Higher education institutions are grappling with a variety of challenges—from enabling workforce readiness to creating consistent user experiences and improving student engagement and retention. To address these, institutions need solutions that help them both maintain the quality of education they’re renowned for and give them the ability to adapt, innovate and improve how they deliver teaching to meet the evolving needs of students, employers and other stakeholders.
During a recent event, we explored how a modern virtual learning environment (VLE) can support institutions in creating engaging learning experiences and staying ahead of technological advancements and trends, notably artificial intelligence (AI).
Read on for the key takeaways and insights.
Empowering active learning in higher education
Over the past few years, we’ve seen higher education institutions evolve to become more flexible, dynamic and resilient in the face of change. Learning technologies have played a significant role in enabling these shifts. “We’re able to recognise which students are passively moving through their courses and which are active learners,” says Anthony Phillips, an account executive with D2L who works with universities in the UK, Ireland and Benelux, “We’re able to use data far more effectively and support remote, hybrid and high-flex learning. We’re also able to empower students to reflect, encourage them to think critically, and enable applied thinking and practice in new and novel ways.”
Yet as much as technology is at the heart of many of these developments, it’s also pressured by them. There’s a greater need for technology providers to continually enhance their offerings to keep pace with change, meet rising expectations and deliver more impactful experiences. VLEs, for example, need to be much more than content repositories. They need to actively engage students, promote participation and personalisation, and encourage comprehension at a deeper level.
Encouraging effective, ethical use of AI
The advancements that have been made over the past few years with AI are creating a world of possibility for higher education institutions. For educators, AI-enabled features can support them with course design, assessment and engagement—saving time and improving outcomes.
But as with any emerging technology, AI development and use must balance innovation with ethics, keeping humans in control of the learning experience. For example, institutions should retain control over how their data is used, and platforms should clearly explain where and why AI is used. “There should always be a human in the loop,” Anthony said, “and the human should always be in control.”
It’s also important that AI be leveraged strategically. “A decade ago, we discovered how useful AI could be in enabling predictive analytics. Now we’re seeing its value in assisting with content generation, auto-captioning, student support and more,” said Anthony. “To stop it becoming a short-lived gimmick and make sure it drives lasting impact, AI must be deployed in ways that will truly benefit students, educators and institutions alike.”
How to create captivating online learning experiences with D2L Brightspace
In his presentation, Shaun Keevil, solutions engineer with D2L, shared some of the ways in which Brightspace can enable responsive, immersive and personalised learning journeys that are tailored to each student’s needs and performance.
He highlighted a variety of features:
- A homepage shows notifications, upcoming and overdue deadlines, news and updates, and awards and class progress. “Students need never feel lost or overwhelmed,” Shaun says, “with the course homepage offering a single point of connection and orientation.”
- Discover allows educators to curate a library of optional learning based on user attributes and rules so that students to electively enrol in courses of their choosing.
- Release conditions and course awards provide ways to directly respond to and acknowledge student performance and behaviour, while intelligent agents can automatically enrol students into extended, deeper learning. “This helps motivate and stretch students who are ready without the burden of manually monitoring results and administering interventions,” Shaun says.
- Creator+ and H5P make it easy to build engaging, interactive content that promotes participation, exploration and comprehension. Plus, AI-powered features can help by automatically suggesting the best activities based on provided content. “By handling the complexity behind the scenes,” Shaun says, “educators can focus on pedagogy, not production.”
- D2L Lumi’s AI-powered tools can support students by offering chat, study and quiz support. They can also aid educators with content generation, course creation, learning outcomes alignment and auto-captioning for videos.
Shaun concluded, “With Brightspace institutions can build courses and programmes of study that will be experienced slightly differently by every single student, based on their own abilities, needs and behaviours exhibited as they work through material.”
See how institutions like University College Dublin are transforming learning by offering a consistent educator and student experience with D2L Brightspace.
Transforming online learning for a consistent experience
Transforming through digital technology is one of University College Dublin’s (UCD) strategic themes that guides the development of students, research and the university community. In 2018/19, UCD introduced Brightspace to deliver a more consistent online learning experience for staff and students.
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