D2L's Brightspace Offers Seven New Ways to Organize and Manage Professional Development

WATERLOO, ON--(Marketwired - April 09, 2018) - D2L today announces a Professional Development (PD) offering for Higher Education. The Brightspace learning platform can now be used to provide seven ways to organize and manage professional learning.

D2L's integrated PD offering will help customers address several industry challenges: new regulations now require instructors and staff to continue learning; faculty and staff need to acquire new skills to maintain their credentials; there is a shift away from seat-time to competency-based learning; and students are demanding to learn on smartphones and tablets so new skills are required to achieve learning.

"Our research into the learning management system segment reveals a great deal of attention placed on creating, managing and delivering content to students," said James Wiley, Principal Analyst at Eduventures, the research division of NRCCUA. "While these are vital for promoting student success, institutions must also empower faculty to improve teaching practices and increase their subject-matter expertise ¾ which is enabled through other technologies or activities such as communities of practice. Extending Brightspace into faculty professional development is an innovative step toward helping institutions combine two essential activities in a single solution."

The capabilities in Brightspace eliminate the need to maintain a separate LMS for faculty development and enable institutions deliver an efficient, integrated approach to faculty development that delivers greater outcomes. In addition, institutions can deliver PD course offerings and packages from other vendors within Brightspace.

Here are the Seven Ways to Support your Faculty Professional Development:

• New Way to Organize and Track Faculty and Staff Development: With the new Manager Dashboard, launching this spring, leaders can easily manage the enrollment and completion of professional development courses for staff and faculty. Learners and groups can be tagged with flexible attributes such as date hired, department, reporting structure, campus or location. Using those attributes, rules-based assignments can make it easy to automatically assign participants into the right onboarding and ongoing learning. Plus, managers get to see metrics on course completion.

• Use the Tools You Love: Learning resources can be seamlessly added from numerous sources. Microsoft OneDrive®, Google Drive™, YouTube, Vimeo and TED talks can easily be added with a simple click to Content or the Activity Feed.

• Go Mobile and Build Content Natively: Use our HTML5 design templates to make all your content mobile friendly, including video. Plus, subject-matter experts and designers can create, drag-and-drop, import and share resources with built-in authoring tools, or import courses and content from other systems.

• New Ways of Supporting Assessment: PD participants can practise, demonstrate and get feedback on what they've learned using video-based recordings; e.g., interview skills. The system supports making it easy to provide feedback, evaluation rubrics tied to mastery levels, interactive exercises, game-based learning, or traditional assignments and quizzes.

• Inspire and Reward: Milestone activities and course completion can easily be recognized and rewarded automatically with badges that show up in a learner's profile card. Participants can track and share their success with personalized certificates.

• Showcase and Share: Participants can discover and learn from their peers by sharing successes and debating new ideas. Participants can connect with course facilitators and each other through online discussions, virtual video-based breakout sessions and activity feeds ¾ a great way to keep employees engaged in the latest developments.

• Recognize Informal Learning: Capture and reflect on real-world examples of work. Share and enter dialogue with peers and connect formal learning goals to authentic examples.

Complementing these enhanced capabilities in Brightspace, a new service package focused on delivering customized implementation and consulting services will ensure a robust and successful professional development experience for your faculty.

"We know Brightspace is already being used for professional learning with many D2L clients. After listening to them, we knew we could help find a better way to build a great professional learning experience for leaders," said John Baker, President and CEO of D2L. "Plus, instructors and staff can use the same learning system to develop their professional skills that their learners are using - which saves organizations money, resources, budget and time."

D2L's Professional Development Offering for Higher Education supports institutions in addressing their professional development needs, helping to reduce turnover, increase engagement and improve productivity - all in one platform. For more information please visit www.D2L.com.

ABOUT BRIGHTSPACE
Brightspace is a cloud-based learning platform that makes online and blended learning easy, flexible and smart. Brightspace is a quantum leap beyond traditional Learning Management Systems (LMS) - it is easy to drag-and-drop content to create engaging courses, supports all mobile devices, has industry-leading up-time and is accessible for all learners. Plus, Brightspace enables the future of learning with a gaming engine, adaptive learning, video management, intelligent agents, templated interactives for course design, full support for outcomes or competency-based learning, and actionable learning analytics.

D2L's Brightspace was recently named the #1 LMS in Higher Ed by Ovum Research and #1 in Adaptive Learning by eLearning Magazine. In addition, Aragon Research included D2L in its highly coveted Hot Vendors In Learning list.

ABOUT D2L
D2L believes learning is the foundation upon which all progress and achievement rests. Working closely with clients, D2L has transformed the way millions of people learn online and in the classroom. Learn more about D2L for schools, higher education and businesses at www.D2L.com.

Twitter: @D2L © 2018 D2L Corporation

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