University of Florida Lastinger Center for Learning

Challenge

Empowering student success across the state

The University of Florida Lastinger Center for Learning is an innovation center dedicated to the research and development of educational solutions that put all learners on a trajectory for lifelong success. The organization focuses on improving three academic milestones that are among the strongest predictors of a child’s success in life: kindergarten readiness, primary school reading and secondary school algebra proficiency. To achieve its goal, the Lastinger Center offers professional development micro-credentials for educators in early learning spaces and K-12 across the state of Florida.

The center aims to make these micro-credentials as engaging and accessible as possible for the busy professionals who take the courses. There are no uniform semesters or enrollment periods: each Lastinger Center program begins and ends at times best suited to the goals of the program. Learners can combine and stack courses flexibly, for a total of between 30 and 300 credit hours.

For almost a decade, the Lastinger Center relied on a learning management system (LMS) that it had developed in-house to host the micro-credential courses. The organization saw great success in learner outcomes, but the complexity of maintaining this platform made it difficult to continue growing and developing new offerings. It also made it difficult to adjust courses when research revealed new standards for best practice while maintaining cost-effectiveness.

“For us to make a difference in the state and reduce the numbers of children in school who are learning below grade level, we need to reach as many educators as possible,” explains Cathy Cavanaugh, Lastinger Center assistant director. “We do that through scale. Our challenge is to continue our growth while also making courses as engaging and impactful as possible.”

To support its mission, the Lastinger Center looked to transition to an LMS that was scalable and easy to use for both learners and course developers.

Solution

Delivering transformation

Casting a wide net, the Lastinger Center conducted a landscape study to identify solutions on the market before selecting Brightspace as its new strategic platform.

“Only Brightspace had the combination of features for interactive learning, access to data that can be used for research, and a supportive company culture that has the same values as we do,” recalls Cathy Cavanaugh.

Taking an instructional design approach to migrating and developing courses, the Lastinger Center team worked on the transformation over the course of a year.

“The instructional design approach informed by distance learning theory is very important to us,” says Cathy Cavanaugh. “What are we trying to achieve? What are the kinds of interactions that are essential to make it happen? And what’s feasible within the limitations that we have? These questions help us stay as effective as possible.”

Partnering with the experts

To help ensure a smooth transition to its new LMS, the Lastinger Center worked closely with experts from D2L, engaging with the implementation team, creative services, solution architects, and more. With D2L’s support, the center’s instructional design team gained in-depth understanding of the new platform—for example, how they could use the competencies feature to enable personalized learning journeys.

“Our Learning Administration Manager and Technical Account Manager are very available, knowledgeable, responsive people who understand education and understand our context,” says Cathy Cavanaugh. “They were instrumental in getting us started because we came from a non-standard platform and a lot of the LMS concepts were new to us.”

Integrating for learners and instructors alike

To maintain the accessible and engaging nature of its courses, the Lastinger Center integrated third-party tools including H5P, Feedback Fruits, and Bongo into its Brightspace platform.

“We want to see that learners can apply their knowledge, and a great way to do that is to capture video of them teaching,” notes Cathy Cavanaugh. “Bongo is perfect for that. It also lets our instructors use video as a dialog with learners, to offer in-depth feedback and questioning and reflection.”

With the H5P integration, the center gained access to a new range of interactive elements that are helping its instructional designers create more engaging courses than before.

“When we found H5P, we worked to identify how we can make the learning experience much more interactive,” explains Cathy Cavanaugh. “Ultimately, we would love to be able to replace some of our assessments with those interactive H5P experiences.”

In addition, the center worked with an AI solution provider to develop and integrate an artificial intelligence (AI) model that can support instructors with reviewing assignments and providing clear, timely, actionable, and individualized feedback.

“Our efforts to improve learner outcomes at scale include attention to the instructor experience,” remarks Cathy Cavanaugh.

The model scans submitted assignments and automatically scores them against a rubric. An instructor then verifies samples of the AI’s output to monitor accuracy. By leveraging AI within Brightspace, the Lastinger Center will be able to scale effectively without adding more workload for the instructors and will be able to enhance the speed and consistency of feedback.

Driving data insights

As an organization that is part of a research university, the Lastinger Center found it important to utilize the Data Hub feature in Brightspace to gather data to drive informed decision-making.

During its transition to Brightspace, the center adopted objectives and key results (OKRs)—metrics which support progress-tracking and decision-making. The OKRs include a net promoter score (NPS), an educator knowledge gain score measured by difference between pre- and post-test knowledge, and learner mastery rates. The Lastinger Center has also used data provided by Brightspace to streamline the building of an automated OKR dashboard to provide dynamic insights and drive continuous course improvements.

Result

Scaling up operations

With more than 160 online courses now managed in the Brightspace platform, the Lastinger Center has been able to significantly scale up its operations while increasing engagement and accessibility.

“Today, we have over 110,000 learner accounts and we serve over 50,000 learners annually,” says Cathy Cavanaugh. “Our early learning educator enrollments have increased by over 100%.”

In the first year of using Brightspace, learners gave the new courses an average net promoter score (NPS) of 79 points. The Lastinger Center also measured a learning effect size of 1.8—a metric which indicates that learners grew by nearly two standard deviations in their knowledge.

Staying cost-effective

While improving the learner experience at scale, the center has also been able to stay cost-effective.

“Brightspace has enabled us to dramatically reduce our per learner course costs due to lower LMS costs and more streamlined course development and deployment,” notes Cathy Cavanaugh.

In parallel, the integration of AI-supported assignment scoring into Brightspace helps to reduce the costs associated with providing detailed feedback, without compromising the learning experience or outcomes.

“Like any educational organization, we have limited funds,” says Cathy Cavanaugh. “When we save on operational costs, we can reach more people with the budget that we have. Our cost-benefit analysis estimated a 33% reduction in scoring costs for a full year of course delivery over 5,000 assignments that use the AI scoring tool, which means we can better serve our mission of improving education across the state.”

Innovating with an accessible platform

The user-friendly nature of Brightspace helps the center provide an accessible learning environment to educators across the state.

“We have such a wide range of educators—some might not have much experience with technology, some might have different learning contexts and needs,” explains Cathy Cavanaugh. “Many of our early learning educators work in Spanish-speaking communities, which means we have to translate all our content. Brightspace has made it easier for us to make sure that everyone can access our content in a way that is meaningful and relevant to them.”

As the Lastinger Center looks to the future, it hopes to use more of the data that it gathers from Brightspace to drive improvements to courses and beyond.

“We are looking to take a holistic approach to learner analytics,” concludes Cathy Cavanaugh. “With Brightspace giving us access to more consistent data on a larger scale, we will be able to make design decisions that make our experience more simple, more streamlined, and more effective. In the end, this will improve the lives of thousands of students and contribute to our knowledge base around professional learning and development.”