Year Up United

Challenge

Closing the opportunity divide

Founded in 2000, YUU is a nonprofit organization that aims to overcome the social and economic barriers that prevent talented young adults from accessing economic opportunities in the U.S. To close what the organization calls the Opportunity Divide, it provides a range of training and community-building opportunities and connects young adults with leading companies.

One of the most significant projects that YUU uses to bridge the Opportunity Divide is its flagship Career Pathways program. Offered free of charge, the program provides nine specialty training offerings across four pathways: business, customer experience, IT and software. After completing skills-first job training to build foundational technical experience and critical professional and personal skills, participants are placed in internships at more than 500 prominent employer partners nationwide, including more than 40 of the Fortune 100 companies, to gain hands-on experience.

Currently, YUU successfully trains and secures work placements for ~4,000 learners per year in 21 national locations. Whether graduates pursue postsecondary education or continue their career path, YUU’s personalized coaching and hiring solution, YUPRO Placement, help alumni launch successful careers.

“Our ambition is to grow Career Pathways by a factor of 10 and connect 40,000 young people to better opportunities and higher earning potential annually. To do that, we need a way to scale sustainably, without compromising quality for learners and our employer partners.”

Scaling up skills-first training

After a thorough evaluation of its current approach to delivering the Career Pathways program, YUU made the strategic decision to update its technology infrastructure and core curriculum to facilitate its growth goals. Training activities were split across three separate LMSs, which added complexity and made it harder to deliver and evolve the program. To put this in perspective, one LMS had 47 separate system admins.

As a result, instructors and system administrators spent considerable time maintaining curricula across the different systems, undertaking administrative tasks and troubleshooting technical issues, impacting the quality of teaching and learning. In parallel, learners had disjointed user experiences across the platforms, sometimes affecting their performance during internships. National employer partners even observed performance discrepancies across identical roles, highlighting the downstream impact of delivery inconsistencies. Additionally, as disconnected systems made it difficult for the organization to capture, track and measure data, YUU’s leadership lacked information for effective decision-making and quality control.

To support its mission to drive lasting societal change by empowering more young people than ever before to access new economic opportunities, YUU set out to transform its Career Pathways program.

Solution

Consolidating multiple processes

A key task in YUU’s transformation journey was the selection of a new LMS that would become the central platform for content delivery across the country. After a rigorous request for proposal process, YUU selected Brightspace.

D2L is more than a vendor—they’re a strategic partner. Their guidance helped us build a scalable, flexible architecture that supports our mission.

Keith Degliaberti, Director of IT Architecture and Security, YUU

The top priority was choosing a flexible platform that gave YUU the ability to standardize and scale curriculum. In addition, Brightspace proved to be secure and easy to integrate with our Student Information System [SIS].

To streamline processes, YUU adopted an Education Data Architecture (EDA) framework. The EDA framework provides a centralized data model, which YUU is using to integrate data from Brightspace, its SIS Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Okta, Zoom and Bongo.

With Performance+, YUU developed two dashboards integrating 16 key data points to monitor course and student performance. The ability to access real-time, granular analytics empowers staff to make timely interventions and support continuous improvements as learner needs evolve.

Transforming the learning experience

By consolidating its LMS landscape with Brightspace, YUU has empowered its organization to redesign its curriculum to support the evolving needs of learners. The Learning Excellence team at YUU worked closely with D2L Learning Services to adopt a flipped classroom delivery approach, establish a competency-based education curriculum, design standard delivery guidance, restructure content into modular components and ensure maximum engagement for student success, with the aim of creating a high-quality, unified learning environment.

“Moving away from a synchronous, in-person, instructor-led curriculum marked a significant cultural shift for us,” comments Margaret Rizzo, senior director, Center of Excellence at YUU. “Embracing these changes would prove more complex at times than making the technological shift, but enlisting the partnership of D2L Learning Services helped us transform the curriculum and position ourselves to accomplish our most ambitious goals.”

Serving as program guides, the Learning Services team collaborated with YUU to establish a consistent branded design across all courses with custom HTML templates, ensuring inclusivity through imagery, scenarios and character names that resonate with its diverse learner demographic.

By bridging the diverse priorities of subject matter experts and aligning them to a unified program vision, the collaboration ensured that each course supported broader curricular goals while enhancing the learning experience. Interactive elements such as drag and drop, matching, ordering, and exploratory hotspots transformed course content into dynamic, active learning experiences. The result is a learner-centric, skills-focused curriculum that equips students with the confidence and competencies to make an impact from day one on the job.

Brightspace is a gamechanger. It’s transformed how I teach and how students learn. The flipped classroom model and engagement tools have made a huge difference.

Alana Lerner, Associate Director Program Facilitator, YUU

Redesigning instruction for learner success

Serving young adults ages 19-29, YUU’s adopts IDEO U’s See, Try, Share and Reflect learning framework as the foundation of its andragogical approach. This model encouraged learners to engage with content, apply new skills, collaborate with peers and reflect on their progress.

To support the shift to a flipped classroom approach, YUU introduced a facilitator training program for instructors teaching in Brightspace. Completed by 100% of instructors, the training provided foundational support in platform navigation, curriculum updates and the new pedagogical model while laying the groundwork for ongoing professional development in areas such as leadership, subject expertise and instructional design.

“Now we are developing an accountability and governance process for the academic arm of the organization,” remarks Elizabeth Pearson, director of talent solutions at YUU. “This has been made possible by building an instructor training experience in Brightspace and leveraging its functionalities to track and evaluate instructor progress.”

