We initially planned for the switch over to Brightspace to take up to a full academic year. With the help of the D2L team, we were able to implement Brightspace and go live with all our programming in under three months!
Anthony Ritz, director of learning experience and design, New Leaders
Challenge
Helping school leaders address complex social issues
Over the past century, U.S. institutions have worked hard to fight racism, injustice and discrimination across all aspects of society. While much progress has been made, there is still a significant amount of work to do in the public education sector to ensure that every student has the same opportunity to thrive.
Disparities within the education system limit access to resources, opportunities, and supports. As a result, far too many students of color and students from communities with lower incomes do not receive the education that they deserve, resulting in lost potential in academic outcomes, high school and college graduation, and lifelong success.
New Leaders is committed to challenging this status quo and reimagining the landscape of school leadership. To accomplish this, the organization provides an array of leadership development training programs and coaching services that enable school and district leaders to remove barriers to success, thereby empowering students to realize their futures as the next generation of leaders for our society. New Leaders ensures the broadest reach by delivering all its courses online, supplemented by in-person seminars.
“Remote learning helps us offer flexible courses that school leaders can fit around their busy schedules,” says Anthony Ritz, director of learning, experience and design. “When we switched to fully remote learning during the pandemic, we had an opportunity to review our existing online learning solutions. We found that our learning management system [LMS] simply wasn’t meeting our needs. It was difficult to navigate, hard to manage, and didn’t offer much flexibility or interactivity.”
Solution
Enhancing training with brand-new digital tools
New Leaders explored many different learning management solutions before selecting D2L Brightspace as its new platform for online and mobile learning.
“We took the time to screen and evaluate lots of different solutions,” says Ritz. “We ran focus groups, held demonstrations, and interviewed the sales and technical representatives from all the vendors we considered. Brightspace was the clear winner and emerged as the perfect fit for New Leaders.”
Achieving a rapid, expert-led implementation
New Leaders worked closely with a range of D2L Services to roll out the organization’s new LMS.
“We initially planned for the switch over to Brightspace to take up to a full academic year,” explains Ritz. “With the help of the D2L team, we were able to implement Brightspace and go live with all our programming in under three months!”
New Leaders has already laid a solid foundation by utilizing content authoring tools to develop prework materials, crafting user-testing sandboxes, and creating a facilitator course to ensure a successful implementation strategy.
“In the implementation of Brightspace, we strive to make it as equitable as possible by encouraging open dialogues with all stakeholders about how they could use Brightspace as their tech solution,” says Ritz. “The more people we get involved in implementing Brightspace, the bigger the energy and momentum.”
Harnessing modular design principles
New Leaders offer an array of leadership development programming for leaders at every level of the K12 education system, including programs, coaching, and workshops. Brightspace provides the foundation for these online courses, giving learners access to course materials and resources and equipping course administrators with powerful management and design tools.
“We really value the modular design enabled by Brightspace,” says Ritz. “By building source courses, we are able to copy created content to specific engagements and customize the engagement based on district needs.
Result
Positively impacting students’ lives
By moving to Brightspace, New Leaders was able to offer learners a much more flexible and interactive learning experience, which helped improve engagement, enthusiasm and participation.
“Feedback on Brightspace has been 99% positive,” says Ritz. “Our learners, our instructors and our admin staff are really pleased with the solution. Many of our learners are already managing a busy work and home life, so having the ability to do pre-work from anywhere via their mobile device is a feature that they really appreciate. Without Brightspace, we simply wouldn’t be able to offer this level of flexibility.”
Using Brightspace, New Leaders is better positioned to help more leaders across the country develop the tools to support more equitable, open and supportive learning environments.
“We’re incredibly proud of the positive change we’ve achieved so far,” explains Ritz. “To date, New Leaders has trained over 8,000 equity-focused leaders and impacted the lives of over 2 million students—87% of whom are students of color.”
“Independent evaluations have shown that schools led by a principal trained by New Leaders enjoy higher student attendance and better performance in core subjects such as English and math,” he concludes. “We’re looking forward to developing our digital learning offering with D2L to build on this success and continue righting generations of educational injustice.”
