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D2L Brightspace LMS

Screenshot example of D2L Home page showing main tools at top, name, school logo, announcements, courses, and right widgets for help links and information.
An example of what the Home page may look like for an individual user.

What

Desire2Learn (D2L) is the company that created Brightspace, our Learning Management System (LMS). We tend to refer to the tool simply as "D2L." It is used for delivering online components of a learning experience to students. In other words, it's the online equivalent of a physical classroom. Generally, it is used for the following purposes:
  • Managing, delivering, and facilitating course content
  • Posting grades and feedback to students for each course they are enrolled in for a term
  • Communicating timely information with students, typically between instructors and students
  • Meeting higher education, data encryption, ADA, and FERPA compliance standards
  • Guiding students through a seamless, efficient, online experience, whether the course is hybrid, blended, mostly face-to-face, or fully online

Other examples of LMS tools are Instructure Canvas, Blackboard Learn+, and Moodle.

Why

The main benefit of using D2L is to create a one-stop-dashboard for students, instructors, and academic staff for all course information and facilitation. In many cases, it offers a method of learning when otherwise not available to students who have physical, geographical, and psychological barriers to learning.

If you are familiar with tools that manage online content, you may question why we would use D2L instead of a tool for content management, such as WordPress. Essentially, using a LMS provides infrastructure for the additional needs of an educational environment otherwise unneeded outside of education. This includes one login for many courses, course history, assessing students, and curriculum documentation and streamlining between many campuses.

D2L Instances? What does this mean?

Each college has their own D2L environment, referred to as an "instance" of D2L. Not all instances of D2L Brightspace are the same for every college. For example, a tool or feature enabled for someone teaching at Front Range Community College may not be available to someone teaching at Arapahoe Community College. If you are unsure if a given feature is available at your school, please contact your local LMS administrator or eLearning staff.

Instructor Tips for D2L Courses

  1. Organized: Keep your D2L space organized and intentional. Organize your course into a hierarchy using D2L’s modules, sub-modules, and tools.
  2. Slim: Keep your course slim by only having the files, tools, and items you need for the current delivery and course design. Store your course files and information in a separate drive, whether in the cloud or a hard drive. This also helps with keeping your files in your own space without unexpectedly losing important work to D2L maintenance or glitches.
  3. Simple: Only use 1-2 educational technology tools in addition to those in D2L for your courses. The more tools we integrate, the more time we spend maintaining these tools, coaching students, and unintentionally guiding students to spend their learning effort learning a tool instead of completing the actual coursework.
  4. Maintained: As you teach courses over time and with hundreds of students, you will observe trends in where courses are strong, weak, and fuzzy. Make at least one update to enhance these characteristics for each course every time you teach the course to maintain updates over time and keep your courses relevant over time with evolving trends and student expectations.
  5. Collaborate: Collaborate with instructional designers, academic technologists, librarians, fellow instructors, and others to ask questions, get inspiration, and find new methods of efficiency in your D2L space. Often, the best things we do in D2L are those we innovate while working together. You are never alone in your endeavor to teach students the best way you know how. Not all versions of D2L Brightspace are the same for every college. For example, a tool or feature available to someone teaching at Front Range Community College may not be available to someone teaching at Arapahoe Community College.

D2L Brightspace Overview Video

This video gives a brief introduction to the D2L Brightspace purpose, breadth of capability, and general product information directly from the parent company.