D2L Releases Brightspace Spring17, Empowering Instructors to Reach Every Learner

WATERLOO, ON--(Marketwired - March 14, 2017) - D2L, a global learning technology leader, announces the Spring17 release of Brightspace, its award-winning learning management system (LMS). With the Brightspace Spring17 enhancements, it's easier for instructors to reach every learner with an engaging and modern experience.

"Mobile and social platforms have transformed the world and we need to make sure that learning experiences are even better," said John Baker, CEO of D2L. "Too many learners are stuck with twentieth century learning. With Spring17, we're making it easier for instructors to reach every learner with engaging and active learning that fosters growth, imagination, creativity and the skills needed by the modern learner."

More than ever, people are demanding an experience that's built around them, saves time, and makes things easier. For instructors to reach every learner in this new reality, it demands technology that makes it easier to personalize learning and build engaging experiences with context. D2L is making it easier to provide meaningful feedback and experiences for learners of all types.

With Spring17, D2L delivers:

INSTRUCTOR ADOPTION SERVICE TO ENHANCE TEACHING AND LEARNING

D2L's goal is to provide products and services that customers love, and are easy, flexible, and smart. Helping instructors reach every learner requires clients to go beyond a normal technology adoption if they want all learners to succeed. This new Instructor Adoption Service starts with a planning session, survey, and collaborative development to build a training plan designed to increase adoption and deeper engagement.

DAYLIGHT IS GENERALLY AVAILABLE

The highly-anticipated new Brightspace Daylight user experience and visual design, is now Generally Available. With this release, D2L sets a new benchmark for visual and learning design. The Daylight experience was designed for the modern, mobile user. It makes it easy and consistent to use Brightspace on any device: mobile smartphones, tablets, and computers. Plus, the Daylight user experience brings new workflows and usability improvements. In Spring17, these include: quizzing, activity feed, and other common tasks.

"We're planning on adopting Daylight for the summer term. We've had a positive relationship with the Daylight project staff and are looking forward to the benefits we'll receive," said Andy Freed, Portland Community College. "We feel confident and excited about moving to Daylight."

DAYLIGHT MAKES QUIZZING EASIER AND FASTER

Design improvements have made building questions in Brightspace far faster and easier. The most common questions are lightning-fast to create, without sacrificing advanced options like contextual feedback based upon learner response, hints, and weighting. Instructors can now see how learners experience a question instantly as they construct the question.

DAYLIGHT ACTIVITY FEED MAKES IT EASIER TO COMMUNICATE AND IT'S SOCIAL

The new Activity Feed in Brightspace makes it easy for instructors to share contextual activities and information with their learners in a way that encourages active learning. For the learners, the Activity Feed gives them one spot to read, communicate and engage in learning activities. Activity Feed will be in Limited Availability for select customers at the end of April.

BRIGHTSPACE PULSE KEEPS LEARNERS ON TRACK

Learners' lives are busy, and the Pulse app helps them visualize their workload, stay on top of deadlines, keep up with discussions, and read all their course notifications, including new grades. New capabilities within Pulse enable learners to view content for their courses and complete their work on their mobile device.

COMMON TASKS ARE EASIER AND NEW URKUND PARTNERSHIP

With Spring17, D2L is taking clicks out of complex workloads. For example, Brightspace makes it easy to exempt learners from an assignment and takes care of all the calculations. Other enhancements include notifications when an assignment is submitted, easier management of discussion topics, and a new integration partnership with URKUND (a leading European plagiarism detection company).

"URKUND is very happy to be working in partnership with D2L, opening up the possibility for both URKUND and D2L's global client base to use the two systems together. Both systems are lauded for their ease of use, client communication and high quality and for this reason, URKUND is excited to start this new chapter with a company that shares its core values," said Andreas Ohlson, CEO, URKUND.

D2L knows that making the transition to mobile can be difficult, so the company is offering a free HTML template to make it easy to build beautiful, mobile-friendly and accessible courses. If more help is needed, D2L's Creative Services has a large team of instructional and web designers that are available to engage on course design.

NEW EXPERIENCE FOR SCORM CONTENT AND OPENSESAME PARTNERSHIP

D2L continues to be a leader in open standards for interoperability. D2L's new SCORM engine provides full integration with all SCORM formats (a standard for packaging content) to make it easy to integrate off the shelf content from around the world. OpenSesame (a publisher with content from 400+ publishers and 20,000+ courses) is leveraging the new SCORM engine to support D2L clients.

D2L's track record of innovation has been widely recognized. In March 2016, Fast Company Ranked D2L #6 on the Most Innovative Companies of 2016 list in the Data Science Category, amongst Google, IBM, Spotify, Costco, and Blue Cross Blue Shield. eLearning Magazine rated D2L as #1 in Adaptive Learning, and Brightspace was recently named the #1 LMS in Higher Ed by Ovum Research.

To learn more about the features within Brightspace Spring17 please visit: www.D2L.com/seasonalrelease. To learn more about Brightspace, visit: https://www.D2L.com/brightspace.

ABOUT D2L

D2L is the software leader that makes learning experiences better. The company's cloud-based platform, Brightspace, is easy to use, flexible, and smart. With Brightspace, organizations can personalize the experience for every learner to deliver real results. The company is a world leader in learning analytics: its platform predicts learner performance so that organizations can act in real-time to keep learners on track. Brightspace is used by learners in higher education, K-12, and the enterprise sector, including the Fortune 1000. D2L has operations in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, Brazil, and Singapore. www.D2L.com

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.

All D2L marks are trademarks of D2L Corporation. Please visit D2L.com/trademarks for a list of D2L marks.