Customer Stories
Purdue University Creates a Foundation for e-Learning Success
Challenge Adapting To A New Way Of Learning Purdue University is a public research university located in West Lafayette, Indiana and is consistently ranked as one of the best public...
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Nurturing healthier, happier classrooms with SEL
From the very beginning, teachers saw that our approach to SEL made a big difference to their students, but teachers already have so much on their plates. We wanted to...
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Helping more students access online learning
Challenge Growing Demand For Online Learning Originally established in 1977 to provide educational travel experiences, Blyth Academy is now one of the leading private schools in Canada and teaches over...
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Raising Mental Health Awareness in Schools
The Robb Nash Project launches an interactive course to help young people explore and improve their mental wellbeing.
More than 1,000 organizations in over 40 countries around the world rely on D2L to help them transform learning.
How Brightspace is helping Ontario Teachers- Brightspace impact on Ontario teachers and students
All K-12 public school teachers in Ontario have access to Brightspace as part of a provincial virtual Learning Environment. A few of those teachers shared how they’re using the LMS and what they love about it. D2L and the Ministry of Education have an 11-year partnership, with the goal of supporting technology-enabled learning in Ontario. Every school board in Ontario has a Technology Enabled Learning and Teaching (TELT) contact, who support teachers using Brightspace. If you’re an Ontario teacher, contact your school board to learn more about your TELT contact and how they can help. You can also check out the Brightspace Community. For useful teaching and learning resources, you can also subscribe to our blog, by clicking “subscribe” and entering your email address.
The journey to competency-based education
Sinclair Community College is helping students to succeed at phenomenal rates. Through a combination of innovative education programs and partnering with an education technology vendor, Sinclair continues to deliver on its mission of student success.
Making high education affordable to all with new pilot program
The average cost of a private, non-profit four-year university degree is $31,231 across the U.S., while the cost for a public four-year school hovers around $10,000 per year, according to the College Board. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York puts student debt at more than $1.3 trillion, meaning it has reached a crisis level. University can be a prohibitively expensive proposition for some people. Many lower-income students often find themselves working part- or full-time in order to raise sufficient funds, or they face other barriers to entry, such as lengthy commute times because they have to live at home. This demands flexibility of their schedules, which offline courses are often unable to offer. In all, this is creating a system that is inaccessible to many who have a desire to learn, says Dr. Jodi Henderson-Ross, Assistant Professor of instruction at the University of Akron. While online learning has often been hailed as a solution to some of these challenges, there remains a stigma associated with the space. “Rightly or wrongly, there’s an assumption that online learning isn’t as academically rigorous,” she says. Against this backdrop, the University of Akron wanted to change that.
RIT's student base created a unique need for highly accessible software
Making content accessible is always important to teachers, but for Sandra Connelly, an assistant professor of Life Sciences at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), accessibility can take on different meanings. For one student, it meant literally being able to access the material. With videos being hosted on YouTube, he was unable to view them being based in China. This presented an interesting problem: while she'd been steadily moving her class material online, how would students, who have restrictions on materials, regardless of their location, be able to access everything?
Smith School of Business re-engaged faculty & cut back on administrative burden
When it came to their learning management system, the IT staff at Queen’s University’s Smith School of Business used to spend much of their energy just keeping the lights on. The Business School used an LMS built in-house, and it simply sucked up too much time, says Troy St. John, associate director of IT for learning technology and application development. When the school switched to Brightspace, it was like a weight had been lifted. “The custom solution we had in place required a ton of resources dedicated to keeping it up and running,” he says. “We didn’t get a lot of time to add new or innovative things professors asked for. So they kind of stopped asking.” Brightspace’s Valence API gave the IT team a new digital sandbox, allowing them to build cool and useful tools against the existing technology. “Our program offers a really high-touch level of service to students,” he says. “And now, these new tools let us – and our faculty – deepen that commitment.”
Success with district-wide digital learning initiative
In a recent survey by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 93% of teachers responded that they now use some type of digital technology to teach. Teachers are increasingly experimenting with digital technologies as a way to enable learning strategies, such as adaptive learning, and are engaging with students online to assign web-based projects, provide feedback, and offer interventions. Gwinnett County Public Schools is a school district operating in Gwinnett County, Georgia. The largest school district in Georgia, with 134 schools serving more than 176,000 students, Gwinnett County Public Schools embarked several years ago on an ambitious digital learning initiative to transform instruction and learning inside and outside of its classrooms through blended learning.