Colombia. D2L announced the release of the spring 2016 version of Brightspace, which now features a new user experience and predictive analytics, video, and mobile capabilities to make learning more engaging and affordable than ever.
"We are making the largest investment in education globally than at any time in history but we must do things differently to get better results," said John Baker, CEO of D2L. "This new technology helps modernize the educational experience and is designed to improve learning outcomes, keep students engaged, and fill gaps in course selection which will help reduce costs and help millions of students graduate as planned."
Spring 2016 Enhancements
Brightspace Degree Compass uses predictive analytics to shorten the path to graduation, saving students time and money, as well as predicting the optimal path to graduation thereby reducing the cost of education. The original solution, initiated by Austin Peay State University and funded with a grant from the Gates Foundation, has been redesigned as a mobile, cloud-based app that works with two of the leading student information systems.
Both students and academic advisors can use the Degree Compass via their smartphones to select the right courses on their path to success.
According to The Organization Complete College America: "Billions of dollars and millions of hours are wasted on unnecessary courses. Excess credits are estimated to cost more than $19 billion each year. Of that amount, about eight billion dollars are paid by students and more than eleven billion dollars are the unnecessary burden on taxpayers who subsidize public higher education."
Brightspace Degree Compass uses the predictive model to uniquely match students to courses that best fit their academic talents and program requirements to drive academic success and degree earning. Combining student performance and readiness data with data from all students who have followed the same path to earning the Degree Compass degree generates a customized set of recommended courses in order of priority. This helps students stay on their path to graduation by saving countless hours of extra coursework and excessive tuition expenses.
Search for papers and presentation videos for students
The new Brightspace Capture allows teachers to deliver rich content through the media (e.g. video spoken with a PowerPoint® or webcast) to a global audience. By recording a presentation and then streaming it live or on demand, each audience member is able to enjoy a front-row experience and can get the most out of content wherever it is and on any device.
With one billion daily mobile views on YouTube™ it is evident that mobile video has become a key tool to attract students. Brightspace Capture is the first cloud-based mobile solution designed to work on any device – laptop, cell phone, tablet – and can be played seamlessly at various speeds so users can consume learning videos anywhere and on their favorite device.
Just as the most popular search engines turned the Internet into an incredible source of knowledge, Brightspace Capture does the same for educational videos. It automatically catalogs them for searches allowing students to instantly search through thousands of hours of video so they find the exact moment the search term is mentioned. This dramatically improves the use of paper and video capture when studying.
New Brightspace Daylight user experience – clean and easy to use
With Spring16, D2L is pleased to showcase the Daylight user experience through three new products: Brightspace Assignment Grader for Android, Brightspace Capture, and Brightspace Degree Compass. Brightspace Daylight is clean and easy to use, and allows users and instructors to focus on what's most important. The rest of the Brightspace platform will be upgraded to the new Daylight experience in the coming months.
Teachers will be able to qualify at any time and place
Teachers have become increasingly mobile. Brightspace Assignment Grader frees instructors from office computers with an offline, simple, and flexible scoring tool that seamlessly syncs with Brightspace. Teachers will be able to do much more than just enter grades. They can provide meaningful feedback through annotations and attach in-context feedback in audio and video so that students get much more personalized feedback on their work. Studies have shown that video or audio feedback can reduce the time it takes to grade assignments by up to 43 percent.