Assessment strategies were redesigned to emphasize low-stakes, formative assessments to support learner autonomy. For example, regular knowledge checks through the quizzes tool in Brightspace provide immediate feedback. Meanwhile, the discussions tool and portfolio tool provide opportunities for longer-form feedback and self-reflection.

“Prior to using Brightspace, there was very little innovation in how students engaged with the content and minimal opportunities to assess students’ comprehension in real time,” says Alana Lerner, associate director program facilitator at YUU. “Now, the content has come alive in new ways. I’ve had two semesters using Brightspace as our new LMS and I can confidently say that the tool has opened many doors for both my facilitation and students’ learning. The Brightspace LMS is a game changer.”

In addition, YUU incorporated video-based assessments. Through learner-recorded reflections, project showcases and collaborative assignments, students were able to learn from one another’s experiences and strengthen peer-to-peer connections. Together, the variety of assessments help keep the diverse learner population on track and empower instructors to provide meaningful feedback and timely support.

Result

Driving operational efficiencies to reach scale

Through consolidating its multiple LMS platforms, YUU has streamlined its operations and seen a significant boost in productivity. For example, through Brightspace’s course enrollment API, YUU saved an average of 41 administrative hours per 1,000 learner enrollments.

“Brightspace has allowed for a seamless integration of curriculum, facilitation delivery and data reporting, and generated useful information to make data-driven decisions quicker than usual expectancy,” reflects Eric Papa, director of central program delivery at YUU. “Brightspace has an intuitive lens for first-time user experience and generates collective buy-in with relative ease.”

Grading automations through the gradebook tool has also freed up valuable time for instructors and administrators. By eliminating delays from manual entry and tracking, grading time has been significantly reduced. In the Application Development program, grading has been reduced by an average of three days where students can now access their grades on average five days sooner.

With real-time performance dashboards, program managers and academic leaders can respond immediately to underperformance at the site, course or learner level. The organization estimates that integrated, real-time data access saves up to 16 hours of manual work compared to its previous evaluation cycles. With these newfound operational efficiencies, YUU is now able to scale effectively while keeping operational costs low.

Creating opportunities for lasting social change

To lay the groundwork for a full implementation, YUU began by piloting the redesigned curriculum and Brightspace platform at two learning sites selected for their change readiness. Throughout this transition, YUU collected learner feedback and measured it against key performance indicators set at the beginning of the journey.

The pilot delivered strong results that reflected meaningful gains in career readiness. The learning and development retention rate exceeded the target by three percentage points, while the conversion rate to full-time employment at host companies was seven percentage points above goal. Employed graduates reported an average starting wage of $26.17 per hour—outpacing the expected range of $19-$24 per hour.

Building on the pilot’s success, YUU implemented a staggered rollout that first onboarded 850 students into Brightspace across 13 courses, redesigned by D2L’s Learning Services team. With the refreshed courses supported by a learner-centered approach, 89% of learners agreed that they felt confident with the skills they had gained and 87.2% said that they found the content engaging. Moreover, 93% of students agreed that training topics were relevant to their careers.

Brightspace has allowed for seamless curriculum integration and data reporting. The transition was smooth, and the team is excited to continue enhancing the user experience.

Eric Papa, Director of Central Program and Delivery, YUU

Brightspace analytics allowed YUU to refine curriculum and delivery within a single cycle compared to the multicycle lag YUU experienced previously. One illustrative example is the Personal Branding Capstone assignment, where students prepare and submit resumes. The pilot group’s average grade increased from ‘meeting’ to ‘exceeding’ expectations—an indication of enhanced learning quality as YUU improved organizational agility in providing real-time support.

Post-pilot data also revealed a 93.6% assignment completion rate—an increase of 12.3 percentage points over the pilot cohort—demonstrating sustained learner follow-through. Overall student satisfaction rose across both the pilot and post-pilot cohorts compared to the pre-Brightspace control group.

Compared to YUU previous LMS platform, Schoology, over a period of six months, Brightspace has enabled YUU to raise assignment engagement by 54x, discussion engagement by 57x and content engagement by a staggering 710x.

With significant gains in student engagement and a 90% Brightspace adoption rate, YUU has successfully launched its fully revamped Career Pathways program to over 50 courses.

Creating opportunities for lasting social change

In 2022, YUU participated in the Pathways for Advancing Careers and Education study. The randomized control trial has found that six years after graduation, the average earnings of YUU participants were 30% higher than those in the control group. These gains translated into an average increase of more than $8,000 per year, persisting through the end of the seven-year study period and resulting in over $38,000 in cumulative additional earnings per participant. A conservative cost-benefit analysis concluded that for every $1.00 invested in YUU’s program, society receives a net benefit of $2.46—underscoring the program’s long-term economic impact and return on investment.

With its new, centralized approach to delivering the Career Pathways program, YUU has positioned itself to reshape the world of work by ending the Opportunity Divide.

“We’re driven by a powerful mission, and we cultivate a culture of both high support and high expectations to empower our students to succeed,” concludes Keith Degliaberti, director of IT architecture and security at YUU. “Our partnership with D2L has truly revolutionized our delivery model and streamlined our workflow, enabling students to maximize their YUU training experience. D2L is more than just a vendor; they are committed partners whose strategic guidance helped us build a scalable, flexible architecture that supports our mission to close the Opportunity Divide.”

YUU’s transformation illustrates a crucial principle: When you eliminate technological friction and provide real-time visibility into learning, both operational efficiency and student outcomes improve simultaneously.

YUU’s partnership with D2L has catalyzed a transformative journey—one that has not only improved operational efficiency and learner outcomes but also positioned the organization to scale its impact tenfold. With a unified LMS, redesigned curriculum, and a culture of continuous improvement, YUU is well on its way to empowering 40,000 young adults annually.