Kitchener, Canada, May 22, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, D2L launches its Emerald Release — the newest version of its Brightspace LMS — which provides an intuitive social and mobile-friendly teaching and learning experience for people around the world.
Social features that engage and delight users include the Activity Feed, which lets you embed social content like TedEx or YouTube videos and images inline. Faculty and teachers can also upload materials from OneDrive and Google Drive and take advantage of smart formatting options to draw attention to important information, send notifications to students and pin posts to keep essential items front and center.
The Emerald Release also features additional socially driven capabilities:
- A Professional Learning offering for K-12 and a Professional Development offering for Higher Education — meaning Brightspace can now be used for professional learning by teachers, instructors and staff in the same social environment as their students.
- Brightspace for Parents allows parents to more fully participate in their child’s learning – with secure way to view an activity feed, assignment insights, communication, and grades on any device. The emerald release better-connects parents to the classroom through a weekly email summary updating them on their child’s key activities, feedback, and grades.
- A new content experience that provides users an intuitive way to create lessons aligned to standards and expectations for K12 and streamlined course creation for bolder, more creative higher education content.
- Advanced analytics tools allow educators access to student data quickly and more efficiently through daily differentials – providing incremental data daily instead of having to download the entire set of data each time. This makes insights readily available to teachers — helping them make more informed decisions that improve learning.
Many of these features were inspired by D2L users and can easily be accessed from any laptop or mobile device, thanks to Daylight, Brightspace’s responsive design. D2L is passionate about working closely with clients and 27% of the features in the Emerald Release inspired by the open-user community, and includes one of the community’s top-voted ideas.
WHAT HIGHER ED USERS ARE SAYING
“Dream Center is excited by the functionality in the Manager Dashboard for Brightspace. By extending the value of the Brightspace LMS to include professional development, we anticipate better staff engagement and increased retention”, said Masai Turner, Vice President, Learning and Development, Dream Center Education Holdings, LLC.
“The ability to share knowledge and practice among peers is a core tenant of learning. Exposing students to an environment where they can freely engage in thoughtful exchanges with one another facilitates a crucial part of the learning experience. Using a social learning platform like Brightspace provides students with the connected experience they thrive in – and allows educators to design meaningful activities to take advantage of this engagement, across any device,” said Dave Starnes, Purdue Kaplan, Chief Academic Officer.
“As the population of the college and university students continue to evolve and become more diverse, we need to ensure we’re supporting the ‘new traditional’ learner. With Brightspace, we are confident our students can have an equal access to their learning - whenever and wherever they are. Everyone can access their courses with all their rich media, as well as assignments, instructors, and classmates from any device. This type of flexibility in when and how learning is accessed fosters a stronger social learning culture that helps students share ideas and experiences in a personally engaging and thoughtful way,” said Dave Starnes, Purdue Kaplan, Chief Academic Officer.
“The daily data differentials allow me to be more nimble in providing faculty support for the incubation of new ideas that require data. Having the ability to access and open the data means I no longer need a campus wide effort to support a small faculty lead effort to impact student success and course design,” said Mark Felix, Director, Instructional Support, Office of Instruction and Assessment, Manuel Pacheco Integrated Learning Center.
WHAT K12 USERS ARE SAYING
“Activity Feed helps us to promote content to students in a more engaging way. Having inline video and displayed images makes a huge impact on our students. And it’s so easy to upload content from other sources. It’s a familiar, fun and easy way to keep students connected with their courses. We started off by introducing activity feed in a few courses, and are now planning to roll it out to all of our courses,” said Matt Waymack, Director of eCLASS Development at Gwinnett County.
“We’ve been using the new content experience in Brightspace. Teachers can build up their course as they go, with a variety of activities and content to choose from, including their own HTML documents, Google Drive/OneDrive documents, links and videos from the web, external learning activities, video assignments and more – giving them lots of options to set up their content.” Matt Waymack, Director of eCLASS Development at Gwinnett County.
“The introduction of Brightspace for Parents means that D2L have given us the ‘complete package’ for online learning. Any outstanding educator knows that engaging parents, as well as students, is key to creating a whole community that values the impact of what happens in school. What has impressed me most of all is the speed of development of the platform and the flexibility of the development team in responding to feedback from front-line teaching staff. D2L are in the process of, yet again, knocking one out of the park,” said Mark Deans, Deputy Headteacher, The West Bridgford School.
“We’re really excited about launching Brightspace for Parents at our school. We’ve been looking for a way to keep parents connected with what’s happening in their child’s classroom, but without adding extra work for the teachers - Brightspace for Parents does this perfectly,” said James Medway, Development Officer/Teacher, Six Nations Polytechnic STEAM Academy. “Our parents will no longer have to wait for parent teacher interviews to find out how their child is doing. They will be able to log in whenever they like to get a firsthand look at what assignments are coming, recent grades, announcements from the teacher and even see recent examples of work their child has completed. We’re excited to see the impact that this will have on student outcomes as their parents have more information to support their children in reaching their potential.”
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 System (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 organizations globally, 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.
D2L PRESS CONTACT
Virginia Jamieson
Vice President of PR and AR, D2L Ltd.
650-279-8619
Virginia.Jamieson@D2L.com
Twitter: @D2L
© 2018 D2L Corporation.
The D2L family of companies includes D2L Corporation, D2L Ltd, D2L Australia Pty Ltd, D2L Europe Ltd, D2L Asia Pte Ltd, and D2L Brasil Soluções de Tecnologia para Educação Ltda.
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