What’s New at D2L
Our users and customers are at the center of all we do at D2L. We’re always listening to your needs, and every month we deliver new and updated features, products, solutions and services to help meet them. We compile recent highlights here to make it easy to stay up to date on what we’ve been up to.
Our focus is on creating effective and easy-to-use educational technologies
More than ever before, there’s a need for educational technologies that save time, reach every learner and set people up for success. The events of the past few years have surfaced challenges in equity and access to quality learning that many didn’t know existed. Our focus has been on creating educational technologies that empower users of every level, simplify the experience for users of all abilities, and bring solutions together in one place. We’re making it easier to offer learning in online and blended environments so that everyone can succeed.
Empower
Empowering learners, educators and administrators with indispensable tools and invaluable resources to enhance outcomes and reclaim precious time.
Author Your Own High Impact Courses
Receive Instant Support Right in Brightspace
Select the Achievement Scale That Fits Best
Adjust Language Preferences in Fewer Clicks
Share Awards to LinkedIn
Access More and More Data
Have Custom Solutions Built for You
Author Your Own High Impact Courses
Educators of all skill levels have been crafting beautiful and instructionally sound content using familiar Brightspace workflows in Creator+ since its release last year. Now, educators have even more Creator+ tools at their fingertips.
Features
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Carousel Slides
Present content in an interactive and engaging way with visual impact using carousel slides.
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Practice Hotspots
Leverage fully accessible hotspot images.
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Layouts
Use a template to display your course content (text, photos, or videos) in columns, and rest assured that it’s accessible.
Receive Instant Support Right in Brightspace
Users can now embed Contextual AI right within the learning environment with Brightspace Virtual Assistant (BVA). It acts as a first point of contact for support where users receive help—immediately, anytime and on any device—that’s tailored toward their role in the learning environment. Plus, BVA can answer frequently asked questions that are specific to your organization, such as those about policies, financial aid and enrollment services.
Select the Achievement Scale That Fits Best
Users can now select achievement scales at the course level, helping to fit the needs of varying programs and courses within an org unit. This improves the effectiveness of assessment with more tailored evaluation of learning outcomes.
Adjust Language Preferences in Fewer Clicks
User can toggle their preferred language in the user menu dropdown available throughout Brightspace, making it easy to switch languages without navigating to the settings page.
Share Awards to LinkedIn
Users can now easily share their badges and certificates earned in Brightspace directly to their LinkedIn profile, which appear in the Licenses & Certifications section. Awards functionality has also been updated to comply with the latest Open Badges 2.0 standard from 1EdTech.
Access More and More Data
Nearly 130 datasets are available in the Data Hub, giving you access to tons of information about their Brightspace usage. Recent updates include improvements to existing data sets as well as the addition of new data sets.
Have Custom Solutions Built for You
Your organization’s unique needs are supported by a team of developers and Brightspace experts who can create custom tools, widgets and LTI solutions through the new Custom Development Services offering.
Simplify
Making workflows more intuitive, efficient, effective and consistent.
Leverage New Functionality in Content Authoring
Control Self-Enrollments in Discover
Allow Instructors to Merge Their Own Courses
Build Better Assessments More Easily
Benefit From Improved Backend Functionality
Experience Even More Effective Onboarding
Leverage New Functionality in Content Authoring
Recent updates to content authoring tools provide greater functionality and better experiences.
Features
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Content Settings
Set content as optional or required to keep learners informed on what’s expected and what’s there for extra support or enrichment.
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Content Progress
Allow learners to manually track their progression through the content by marking an object as complete when they’re ready to, making it easier for them to keep track of where they left off.
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Browser-Based Capture
No need to download the desktop app of Capture in Creator+ any longer—the new browser-based option provides full presentation and video capturing capabilities.
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Media Library
Use the enhancements to the interface of Media Library to perform quick actions like filtering options and bulk actions.
Control Self-Enrollments in Discover
To help ensure the right learners are enrolling in the right courses, you can now set self-enrollments through the Discover tool to require approval by an instructor or administrator.
Allow Instructors to Merge Their Own Courses
Instructors can now easily merge like courses into a single course offering while keeping the Classlist based on the section from the SIS. This means one area to manage content and grade assignments, all while the Gradebook and Classlist can still be filtered based on section. The benefits of allowing instructors to perform course merges is twofold: Instructors are empowered and administrators save time to focus on other priorities.
