D2L Selects Brightspace Excellence Award Winners

• By Leila Meyer
• 07/19/16

D2L has chosen 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.