Fusion
On-Demand

Join the livestream of the Fusion Welcome and D2L Champions Spotlight followed by the Opening Keynote by John Baker, Founder, President and CEO of D2L

Join the discussion to see continuous learning within your company. In the corporate world, training and knowledge sharing are often seen as non-essential and may face budget cuts for a number of reasons. This presentation will offer strategies to prevent this. Drawing from my 25 years of experience across five large companies, I aim to help you advocate for learning in a corporate setting.

This session explores how Rumi integrates with D2L Brightspace to support academic integrity and responsible AI use. Attendees will learn how Rumi encourages transparent writing processes, supports creative assignments, and provides faculty insight into student thinking without relying on punitive detection tools.

Learn how to create more engaging webpages using lesser-known HTML tags and useful CSS properties. Highlight text in yellow, reverse list numbers, replace list bullets with emojis, perform light image editing, and add interactivity to your pages directly from the D2L Brightspace Editor. No Creator+, content templates, or coding skills? No problem!

Orientation can do more than welcome learners to D2L Brightspace. It can launch them into professional thinking. This session shares the redesign of an adult online learner orientation for a competency-based teacher licensure program, built with Creator+ and H5P, and the comparative learner feedback that proves intentional design truly matters.

Recording and managing video and audio content in D2L Brightspace is easier than ever with the media library. This tool enables you to upload, record, edit, organize, and use multimedia content and other files across multiple courses/semesters.

In this session, we’ll explore:

• upload and record audio and video files in your media library
• upload, generate, and edit closed captions for accessibility
• use the embedded media player
• view and download transcripts

Along the way, we’ll also discover practical ideas for how and where media library files can be created and used in your courses.

What if instructors could build visually rich, on-brand course pages in Brightspace—without code, design skills, or support calls?

At the University of Ottawa, we built Designer+: a faculty-branded component library inside Brightspace that lets instructors copy and paste polished, themed components into course pages. Complementary to Creator+, it enriches static content with intro boxes, highlight boxes, cards, icon lists, and more—a replicable model for design autonomy at scale.

This session highlights the Medical University of South Carolina’s Fundamentals of Digital Accessibility course in D2L Brightspace and explores why accessible design matters for all learners. Attendees will see key course elements that support digital accessibility in Brightspace, learn how participants earned a micro‑credential through the Awards feature, and gain practical ideas for supporting inclusive, accessible teaching.

The University of Windsor has been using Analytics Builder to develop customer reports including a dashboard displaying tool usage across courses. This dashboard is used to monitor tool adoption and inform training needs at our institution.
Join Tim Au-Yeung, Online Learning Systems Administrator, as he walks you through the thought process behind the development of the dashboard, and how to implement it at your institution using Analytics Builder.

Most professional development fails because it is designed for completion, not integration. Organizations invest heavily in learning programs, yet research in adult learning, transfer of training, self-determination theory, and implementation science consistently shows that new skills rarely translate into sustained behaviour change. Certificates are earned, dashboards look good, but observable practice often remains static. 

This session reframes professional learning as a system-level challenge. Participants will examine how professional identity, autonomy, cognitive load, feedback loops, and organizational reinforcement interact to either support or undermine lasting change. The session introduces a psychologically informed framework to design learning ecosystems that embed reflection, accountability, and ongoing skill integration. Attendees will leave with actionable strategies to audit current programs, identify systemic barriers to transfer, and implement evidence-based design shifts that produce measurable behavioural change, strengthen professional identity, and maximize organizational impact.

This presentation explores the use of Timely Grader, an AI-assisted feedback tool, to support Ed.D. students in mastering APA reference formatting. Implemented in a dissertation course, the approach provided immediate and iterative feedback. Results of this integration included improved accuracy, increased confidence, and reduced instructor workload, shifting focus toward higher-order writing skills and deeper learning.

