Keeping employees and volunteers updated on regulations and best practices is vital to your nonprofit organization’s mission. When your staff is well trained, they can better articulate your mission, engage with donors and develop agendas that move your organization forward for more significant impact.
Educational programs can effectively deliver compliance training and equip staff and volunteers with the tools to drive your mission. However, manually creating custom programs tailored to each staff member’s needs can be expensive and time-consuming. Without detailed data about learners’ engagement and progress, it’s hard to know whether all that time and effort improve outcomes.
D2L’s software for training organizations helps you meet the challenges of creating and presenting personalized learning programs that close staff skills gaps and support your nonprofit’s goals.
An Engaging Learning Hub for All Audiences
D2L Brightspace provides the foundation for an engaging learning experience. Unlike in-person training, which can only offer generic information at a set pace, Brightspace transforms education into a flexible, personalized experience.
As employees, volunteers and donors progress through courses, specialized release conditions present information that supports their learning style and speed. Self-assessments determine whether learners need remedial guidance or are ready to move on to the next module. Through this automated process, learners of all skill levels get the opportunity to understand the material and complete their training.
Supporting Learner Participation From Beginning to End
Brightspace includes a customized homepage and activity feed to keep learners engaged along these personalized paths, which can be configured to display important information like:
- course progress
- upcoming deadlines
- recent group discussions
- announcements and messages from instructors
- links to course materials and external resources
For Stuart Pedley-Smith, head of learning at Kaplan Financial, the Brightspace Awards Leaderboard was the most powerful tool for driving engagement. To help learners succeed in their final accountancy assessments, Pedley-Smith and his team worked with D2L to develop a reward system that encouraged progress and displayed achievements within the Brightspace environment.
“We worked with D2L Learning Services to introduce a badging system into the first level of our accountancy qualifications,” he explains. “Each candidate is awarded points for completing certain activities. By making the leaderboard available for all learners on a given course, we can galvanize [them] to engage in a spot of healthy competition to spur their learning.”
Progress Tracking and Reporting With Detailed Analytics
Beyond the leaderboard, D2L Performance+ integrates with Brightspace to provide detailed tracking data. You can easily monitor your staff’s progress through compliance programs to ensure everyone completes the required training.
Performance+ data is comprehensive enough to meet even the strictest standards, as Connie Ryan, founder of the Professional Development Institute (PDI), discovered. To get its courses approved by the University of California San Diego Extension, PDI needed to provide detailed information showing the benefits students got from their programs.
“When I first talked to D2L about our reporting requirements, I thought what I was describing was a dream,” says Ryan. “When we saw the final version of the custom reports they built for us, we were literally dancing around the office because we realized what a complete game changer it was for our business.”
Real-time data updates allow you to see how personalized learning benefits your organization like PDI did. As more learners advance through training, clear connections emerge between course completion and organizational outcomes. You can use this data to improve and update the courses that drive impact—and stop wasting resources on efforts that don’t.
Simple, Time-Saving Course Creation and Licensing
Creating and updating courses that enable staff and volunteers to advance your organization’s mission are more straightforward when you have tools that streamline the process. D2L Creator+ expands the capabilities of Brightspace to enable faster course development. With Creator+ you can:
- create a consistent visual experience with templates and styling options
- insert interactive elements like quizzes and practice activities
- capture and add multimedia recordings
- use HTML editing to make granular changes
Once courses are created, Course Publisher, Course Merchant and Discover help you scale distribution:
- With Course Publisher you can share content with one learning management system (LMS) or many, easily publish courses or update content in real time, and turn off access when licenses expire. This helps you make your content available for broader audiences while safeguarding your intellectual property.
- Course Merchant allows you to make courses accessible through a branded storefront. Sophisticated e-commerce capabilities, flexible payment options and a seamless shopper-to-learner experience help you expand awareness about the work your organization does.
- The Discover tool helps people take charge of their own learning journeys—searching for and self-enrolling in the courses that are the most relevant and interesting to them.
These tools enable you to offer education as an employee benefit, volunteer perk or donor gratuity. Providing these professional development opportunities can bolster your organization’s reputation, encourage stakeholders to engage with your mission, and increase your reach within and beyond the communities you serve.
Expert Support for an Optimized Learning Experience
But how can you make the most of these tools without exhausting your organization’s limited time and resources?
D2L offers professional support to guide you in Brightspace setup, configuration and implementation:
- Learning services connect your organization with specialists who can help you design an engaging, effective, personalized learning experience for the variety of audiences you need to serve.
- A technical account manager works with you continuously to optimize Brightspace for your organization’s unique requirements.
- A learning administration manager (LAM) handles Brightspace configuration and updates so you and your staff can focus on advancing your nonprofit’s mission. Your LAM also helps you understand and apply data to make strategic decisions that improve your learning program.
Comprehensive support was important for Teaching Training Together (TTT), an organization on a mission to provide training to underserved teachers and leaders to help them become more effective in their classrooms and schools. TTT has delivered in-person courses for more than a decade to educators in a range of countries, including Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Haiti, Liberia, Nigeria, Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya. With an aim to scale its operations and impact, TTT set its sights on an online horizon and began the search for an LMS.
“Choosing the right LMS solution for us was a big commitment. There were very few organizations like us that we could reference,” explains Brandon Hutchens, vice president of TTT. “We evaluated over 15 different LMS solutions and eventually narrowed the list down to four contenders. After three months of testing, we felt that D2L provided the best product to help us achieve our goals.”
With no prior experience implementing an LMS, the support each vendor could provide was equally critical.
“D2L guided us throughout our LMS journey, providing ongoing support from initial planning to course development and helping us to understand how we could use Brightspace to amplify and enhance the excellent work we had done during our in-person seminars,” says Hutchens.
Teaching Training Together
Upskilling Underserved Educators and Leaders in Developing Nations
Teaching Training Together is on a mission to improve classroom instruction, school leadership and the overall student learning environment by offering teachers and school leaders access to affordable, impactful online professional development courses.
Advance Your Mission With D2L’s Personalized Learning Tools
With its simple course creation tools and flexible capabilities, Brightspace equips your organization to guide employees and volunteers through personalized learning paths that strengthen their skills and position them to serve your long-term purpose.
A more knowledgeable staff can engage stakeholders with a strong message that conveys your organization’s value and shows your work’s impact. When your “why” is clear, people are more likely to engage with and support what you do.
Detailed learner data and in-depth analytics enable you to verify and report on employees’ compliance progress. Donors can see you’re on track with regulations, which shows your organization’s credibility and makes securing funding easier. And with more funding on hand, you have the resources you need to move forward with effective initiatives that drive your mission.
Need help equipping your organization to make a bigger impact? Schedule a demo to see how D2L can transform your learning program.
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