Member Article

D2L launches update to boost students’ soft skills

Global learning technology provider, D2L, has released a new version of its award-winning learning management system (LMS), Brightspace. Now, instructors will have new ways to personalise the learning experience and deploy tools for learners to collaborate, demonstrate knowledge, and showcase their employability and soft skills.

“Soft skills, such as presentation style, body language, and verbal communication are important to university and career readiness – however, they are difficult to assess with traditional learning tools,” said Renny Monaghan, CMO of D2L. “Brightspace Autumn16 offers new tools for learners to demonstrate their knowledge, relationships, and workplace readiness. Brightspace is the only major LMS on the market that offers broad video capabilities, including a dedicated video assessment tool, that are seamlessly integrated into the learning experience.”

Brightspace Autumn16 Makes Learning More Personal:

With improved Intelligent Agents, instructors can automate the delivery of personalised, instant feedback to students at critical points in their learning. “Intelligent agents are a godsend. With over 1500 students in my subject, they have made such a difference to my ability to engage and communicate with each and every one of them. With so many students, it would be impossible to achieve the same level of interaction manually. Not only are students highly satisfied in my course (always above 90 percent) but they have helped increase our retention rate too,” said Jaclyn Broadbent, Senior Lecturer, Deakin University.

New features have been added to Virtual Classroom, which connects and engages more learners, regardless of physical location. Earlier in 2016, D2L announced broad video capabilities in Brightspace, including Brightspace Capture (for Lecture Capture), video response in Discussions, and the recently announced Virtual Classroom. With this release, learners benefit from new capabilities within Virtual Classroom such as polling, file sharing, status icons, and advanced moderator settings.

New Video Assignment is seamlessly integrated into Brightspace to help learners demonstrate both their knowledge and their soft skills. Powered by YouSeeU, one of the leading virtual classroom tools, Video Assignment makes it easy to add integrated video-based assessments to any course in Brightspace. With it, teachers can create and receive video-based evaluations that are embedded into any course alongside other learning materials.

D2L continues to lead the industry with open standards and learning analytics with expanded support for additional open standards, more open APIs, and improvements to our analytics Data Hub.

The Brightspace Daylight Experience is a new user experience built with a responsive web design so Brightspace can be used on any device. Autumn16 provides a curated library of beautiful images to be used by instructors as well as numerous other visual design enhancements. Plus, it’s faster for instructors to create a quiz and allow learners to choose when, where, and on what device they want to take it.

“Today’s learners live in a world that is personalised: geared to their interests, delivered on their time, in formats they choose. Education must embrace personalisation to help more learners engage, enjoy rich feedback, and reach their full potential in life,” said John Baker, CEO of D2L. “Brightspace Autumn16 release was created to do exactly that and we look forward to helping our clients engage millions of learners with a better learning experience.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Desire2Learn (D2L) .