 
Assessing student mastery of course material is essential for instructional practices and learning outcomes. We describe a systematic approach to map quiz data from the D2L Brightspace Learning Management System to course standards, providing individual- and cohort-level analyses to help identify knowledge acquisition and areas requiring intervention.  

This year, we have enhanced our LMS via key integrations: D2L Brightspace New Content Experience, D2L Lumi, H5P, Simple Syllabus, and YuJa Panorama. Alongside a University Southern Georgia content purge for system stability, we successfully consolidated with East Georgia State College. These updates helped to see a more robust, accessible, and learner-focused digital environment.

Standardization doesn’t mean depersonalization; it can free faculty up to make more personal connections. Intelligent agents go beyond automating student emails. They can let you know when students are struggling, take on more administrative tasks such as enrolling students in another D2L Brightspace page, or assist in onboarding new faculty.

Dive into using AI to build custom widgets for D2L Brightspace! This session will show you hands-on ways to use vibe coding with AI tools to create custom widgets and tools in D2L Brightspace. We’ll focus on enhancing the user and admin experience, covering vibe coding best practices, code deployment, and basic maintenance tips you’ll need to keep those engaging tools running smoothly.

Data centers are projected to consume 100s of Terra Watts annually by 2035, demanding power conversion technologies that are not only energy-efficient but also cost-effective, scalable, and reliable. This presentation explores the development of a novel megawatt-scale, medium-voltage power conversion system based on a Variable Air Gap Solid-State Transformer architecture, reducing energy loss, footprint, and cost while enabling flexible, modular deployment, and reliable operation.

Deliberately designed course communication shapes instructor presence and student engagement. This session shows how D2L Brightspace, guided by the Community of Inquiry (CoI) and Universal Design for Learning (UDL), can support systems that build connection and enable more regular and substantive interaction.

When complex system integrations succeed in higher education, it’s rarely about code – it’s about collaboration, leadership, and structured project management. Lonestar college’s “istarGradePassback’ project automated grade pass-back from D2L Brightspace to PeopleSoft (Student Information System) became a model of how to better navigate complexity through teamwork, planning and positive vendor relationships at a large community college. Our story is about how multiple teams worked for a common purpose and made history by rolling out a huge positive change seamlessly.

Explore how a single D2L API report evolved into a role-based dashboard ecosystem built entirely within D2L Brightspace. Using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Brightspace APIs, standalone tools were transformed into centralized dashboards for admins, faculty, and students with no external database required. Learn practical strategies for organizing API-driven tools, improving workflows, and turning LMS data into actionable insights.

Course design standards shape the learning experience in profound ways, influencing engagement, accessibility, and overall learner success. To better understand how institutions are defining and pursuing quality, we conducted an environmental scan of course design standards across North American higher education institutions.

Explore how the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology School of Business transformed a course with 30% completion rate. Learn how integrating AI tools like Bongo, Wayground, and HeyGen within D2L Brightspace helped boost engagement, retention, and student success. 
With completion rates at just 30%, the course adopted a student-centered “Backward Design” using D2L’s New Content Experience. This reduced plagiarism, improved learning outcomes, boosted retention, eased faculty grading workloads, and raised assessment averages to nearly 90%. 

With the new ADA Title II requirements, accessible content is essential—but still challenging to create. Applying Universal Design for Learning (UDL) concepts from the start can helps reduce barriers and streamline accessibility work. This session explores:

1. What UDL is and how it relates to accessibility
2. Practical strategies for accessible content in D2L Brightspace and beyond
3. How Purdue University uses AI to help with tasks like creating alternative text and converting documents

When faculty repeatedly asked, “Brightspace can do this—why can’t our instance?”, we asked deeper “why” questions. Those conversations revealed some mishaps and untapped potential within Brightspace:

Time to re-org Brightspace, purge, and adopt the New Content Experience (NCE). 

We recount the journey – how our team at a public university navigated constraints, questioned assumptions, uncovered solutions and embarked in a multiphase project. From survival through catchup to more well‑trained EdTech companions: supportive, reliable, and unlikely to set anything on fire.