Authored by: Customer Success at D2L
Getting Started
To know if this play is right for you, ask yourself if any of the following statements are true:
- My school does not have an internal plan for Brightspace adoption
- My tool usage reports show low usage numbers
- My tool usage over time reports show little to no increase in usage over time
- Most of the faculty/instructors at my school are not using the LMS for their teaching and learning activities
- My school is new to Brightspace
… IF you’ve answered “yes” to any of these questions, it is likely that your usage and adoption rates could be very low, and this play is right for you!
… IF you’ve answered “no” to all these questions, another play may be better suited. Go to the Higher Education Adoption Playbook main page to review other available adoption plays.
The Play: Kick Start Brightspace Adoption
One of the simplest ways to ensure faculty and instructors across your organization begin to use and adopt Brightspace in their regular teaching habits for both online and in-person courses is to set mandated usage standards. When mandating usage is not an option, it is useful to set school-wide minimum usage recommendations.
The Kick Start Brightspace Adoption Play provides a specific plan to follow to bring a couple of basic content-related teaching tasks into the LMS. This play exposes staff, faculty, instructors, and students across your organization to Brightspace and begins to generate a consistent learning experience for every course offered by your school, whether the format is online or in-person. When students can access the same bits of information in the same ways in all their courses, students have a simpler and predictable time navigating their courses and understanding what is expected of them.
Objectives:
- Provide faculty with step-by-step actions to take to kick-start adoption
- Provide inspiration with approaches you can take to kick-start adoption
- Build a personalized plan to implement this play
STEP ONE: Identify Brightspace Features/ToolsHere is a list of some simple content-related teaching tasks–and the Brightspace features and/or tools that make them possible—that we suggest you recommend be brought into your LMS.
- Use the Content tool to post a course syllabus to the course overview section of every course
It is important to note here that different schools have different ways of setting up Brightspace. In some schools, course shells are populated with course syllabi by administrative staff at the departmental level. In others, it is the responsibility of each faculty/instructor to make the course syllabus available to students. How the syllabus gets uploaded into each course is a decision for your school to make. The important step here is that every course offered by your school has a course syllabus available to students at the start of the course in the LMS.
- Use the personal settings feature to create a user profile for every course instructor
Ensuring every instructor creates a personal profile within the personal settings feature establishes some familiarity for the students about the person teaching their course. It also provides a place for instructors to share information about their teaching history and research interests, as well as a centralized place to share details for their preferred method of contact. If all faculty and instructors have a profile set up, students in any course will always know exactly where to look to find appropriate contact information!
- Use the Announcements Tool or Activity Feed Widget to post a welcome message in every course
Posting a welcome message in your course reinforces the familiarity established in step 2, contributes to a personalized learning experience for students, and is a centralized place to share any important information regarding the course before the first official class.
Note: Your Learning and Development office is ideally positioned to choose what minimum uses to recommend as part of this play. We have provided the example above using very some simple content-related uses of the LMS. These recommendations may not be suitable for your school depending on where you are in your customer journey with D2L.
See Step 2
Not in Higher Education?
If you are a Corporate or K-12 Customer, we have an Adoption Playbook just for you!
