Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business

Challenge

Maintaining global standards for business schools 

The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) is the global standard-setting body for business education. Its mission is to elevate the quality of business schools through accreditation, thought leadership and learning opportunities. The AACSB has over 1,900 member organizations in more than 100 countries, making it the largest business education network in the world. 

A leader in providing learning opportunities to help advance business education, AACSB runs seminars, webinars and online courses. The organization had been using D2L Brightspace for online learning and realized it wasn’t leveraging the platform’s full potential. As a result, it missed opportunities for automation leading to productivity bottlenecks. 

“People on our learning and development team were creating all of our seminars manually,” says Travis Sweet, manager of business applications. “They would take a previous seminar and manually clean it up, changing the structure if needed. There was a 50-page document detailing all the steps to create a new course. And because we set up a new course for each of our deliveries throughout the year, we were constantly going through this process. I thought: can’t we automate this a bit more?” 

At the same time, the organization saw an opportunity to increase the value of its membership by developing a competency-based education (CBE) academy that members could use to upskill and gain certifications that would help them progress in their careers. 

“We had a pilot certificate program that was being run in-person and through email,” recalls Amanda Chiplock, director of curriculum and learning strategy. “We looked for a platform that could help us manage that work more easily and give us the opportunity to continue growing the program globally.” 

Solution

Re-evaluating and automating

To boost productivity and enable the learning and development team to focus on value-add tasks, AACSB reviewed the way it was using Brightspace. 

“We don’t have a full-time LMS administrator, so we reached out to our D2L representatives and asked them to walk us through all the features that are available to us,” says Sweet. “It quickly became apparent that we hadn’t been fully aware of the system’s capabilities.”  

As the AACSB team started to explore the platform’s automation tools, the first thing they did was create course templates.  

“There was immediately a lot of positive feedback,” shares Sweet. “The course creation process went from the 50-page document to just a few pages and a few clicks.” 

AACSB also began using the Intelligent Agents feature to automate communication with learners and ease the administrative burden on faculty members. The platform now consistently sends notifications to all course participants, as well as targeted reminders for those who may need to complete homework between classes. 

In addition, the team took advantage of Brightspace Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to create a process for enrolling faculty users and automatically setting their permissions for the whole course.

Enabling competency-based education 

Now that Brightspace was automating many of their routine tasks, the learning and development team was able to focus on using the platform to support the development of innovative learning opportunities. 

“When I first came to AACSB, I created a blueprint of initial ideas for expanding the certificate program,” says Chiplock. “Now, we have both the technology and the time to implement those ideas. We didn’t even have to spend time reviewing other products—everything I wanted to do can be done in Brightspace.” 

A significant benefit of the Brightspace platform for AACSB is its flexibility to enable global reach. As an international association, AACSB must tailor its learning opportunities to different regions to ensure that the content it provides is accessible no matter where a learner is located. 

“We want accessibility to have more than one meaning,” confirms Chiplock. “Accessibility is defined differently in different areas of the world, so we will be making sure that all of these definitions are built into the platform.” 

Working together with D2L and industry leaders, AACSB is now developing a competency-based curriculum of professional development opportunities for the staff, faculty, and leadership of its member business schools.  

“We are considering doing progression mapping for our learners,” says Chiplock. “Learners will self-assess their own competency levels, and then we will be able to recommend them specific content within the academy that will help them move forward in their skill level most effectively.” 

With a focus on skill development and knowledge acquisition, learners will then complete modules for which they will be awarded badges. Once a learner earns enough badges for a specific topic, they receive a certificate which will support them in their career progression. 

“Brightspace gives us the opportunity to link to content that other providers have already created,” adds Chiplock. “This means that we can focus on filling any gaps, instead of building everything out from scratch.” 

Result

Unlocking administrative efficiency 

With Brightspace fully optimized, AACSB’s learning and development team is experiencing a surge in productivity. Courses now build themselves, and faculty are instantly enrolled with the right permissions—eliminating a major administrative burden and giving the team more time to focus on what truly matters.

“Just that alone saved hours and hours of time for the team,” says Sweet.

In addition, the course templates don’t just save time—they also standardize the look and feel of all AACSB courses, improving their visual appeal and raising learner engagement.

Piloting an academy for business education excellence 

As AACSB continues developing its innovative competency-based academy, it will also continue to explore Brightspace and re-evaluate the tools available. 

“We’ll be using tools such as discussion boards and groups to facilitate active learning strategies,” explains Chiplock. “And it’s nice to have the assessment tools built in. We’ll be uploading our rubrics into the platform for our facilitators to access, so they can always give meaningful and valuable feedback to the learners.” 

AACSB is now creating content covering leadership excellence, faculty success,  business quality and impact, and will be launching pilot projects for every course to get learner feedback and continually improve its academy. “D2L is so wonderful to work with, it always feels like we’re on the same future-focused pathway together,” concludes Chiplock. “I’ve worked so hard to define business education excellence with AACSB, and what we’re building with the Brightspace platform will help us bring that to life.”