Customer Stories
Delivering Excellent Learning Experiences at Scale
Challenge Continuing decades of championing accessible education As the alma mater of first man on the moon Neil Armstrong, Purdue University knows that every giant leap starts with one small...
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Helping more students access online learning
Challenge Growing Demand For Online Learning Originally established in 1977 to provide educational travel experiences, Blyth Academy is now one of the leading private schools in Canada and teaches over...
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Raising Mental Health Awareness in Schools
The Robb Nash Project launches an interactive course to help young people explore and improve their mental wellbeing.
MORE THAN 1,000 ORGANIZATIONS IN OVER 40 COUNTRIES AROUND THE WORLD RELY ON D2L TO HELP THEM TRANSFORM LEARNING.
Making high education affordable to all with new pilot program
The average cost of a private, non-profit four-year university degree is $31,231 across the U.S., while the cost for a public four-year school hovers around $10,000 per year, according to the College Board. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York puts student debt at more than $1.3 trillion, meaning it has reached a crisis level. University can be a prohibitively expensive proposition for some people. Many lower-income students often find themselves working part- or full-time in order to raise sufficient funds, or they face other barriers to entry, such as lengthy commute times because they have to live at home. This demands flexibility of their schedules, which offline courses are often unable to offer. In all, this is creating a system that is inaccessible to many who have a desire to learn, says Dr. Jodi Henderson-Ross, Assistant Professor of instruction at the University of Akron. While online learning has often been hailed as a solution to some of these challenges, there remains a stigma associated with the space. “Rightly or wrongly, there’s an assumption that online learning isn’t as academically rigorous,” she says. Against this backdrop, the University of Akron wanted to change that.
RIT's student base created a unique need for highly accessible software
Making content accessible is always important to teachers, but for Sandra Connelly, an assistant professor of Life Sciences at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), accessibility can take on different meanings. For one student, it meant literally being able to access the material. With videos being hosted on YouTube, he was unable to view them being based in China. This presented an interesting problem: while she'd been steadily moving her class material online, how would students, who have restrictions on materials, regardless of their location, be able to access everything?
Smith School of Business re-engaged faculty & cut back on administrative burden
When it came to their learning management system, the IT staff at Queen’s University’s Smith School of Business used to spend much of their energy just keeping the lights on. The Business School used an LMS built in-house, and it simply sucked up too much time, says Troy St. John, associate director of IT for learning technology and application development. When the school switched to Brightspace, it was like a weight had been lifted. “The custom solution we had in place required a ton of resources dedicated to keeping it up and running,” he says. “We didn’t get a lot of time to add new or innovative things professors asked for. So they kind of stopped asking.” Brightspace’s Valence API gave the IT team a new digital sandbox, allowing them to build cool and useful tools against the existing technology. “Our program offers a really high-touch level of service to students,” he says. “And now, these new tools let us – and our faculty – deepen that commitment.”
Using Brightspace to implement a unique CBE experience
In November 2009, President Obama launched the Educate to Innovate initiative to move American students from the middle to the top of the pack in science and math achievement over the next decade. Recognizing that great teaching is part of any child’s success, President Obama also issued a challenge to the nation to recruit and prepare more than 100,000 new teachers over the next decade.
Helping students track and showcase learning that happens outside the classroom
There is more to a student than just a letter grade. Unfortunately, there is no letter grade to document the experiences and skills a student develops outside the classroom. To address this challenge, the University of Central Oklahoma (UCO) developed the Student Transformative Learning Record (STLR) as a way to provide students with new tools to showcase a more detailed and complete picture of their experiential learning activities.
Helping students take charge of their education online
Lakeland College students have the opportunity to take charge and participate in shaping their own education at the college. How? Through career-relevant, student-run projects, operations and events. The college’s students are drawn to Lakeland’s unique, hands-on education approach. Students have the opportunity to leverage a variety of instructional methods from face-to-face, blended, and distance learning to realize their educational goals, become career-ready, or enhance their professional skill set for career advancement.
Five-star accommodation
It had always been a point of pride—Stephen F. Austin State University (SFASU) enjoyed a reputation for offering the most in accessibility. When it came to online learning, however, feedback was less than glowing. Students and faculty who needed accommodations, particularly the visually impaired, were regularly calling for help. Unfortunately, the learning management system (LMS) used by SFASU made it impossible to resolve the recurring issues. Determined to reverse the situation, they set out to find a learning platform that would meet their accessibility requirements. In order to get it right, they asked for help from those who would benefit the most: students and faculty.
Equal learning opportunity for all
Increasing accessibility for students within a post-secondary learning environment is an ongoing challenge for the thousands of colleges located in the US. To varying degrees, educational institutions are seeking to improve and enhance campus facilities, services and courseware to be more fully accessible to people with disabilities as well as address all cognitive learning styles. Inver Hills Community College, part of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System (MnSCU), is an educational institution at the forefront of improving accessibility for its students. The college’s charge, for more than forty years, has been to improve its community by providing higher education for a variety of learners. With more than 70% of students from underrepresented populations and 20% first generation college students,[1] Inver Hills Community College strongly believes that fulfilling this principle means making education accessible to all.
The great zombie collaboration
It started as a joke. Professors from the virtual campus at HACC, Central Pennsylvania’s Community College, were brainstorming creative ideas for new interdisciplinary courses when someone said, “It’s not like we could do a zombie course.” Or could they? It was the ideal subject for studying from a wide range of perspectives—in fact, there were so many possibilities for collaboration that the course grew to include eight faculty members across five disciplines and seven different specialties. “Zombies in Contemporary Culture” was born, a groundbreaking experiment in academic teamwork made possible by blended learning.