Campus Living Centres

Challenge

Boosting the Student Residence Experience

CLC is the largest operator of post-secondary student housing in Canada. With a portfolio of approximately 35,000 beds, the company aims to support universities and colleges across the country with expanding housing capacity, improving the financial performance of housing operations and boosting the student experience.

“Enhancing the experience of the students living in our residence communities has always been a top priority for us,” explains Courtney Daponte, project manager of residence life at CLC. “In order to achieve that, our staff members need to feel supported and equipped to deal with any situation.”

Alongside the 55 full-time professional staff members, CLC employs students as resident advisor to support the smooth running of residences. The nature of employing student resident staff through their study periods results in regular turnover, with roughly 330 new hires onboarded on the same start date from coast to coast to coast.

What’s more, the COVID-19 pandemic brought an end to the in-person onboarding and training that CLC traditionally relied on, further complicating the process for the Residence Life team.

“The requirement for a rapid shift to online training left us with a mix of digital services and platforms that never quite fit what we were looking for,” comments Daponte. “It caused confusion and frustration for staff and their trainers.”

To enhance job satisfaction and retention, CLC looked to revise its approach to recruiting, training and developing full-time staff members as well as to deploy a new centralized platform to support this vision.

Solution

Seeking a New Approach

CLC conducted a thorough review of new hires and their experiences over a 12-month period. From the insight provided, it was clear that the student staff required extra support.

“Looking at the documented skill level of our recent hires, we noticed that there was an increased need for more training and skills development related to fundamental competencies such as office work,” notes Daponte. “Many new student hires join the team with minimal work experience relating to residence life and student affairs, and we want to ensure they are building the right skills to succeed.”

Based on emerging employment trends within CLC and the residence life sector, the profile and definition of the ideal candidate have also shifted. To reflect the needs of the company when attempting to fill open positions, CLC established new standards used to assess candidates and refined its competency framework to reflect main job responsibilities.

From there, CLC worked to design a standardized training that provides better support for both the incoming employees and their on-site supervisors.

Selecting the Platform for Success

With the introduction of D2L Brightspace in mid-2023, CLC has been able to design a more flexible approach to onboarding and training. Previously, training to support cyclical projects was released only once a year, putting pressure on the four-person corporate team to provide constant support and procedure recalls for all professional staff members. Now, professional staff can take the residence life courses at their own pace and repeat them as many times as needed.

For new hires, CLC created hands-on learning tasks, empowering student staff to build skills within the guardrails of a learning environment first before applying them on the job.

“We’re committed to ensuring that the materials we provide are equitable, digestible, engaging and helpful,” confirms Daponte. “To ensure we are meeting learners’ needs, we continuously seek insight to identify areas for improvement, and seeing which lessons are being accessed the most helps us to prioritize where to place extra support.”

Partnering for Opportunities

CLC often partners with experts in the residence life field to enrich its onboarding and training programs.

“Collaboration with community partners helps us to ensure that we are equipped to deal with any high-level and complex concerns in the residence buildings,” explains Daponte.

Integrating external resources from partners with Brightspace, CLC not only expands on the existing collaboration but also ensures that critical learning opportunities together with other training content can be accessed at any time.

“We’ve been able to offer a course on gender-based violence and consent by uploading a SCORM file from one of our partners to the platform,” says Daponte. “Before D2L, this would have been only a once-a-year training opportunity that we couldn’t replicate every semester, meaning that about 15% of our resident advisor cohort would miss out on this important learning.”

Result

Getting Competencies Right

Leveraging Brightspace, CLC has removed the complexities associated with searching for resources across multiple digital channels. For both student and full-time staff, standardized interactive modules covering each core area of the competency framework lay a strong foundation for onboarding. They also boost manager confidence by ensuring teams are aligned in skills and knowledge—helping streamline workflows, reduce errors and improve overall productivity.

By transforming its approach to onboarding and training, CLC is seeing a significant improvement in the competencies of its new hires. In particular, by focusing on building fundamental skills first, CLC has been able to provide better support to student staff and unlock new operational efficiencies.

“The majority of my team members are 17-to-19-year-olds with no prior work experience,” comments William Logan, residence life manager. “Writing reports with strict requirements for documentation is often a particularly steep learning curve. The Brightspace courses are so robust and easy to follow that now reports are routinely submitted error-free. It is truly a remarkable accomplishment.”

The new courses also encourage independence in learners, meaning that managers can be more intentional in providing one-on-one support and have more time to pursue strategic tasks.

“Our student workers know that if they have any questions, their first step should be to check in Brightspace,” continues Logan. “The majority of the time, they can find an answer independently with ease.”

Similarly, the full-time professional staff now have access to standardized training in easily digestible formats, supporting them with their own learning curves. They have reported that the new platform is easy to navigate and engaging, and it makes reviewing content more pleasant.

“Learning how to navigate our housing software has historically been a tedious process, causing much frustration and discouragement,” says Daponte. “Since utilizing Brightspace for training, we have seen a significant improvement in the correct use of this complex software, with the team scoring an average of 90% on the associated quiz in their training.”

Supporting Hands-on Learning and Collaboration

The experiential learning projects created by CLC not only provide learners with a deeper understanding of their roles but also support the company in making effective transitions during staff turnover. Often, student staff will change every four to eight months, meaning that any long-term projects, such as social activity programming, need to be handed over frequently. By using Brightspace as an online repository for ongoing projects, the incoming staff can now seamlessly access all the information they need and continue the work.

The discussions tool has been particularly popular with CLC staff, as they can openly share ideas and work together to solve problems. This has led to innovative and creative solutions, creating better team dynamics and a more collaborative work environment.

“In just the first four months of the 2024-2025 academic year, 918 discussion threads have been created by the resident advisors, sharing ideas and advice with each other,” says Daponte. “As CLC has residencies based all over Canada, the online discussion boards provide a valuable source of collaboration and connection for workers based in different parts of the country.”

Unlocking New Efficiencies With Data

Using D2L’s data hub has significantly boosted the CLC corporate team’s ability to maintain performance management processes.

Our previous digital training tools did not offer such comprehensive completion data, which left supervisors in the dark about the status of their teams. With the insight we have through Brightspace, we have been able to drive course completion rates up from 62% up to 90%.

Courtney Daponte, project manager, residence life

Additionally, supervisors can use completion data to proactively provide additional support to new hires who may be falling behind, ensuring a robust learning environment for everyone.

“The expectations of today’s learners demand that we alter the ways we’ve previously relied on training, developing and retaining our staff teams. With Brightspace, we have created an engaging, self-paced and collaborative onboarding experience that is designed to coach employees through every step of their employment and personal development from day one,” concludes Daponte. “Offering learning opportunities that reflect CLC’s commitment to empowering employee success ultimately helps us build a positive and healthy workplace.”