D2L Presents Brightspace Excellence Awards
D2L has selected the winners of the 2016 Brightspace Excellence Awards,
including three Awards for Excellence, one Excellence in Integrations
and Extensibility Award and one Excellence Award for Accessibility.
Winners used D2L's Brightspace online learning platform in a way that
"demonstrated progress and remarkable innovation in student and teacher
engagement, student retention, and teaching and learning efficiencies
that resulted in cost savings," according to a news release.
The University of Akron in Ohio won an Award for Excellence for its GenEd Core Pilot Program.
The program, which was launched in fall 2015, used Brightspace to help
increase access to higher education by delivering blended learning
courses with experiential learning components at a reduced cost to
students. Students used the platform to craft their own personalized
learning experiences while Brightspace's formative assessments
monitored student progress.
The University of Colorado Boulder won an Award for Excellence for its New Student Welcome Experience. The
university used Brightspace to created a customized online orientation
program using checklists, digital content, quizzes and widgets. The
system also offered coupons and contests as rewards for completing
orientation modules and passing quizzes.
Gwinnett County Public Schools in Georgia won an Award for Excellence for its blended learning
program. The school district began using Brightspace for its blended
learning program in the 2014-15 school year. The district partnered
with D2L "to develop and implement strategies to increase teacher
capacity and adoption of effective practices, providing peer coaching,
models of instruction, and effective tools to enhance instructional
practices," according to a news release.
Smith School of Business at Queen's University in Canada won the Excellence in Integrations and Extensibility Award
for its suite of tools and applications that work with the Brightspace
platform. The school's Application Development Team use the D2L Valence
API (application programming interface) to create a build photo upload
tool, an auto assignment cover page creator and a customized name card
printer.
Rochester Institute of Technology in New York won the Excellence Award for Accessibility for its online
biology course. The university used Brightspace to create a fully
online general education biology course that includes approximately 200
short videos with captioning, sign language interpretation and other
contextual learning options. "Since moving the course to fully online,
students are spending on average 60 percent more time engaged in the
materials, and as a result the average class grades have shown a
consistent increase of more than 10 percent," stated a news release
from D2L.
Further information about the D2L Brightspace Awards can be found on D2L's site.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].