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Gauging Student Participation
Is there a seamless way to gauge student participation in Brightspace? It should be authentically meaningful to students and instructors.
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Learning Loops, Not Lectures: Systems and Design Thinking with Brightspace and AI
The first year I planted a kitchen garden, my plan looked flawless: neat rows, companion charts, perfect spacing. Then reality happened, shade I hadn’t noticed, soil that held water unevenly, pests that loved my plants more than I did. What saved the season wasn’t more seed; it was changing how I looked. Systems thinking…
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Finding Your Niche Part 2: Roles That Work Alongside Instructional Designers
Expertise often grows through cross-disciplinary partnerships, which is something that was never more true for me than when I was creating a media-rich course with looming deadlines and a number of stakeholders in the project. Our work felt less like it was rooted in a classroom and more like it was anchored in a…
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Finding Your Niche Part 1: Focusing Expertise in Instructional Design
Most of us who work as instructional designers didn’t dream of this career path when we were kids. Many of us thought of being teachers, but there are a few members of the Learning Services ID team who came from somewhere other than the classroom: one from Lululemon (seriously. Yes, we all asked her how she could possibly…
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Keeping It Real: Maintaining the Personal Touch When Building Courses With AI
As a lifelong Garfield aficionado, I am wondering if using AI in course creation is like making lasagna. When you make a lasagna, you have loads of choices about how much of it you are going to do yourself. Will you roll the pasta yourself or use lasagna sheets from a packet? Will you make both sauces yourself, or skip the…
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Rethinking the Checklist Tool: A Secret Weapon for Instructional Designers
When you hear Brightspace Checklist, do you immediately picture it as a student-facing tool? Most of us do. But what if I told you the Checklist tool could actually make your life as an instructional designer easier, too? Inspired by its use in the Course Blueprint product created and delivered by D2L’s Learning Services…
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Designing for Complexity
Designing effective courses is no simple task. Some may even say it’s quite…complex. And just like effective course design, learning is often complex too. Presenting your content in digestible chunks is a good first step, but complex learning also requires creating meaningful learning experiences where learners get to…
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Custom GPTs in Learning Services: A New Kind of Teammate
By Vicky Nesbitt (with considerable assistance from Mr. Smith) If someone had told me a year ago that I’d be co-writing an article with an AI assistant who corrects punctuation, quotes style guides without being asked, and gets sassy if his instructions are too vague—I might’ve smiled politely and changed the subject. And…
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Integrating AI in Course Development: Three Practical Tips for L&D Teams
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a fixture of conversations about teaching and learning. Recent research shows that 74% of organizations struggle to scale AI practices, and 52% of workers worry about AI. Trust remains a barrier to adoption – a phenomenon often called ‘algorithm aversion’. Rather than resisting,…
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Using AI with Ethics in Mind
AI is everywhere. We are reaching a point where, whatever personal misgivings we might have, using AI remains an essential skill. There is no denying the power of generative AI. But it is also clear that AI has issues. There are real ethical concerns at play: environmental impacts, data privacy and security, inaccuracies…
