Brightspace’s advanced tools, customisation capabilities and collaborative features perfectly align with our vision of fostering an enriched learning experience for our students and faculty.
Dr Mario Landman, head of education technology and innovation, The IIE
Challenge
To personalize learning and automate routine tasks
The IIE offers over 130 qualifications, from Higher Certificate to Doctorate level. It is passionate about teaching and learning and uses technology to help optimise the learner experience and educator productivity.
The institution’s goal is to meet unique individual needs by personalising student learning pathways, giving just-in-time feedback, supporting distance learning and using analytics to support outcomes. These ambitions had outgrown their previous learning platform, which had served them well for 15 years but favoured standardization. Its functionalities and development roadmap no longer aligned with the EdTech Strategy of the IIE.
“We wanted to pursue adaptive learning in its broader sense,” explains Dr Mario Landman, head of education technology and innovation at The IIE. “Adaptive learning is about process, as well as technology. We needed more functionality.”
The IIE was interested in release conditions, which empower educators to release content or activities when a student has met certain, predefined criteria. That could be moving on to a module only when they have demonstrated understanding of the previous one.
However, it had a challenge, in the sheer size and scale of its teaching and learning. The institution has 1,400 unique academic modules across 135 higher education qualifications, replicated across multiple brands. In total, it has 40,000-unit instances on its learning management system (LMS).
A colossal 70,000-strong student body, each with their own individual way of learning, interacts with the enormous bank of content. Educators create material, teach, mark and assess.
The IIE needed ways to maximise staff productivity, minimise repetitive and manual labour, streamline activities, develop content easily and use artificial intelligence (AI) to automate tasks.
“We were looking for technology to provide efficiency and cut down on lecturer workload, to free them up to spend more time on student support and teaching and learning,” says Mario. “Lecturers were bombarded with student questions: ‘Can you explain that?’, ‘Where can I find information on…'”.
The IIE also wanted better analysis of how students learn and how they are progressing, so that it could act to optimise outcomes. It sought a partnership with a platform provider, one in which they could grow together and work to develop and continually improve digital learning.
Solution
A digital learning platform with enhanced features
The IIE ran an extensive evaluation process that assessed prospective platform providers against 450 functional criteria. D2L stood out, so Brightspace was chosen.
“One of the categories where D2L performed very well was when we interviewed a number of D2L’s clients,” says Mario. “They highlighted the direct input they have to D2L’s roadmap, which really appealed to us. It is a partnership vibe—not like a vendor.”
D2L’s extensive portfolio satisfies The IIE’s needs for advanced functionality. D2L Creator+ and H5P provide content authoring and over 50 engaging, interactive content types such as videos, quizzes, flashcards and drag-and-drop activities. Performance+ supplies the analytics, while D2L Lumi brings AI into every stage of the learning experience.
For faculty, it streamlines content creation, accelerates common workflows, and surface insights on where learners need support. For students, Lumi Tutor acts as a personalized, course-specific coach available 24/7 — providing guidance grounded in the course content itself, encouraging self-directed study without adding to instructor workload. Lumi Feedback supports educators in delivering timely, rubric-aligned feedback at scale: AI drafts the comments and grades, but educators review and approve everything before it reaches learners, keeping them firmly in control.
“The day we saw the demo for Lumi Tutor,” says Mario. “I literally flew up from my chair and ran to the director’s office and said how do we apply for a grant for this technology?”
D2L made it really easy for us to add advancements rapidly and cost-effectively.
We are years ahead from where we originally expected to be.Dr Mario Landman, head of education technology and innovation, The IIE
With Creator+, The IIE has been able to develop ways for educators to add their own content to template designs. This has made it easier to build content and deliver high-quality, interactive course materials. Creator+ can help higher education boost engagement and completion rates through engaging course content, without recourse to designers and developers with specialist coding skills.
Meanwhile, Lumi Tutor enables personalised learning, quizzes students and explains course content to them but Mario explains, with safeguards: “Students don’t need to go to ChatGPT or Gemini anymore. It gives them the benefit of AI, without developing poor practices through direct engagement with large language models. Benefits, but mitigating most of the risks.”
We’ve ticked three of our main strategic boxes—a coursework development tool and AI grading support as well as Lumi Tutor in 2026. Lumi Tutor can’t go outside the coursework—it is only trained on what happens in that walled garden—everything else we’d seen put us at risk.
Dr Mario Landman, head of education technology and innovation, The IIE
The IIE also leant on D2L Learning Services, a team of course development, instructional design and customisation experts that help organisations deliver engaging, effective and easy-to-use teaching and learning experiences.
Result
A partnership that delivers for students and educators
The IIE introduced Brightspace through a pilot with 2,500 students implemented in a “remarkable” six weeks and, within a year, it had rolled out the platform to all 65,000 students. At the same time, the team worked with D2L’s Learning Services to mock-up an astounding 1,000 modules. Mario puts the success of working with D2L down to never having, “a break in communication”.
“The project management was masterful. At some points, we were meeting daily. Every module was tracked; every issue highlighted. It was taxing, but enormously productive.”
Dr Mario Landman, head of education technology and innovation, The IIE
Clearly, a colossal effort and dedication went into ensuring the Brightspace launch would be a huge success, but the team still expected an “aftershock” from such a significant change. It was astonished, therefore, to see highly positive survey results only three months later.
Feedback included observations that Brightspace is more user-friendly than the previous LMS and more logically organised, with a simpler user interface that makes it quicker to find things. Students also loved how customisable the platform is, with the ability to switch notifications on and off to suit.
New, high-quality, interactive modules are designed to be easy for lecturers to work with. They give students more choice over the activities they do and how they engage with and consume content. Students can, for example, choose to watch a video, switch captions on or just read a transcript. They can measure their own performance and make more informed selections to maximise outcomes.
Timely, AI-assisted feedback meanwhile, supports a high-quality learning experience whilst simultaneously helping tutors work more effectively. “To have consistent, high-quality feedback in a small timeframe is an absolute winner,” notes Mario. “I can’t tell you how groundbreaking that is for us. It improves the quality of the lecturer’s work and their efficiency. It’s absolutely a win-win for us.”
Through analytics, The IIE can now understand how students engage with the learning platform to empower educators to optimise tuition and interaction.
Throughout, D2L’s infrastructure has been robust, with consistent uptime the likes of which Mario says they hadn’t had before. Likewise, the partnership element has exceeded expectations. “We’re looked after proactively,” Mario says. “It’s a completely different experience and incredibly refreshing; not like a client – we have common goals.”
The IIE set out to form a partnership with a learning platform provider with the vision and advanced technical functionality to match its ambitions for personalised, adaptive learning and continuous development. After an intense and rapid deployment, students and educators at the institution have praised Brightspace highly and now enjoy high-quality, interactive course content, time-saving automation and performance insights.
Discover Brightspace for education, visit d2l.com/en-eu/solutions/higher-education.
Interviewees:
- Dr Mario Landman, head of education technology and innovation, The IIE