Build Better Assessments More Easily
Updating tools and improving consistency across the platform—and without disruption—continues to be a priority.
Features
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Discussions
The new Discussion creation experience is consistent with the Assignments and Quizzes experience, bringing familiarity to the workflow and making it easy to jump from creating one assessment to the next. Plus, we’ve added a new release condition for Discussions that requires a user to reply to a thread before the condition is met.
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Quizzes
We released the new Quiz experience last year and we’ve continued to improve it even further since. Recently, we’ve added additional paging options, auto-submit functionality for high stakes exams with strict time limits, support for synchronous quizzing windows, availability dates of quizzes in the calendar and other workflow improvements.
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Rubrics
Various updates to the Rubrics tool provide workflow and interface enhancements: including the organization’s logo on a printed rubric, keeping track of changes to assessed rubrics with enhanced visual cues, backend permissions updates and rearrangement of interface components.
Benefit From Improved Backend Functionality
Backend functionality doesn’t take the backburner at D2L; making administrative workflows powerful and accurate is top of mind.
Features
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Org Unit Editor
Improvements to the workflow and filtering options in the Org Unit Editor make it simpler to view, edit, create and delete Org Units, which define the structure of an organization.
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Course Publisher
Course Publisher enables course providers to easily distribute courses from their Brightspace instance to a partner’s external LMS. Recent updates provide enhanced enrollment functionality including enrollment limits, sections and role controls.
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Brightspace Export Packages
Brightspace Export Packages now support more features, including Groups and Gradebook settings.
Experience Even More Effective Onboarding
Set up rules for self-enrollment in Discover based on role and other custom user attributes to ensure users can only enroll in courses that align to their needs.
Unite
Coming together to transform the way the world learns and take the friction out of your learning strategy.
Make Registration Seamless
Come Together in an Improved Community Experience
Combine Data to Identify At-Risk Learners
Integrate Your Technology Ecosystem
Supercharge Your Workforce
Stay In the Know With the Product Roadmap
Make Registration Seamless
As an integration partner for more than nine years, Course Merchant served as a key component of the solutions we deliver. Through the recent acquisition, the front-end course catalog, coupled with a robust and efficient payment and enrollment system, will be offered as a D2L product. This tool makes it easier for learners to register for online courses through a seamless, modern e-commerce experience.
Come Together in an Improved Community Experience
A new and improved experience that makes it easier to access documentation, ask questions, see what’s on the product roadmap and review recent releases is now in full swing through the new D2L Brightspace Community.
Combine Data to Identify At-Risk Learners
Bring data to where users need it by visualizing Brightspace Analytics right within Ellucian Experience. This helps advisors quickly identify at-risk learners by aggregating Brightspace data with external data to holistically determine appropriate intervention.
Integrate Your Technology Ecosystem
Increase efficiency by integrating your systems into one cohesive ecosystem.
Features
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D2L Link
Early access to D2L Link brings the ability to connect Brightspace with the systems of record our clients use every day. The integrations made possible through D2L Link help to minimize manual tasks and ensure data is synchronized between systems.
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IntegrationHub
IntegrationHub replaces App Finder as a new catalog site that lists partner solutions that are available for integration with Brightspace. Built on LTI 1.3., IntegrationHub makes it easy for Brightspace users to distill D2L’s extensive list of integrated technologies and solutions, such as accessibility tools, student information systems, secure proctoring assessment platforms and many more.
Supercharge Your Workforce
D2L Wave—a separate offering from Brightspace—continues to expand its education partner network and add functionality to the platform.
Some of the new functionality includes:
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Trending Category
Shows employees what courses are trending among their colleagues.
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External Training Support
Provides an option for employees to submit other external training for approval through D2L Wave.
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Chatbot
Supports users who need help when using D2L Wave.
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Career Explorer
Identifies roles at the employer that the user might be interested in developing toward, maps the skills commonly associated with that role and then recommends courses or programs that might be of interest.
Stay In the Know With the Product Roadmap
The launch of the public Product Roadmap brings visibility into what’s coming soon at D2L and aims to assist your longer-range planning.
The Updates Never Stop
Stay up to date with new releases through our D2L Brightspace Community. Have questions or want to learn more?