful tools against the existing technology. “Our program offers a really high-touch level of service to students,” he says. “And now, these new tools let us – and our faculty – deepen that commitment.”
Creating a customized orientation guide for students' first-year transition
The transition from high school to university can be an exciting but often overwhelming experience. To help ease the transition, the University of Colorado Boulder used to require incoming students to attend a two-day, on-campus orientation program where students would learn more about campus resources, academic advising and enrolling in courses. However, the face-to-face orientation wasn’t always an ideal fit, says Courtney Fell, Learning Experience Designer at the university. The sessions were content heavy and sometimes overwhelming for students. The experience was sometimes a challenge for out-of-state attendees, who had to coordinate travel and accommodations. Parent attendance was also on the decline, Fell says, which meant they were often missing crucial information about their children’s impending university experience. In an effort to improve the orientation process and better help students set themselves up for success, the university undertook an ambitious project: in only a few months, it created a completely personalized introduction to the school, the New Student Welcome Experience. Students who want to come to campus can attend a New Student Welcome Day, but it is no longer required for all students.
Using Brightspace to implement a unique CBE experience
In November 2009, President Obama launched the Educate to Innovate initiative to move American students from the middle to the top of the pack in science and math achievement over the next decade. Recognizing that great teaching is part of any child’s success, President Obama also issued a challenge to the nation to recruit and prepare more than 100,000 new teachers over the next decade. Rising to this challenge, Valdosta State University (VSU) has turned to an innovative Competency-based Education (CBE) initiative delivered online via the Brightspace platform to raise the technical skill levels of elementary teachers currently working in the State of Georgia.