School District 71, Comox Valley Schools

Challenge

Offering digitally enhanced learning for everyone

Comox Valley Schools is located on the east coast of Vancouver Island on the traditional territory of the K’ómoks First Nation. Servicing approximately 11,000 students from kindergarten through to grade 12 across 23 schools, the district aims to provide compassionate, connected and personalized learning for all.

Recently, the Comox Valley Schools’ Board of Education initiated a new strategic plan that emphasizes flexible learning environments and digitally-enhanced learning to improve accessibility across the district. Comox Valley Schools already offered blended and remote learning options as well as traditional “brick-and-mortar” schools, and has had a centralized learning management system (LMS) to support the expansion of blended learning opportunities to more students.

“People ask me, where do we start with accessibility and inclusivity?” said Shannon Hagen, inclusion educational technology coordinator at Comox Valley Schools. “And my answer is always that you have to have an LMS because students should be able to access all resources digitally.”

Solution

Recalibrating for individualized learning

Starting with a deployment for its provincial online learning school Navigate/NIDES, the district is now in the process of rolling Brightspace out across its brick-and-mortar schools.

Instead of enacting a complete top-down transition, the district has designated LMS mentors at each of its schools to support educators and offer them the freedom to integrate digitally-enhanced learning at their own pace. “If a teacher wants to explore the Brightspace platform for delivering one of their courses, we immediately create a sandbox so they can go in and just play around,” says Josh Porter, director of IT at Comox Valley Schools.

“A big aspect of navigating a new LMS is supporting the school leaders,” adds Hagen. “Ultimately, they’re the ones who will build capacity within a school. I’ve been offering one-on-one sessions as well as group presentations for anyone who needs them.”

Significantly, this approach enabled the district to review its previous approach to pedagogy, especially in terms of personalized learning. “This is an opportunity to refresh, retool and recalibrate in our approach to delivering our courses,” notes Jay Dixon, associate superintendent at Comox Valley Schools. For example, an IT teacher at one of the secondary schools discovered that by using the Groups feature, his students can pick course paths based on their personal interests, which makes the course feel much more engaging for them.

Counselors also have access to the platform to help students choose courses that support their development and future career plans. By using Brightspace for blended learning, students who may not have enough room in their brick-and-mortar school timetable for an additional course can take it online or configure a more flexible schedule to meet their accessibility needs. In addition, counselors can use the Class Progress tool to spot students who may be falling behind and proactively offer extra individualized support.

Supporting administrators and parents

To further support the development of personalized learning opportunities, the district’s online school administrators are exploring using the data analytics provided by the Brightspace platform to assess student progress and course popularity.

The administrators are also in the process of starting to use the Intelligent Agents feature to automate online school enrollment processes. By streamlining repetitive administrative workloads, the district will boost productivity and enable administrators to focus on scaling digitally enhanced learning.

Furthermore, Comox Valley Schools leverages the Brightspace Parent and Guardian functionality to support the learning journey even when class is over. “Bringing in the parents and guardians to be involved more directly helps close the feedback loop,” says Porter. “We’ve opened that door for our teachers to provide more support resources outside of the classroom.”

Result

Enabling accessibility for teachers

With more and more brick-and-mortar schools embracing the new Brightspace platform, Comox Valley Schools is already seeing how the LMS supports district strategic priorities and promotes equitable access for students and teachers alike. Using the centralized online platform, the district shares educator-reviewed support resources for all teachers.

“When the ministry implemented a new assessment framework, I had quite a few teachers who were struggling to use it effectively,” recalls Hagen. “But once I connected the framework to the Brightspace grade book, it clicked, because it was outlined visually. The teachers who were teaching a grade nine-ten split class especially loved it because Brightspace allows them to assess students in two ways at the same time.”

An unexpected benefit of Brightspace for Comox Valley Schools is that it has also become a learning opportunity for the teachers. “The teachers get great learning opportunities in terms of delivering new content, but they are also building tech skills,” continues Hagen. “It can be tricky to navigate online resources—but with the Brightspace tools they really took to it.”

Inclusivity across the district

Thanks to the built-in accessibility tools in the Brightspace platform, students with functional diversities in online and blended learning environments can access new forms of support. In addition, the smooth integration of Brightspace with tools such as ReadSpeaker ensures robust accessibility measures across the whole district.

The district also encourages teachers to use Creator+ to design more interactive content that supports diverse student needs. “The biggest game-changer with Creator+ for us has been the video note,” says Hagen. “Self-reflection is a core competency that students have to show and for those who struggle with writing, the ability to record a video instead means they are no longer limited in their responses.”

As Comox Valley Schools introduces digitally-enhanced learning to more in-person classrooms, more students are benefiting from new flexible learning opportunities, such as being able to catch up on missed lessons from home. “I’ve already had positive feedback from our brick-and-mortar school students,” notes Dixon. “Even those who are not taking any online classes find that the Brightspace platform helps keep them organized. They also like the fact that it offers them more flexibility—they can hand in work at any hour of the day. They often say that they wish more teachers would use it.”