About the Excellence Awards
These awards celebrate inspiration and innovation in digital education and learning and development. There will be a maximum of five (5) Excellence Awards winners. If your organization is delivering a solution that’s making an extraordinary impact or helping to create a unique and collaborative learning experience, share your story of excellence!
Want to know how you can strengthen your submission? Find out from previous judges of the Excellence Awards what attributes help make a submission stand out from the crowd.
Who to Recognize
Nominate an individual, course, program, or organization-wide initiative.
Nomination Deadline
The deadline for the 2022 award nominations is Friday, January 28, 2022.
Guidelines
Award nominations are open to all organizations using the Brightspace platform; including their faculty, staff, and administrators. Nominations can be submitted for an individual, team, program, or organization.
Each winning submission will receive the following prizes:
- D2L Excellence Award Trophy
- D2L Swag Prize Pack
- Two free main conference registrations for the 2022 in-person Fusion event
2022 D2L Excellence Awards official rules can be found here.
More Information
For further information, or if you have any questions, please send us an email.
Check out the 2022 Award Winners.
2022 D2L Excellence Award Winners
Pima Community College
Summary:
In 2021, Pima Community College was one of the first colleges nationally to host an educator conference that repurposed D2L Brightspace as a conference management solution. With over 200 educators attending the 2021 PimaOnline Educators Conference (POEC), Pima demonstrated that D2L Brightspace can effectively manage dynamic learning conferences that enable educators to participate in meaningful, interactive learning opportunities that harness, and model, the power of Brightspace for supporting synchronous and asynchronous learning.
Sinclair College
Summary:
The Coaching to Complete program at Sinclair Community College (Dayton, Ohio) leverages Brightspace and its tools with dynamic collaboration between faculty and Success Coaches to support student success in eLearning courses. Coaching to Complete paved the way for an innovative success model of in-course support at a much-needed time during the transition to all online learning due to the pandemic. Outcomes included participating courses averaging a 5% higher passing grade rate versus non-participating courses, a 90% interaction rate between Success Coaches and students through different Brightspace channels, a majority of students indicating the Success Coach helped them with motivation and encouragement, meeting assignment deadlines, finding resources for help, and getting in better contact with their instructors. Since its inception, more than 6,400 students, 50 faculty, and 300 online courses have taken part in Coaching to Complete.
Purdue University
Summary:
Purdue University’s Learning Online 101 was developed as a self-paced resource to help students adapt to a dynamic learning environment due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Learning Online 101 brought together a range of curated materials to help students connect with essential resources and identify the best practices to aid in their individual learning needs. This course was designed to address common online challenges by providing students with the skills, resources, and confidence to learn and engage with course elements housed in Brightspace. To date, over 57,000 individuals have been enrolled in this course. The course evaluation survey (n=3,000 responses) revealed high levels of engagement, where 96.1% visited most content topics and an average of 95.5% found the content useful across all four modules. Learners also reported this course as an excellent introduction to learning and engaging with online courses at Purdue, which made learners feel more prepared and less anxious.
Energy Safety Canada
Summary:
With the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, when educational institutions and training centers are opting for online delivery methods, evaluating the efficiency of training programs is critical to ensure their success. The Kirkpatrick model is the standard of leveraging and measuring training success, and this submission presents the assessment of the Common Safety Orientation (CSO) course at Energy Safety Canada (ESC) that is hosted on Brightspace. The first two levels (reaction and learning) of the Kirkpatrick model are useful tools to drive continuous improvement in student experience and learning outcomes. Course quizzes and exit surveys built into Brightspace are used to measure student satisfaction and to translate the success of the training programs at Energy Safety Canada, which drive safe work practices across the Energy Industry.
Greater Essex County District School Board
Summary:
The Greater Essex County District School Board’s response when presented with the challenge of educating students and supporting staff from a distance, is one that evolved through innovation. The GECDSB’s Brightspace for Teachers course was launched in 2020 to provide professional learning and support to nearly 5,000 educators on a self-serve, anywhere/anytime basis. The Brightspace Application Programming Interface (API) was used to pull information from within Brightspace and make it available to educators quickly and easily. What started with an API tool to provide the ability to search course content files in the Brightspace for Teachers course grew to over 20 more useful API tools developed to help support educators using Brightspace. Through educator feedback and needs analysis, these API tools were developed with the end user in mind. They have since been shared and are now being promoted and used across other organizations in the province of Ontario