Adoption Planning: How and When to Roll Out New Brightspace Tools
Authored by: Holly Whitaker, PhD, Learning Strategy Consultant at D2L.
An adoption sprint, or a concentrated effort for the adoption of something specific, is a common practice among change leaders. For higher education, that typically means the sprint happens in a single semester or term.
The major challenge of executing any campus-based adoption plan is that instructors typically have little time to improve their course once the semester kicks off, and they're either off for the summer or engaged in pre-semester meetings once they return. This leaves very little time for instructors to improve their courses before the semester begins.
This begs the question, how do you roll out new tools to your instructors, and when is the best time to do that considering all of the constraints and time pressures that your instructors face? This article will help you determine how and when to roll out new tools to your instructors.
Selecting a New Tool to Roll Out
You have many sources of data to evaluate as you select a new Brightspace tool to roll out. Create a list of tools using at least the following data sources:
- With Continuous Delivery, new Brightspace tools roll out to you every month, and you decide which ones to make available to your instructors. Think about tools have recently been rolled out to you through Continuous delivery - which 1 or 2 could be good for students at your campus?
- Your campus's innovators have probably asked you to have access to tools they have seen demonstrated at conferences like Fusion, tools they had access to at other Brightspace campuses or tools they discovered on Brightspace Community. Look back through your email or notes from your recent meetings - which tools have your innovators requested or publicly daydreamed about using in their courses?
- As an education technology innovator yourself, you might have ideas about how cool it would be to see courses in a certain department using a tool you know is available, but is not used as much as you think it should be. Which tools do you think need to be used more often?
- You could also invest special effort in increasing use of one or more of your MVLE tools that may not be as widely adopted as you ideally would like. Is there a tool in your MVLE that needs an adoption boost?
- You should also look to your advisory board for help. They might have ideas or problems that you never thought to use a Brightspace tool to help with. What tools do they mention - or what problems are they facing that a Brightspace tool could solve?
From these data sources, put together a short list of tools to consider rolling out. Together with your advisory board or your team, consider the positives and negatives of each tool on your short list. Use an evaluation rubric like the one below which loosely follows Everett Rogers's Features of Innovations.
Use one rubric for each tool you're considering. Use tally marks or other indicators to give you a total in the bottom row. Use the advice in the cell from your total to help with your selection decision.
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Item
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Ratings
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Ease of use
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Easy to start using
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Difficult to start using
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Difficult to start, but easy to keep using
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Time to learn (for most instructors)
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Can be learned in less than 5 minutes
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Need focused training session
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Need repeated trainings and support
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Aligns with instructor values
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Amplifies the way instructors already teach
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Somewhat aligns with instructor values
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Requires mindset shift around new set of instructor values
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Simple to observe the impact
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Easily visible & helpful to instructors & students
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Easily visible & helpful to either instructors or students
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Difficult to see or can make things confusing
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Instructors can try before going all-in
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Trying this tool is easy and won't impact current course
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Trying this tool could be difficult considering the current course
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Trying this tool will impact everything in current course
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Benefits instructors
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Can achieve benefit in one use
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Achieve benefit in days or weeks
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Achieve benefit only at end of term
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Benefits students
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Can achieve benefit in one use
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Achieve benefit in days or weeks
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Achieve benefit only at end of term
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Already in use by several instructors
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In use by > 2% of instructors
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In use by 1-2% of instructors
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Tool not in use at your campus
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Totals
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If majority of marks are in this column, this could be a good tool to roll out.
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If majority of marks are in this column, special attention on lower rated items will be required.
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If majority of marks are in this column, this is probably not a good tool to roll out.
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Rolling Out New Tools
Now that you've selected the tool you want to introduce, it's time to create a roll-out plan. A successful tool roll-out plan includes communication, the training team, the help desk team, the instructional design staff, the data & analytics team, and it details how you'll work with your executive sponsor throughout the effort.
As mentioned in the introduction, timing your rollout with the beginning of the term won't always work with instructor time. This gives you the freedom to start your rollout plans at any point in the year, but be sure that your total plan includes at least one full term to allow for maximum instructor implementation over the life of a full student course experience.
DO THIS FIRST: One critical step to perform before all the others in this list is to ensure that your instructors have proper tool access. Work with your LMS Administration team to ensure that the tool is enabled for instructors.
Step 1: Coordinate Support Team Schedules
In the previous article in this series, Setting Attainable and Realistic Brightspace Adoption Goals, you forecasted the impacts of this adoption initiative on each support team: training, help desk, instructional design and data. In the example, we learned that the training team determined their availability based on other training commitments. We also learned that help desk needed one month to ramp up their internal knowledge base, and requested that training begin after that ramp-up period. If help desk begins their ramp-up period right away, this means you have about a month to plan and execute all the other details.
Before creating your communication plan, confirm a clearly articulated schedule with each of your service teams.
Step 2: Create a Communication Plan
Once your support teams have established dates for their work, you can begin to plan the initial communication around the new tool announcement.
- If this new tool could be adopted by any and all instructors, send the communication to all of your instructors.
- In the previous article, we used an example aimed at improving the quality of Rubrics use in a specific set of courses. If improving adoption of a specific tool for a specific set of courses or within a department is desired, then send the communication specifically to that sub-set of instructors.
Create a series of email communications inviting instructors to the training sessions. These emails should go out about once a week for the month before the training with RSVP or attendance reminders in the days before the training actually occurs. Additionally, try to get an article in the faculty newsletter or another reliable form of communication that the target faculty group reads regularly.
Below is a sample email invitation, but please review this article on creating enticing language that will create interest in the tool you've selected. You'll find that the rubric you used to select your tool will help you as you plan these communications.
In this sample email, I extend the example of improving the use of Rubrics:
Dear Instructor,
We are happy to invite you to a special training in how to effectively use Rubrics to help students achieve course learning outcomes. In this advanced course, we will help you quickly raise the bar on how you can use Rubrics in your current course to give students more clarity into what's required. While the training will be brief, we are reserving a full hour to offer you time to try out this improved method for using Rubrics while our staff can help you one-on-one. Trying out this new method won't impact your current use of Rubrics for active assignments in your current course, so you can be sure you've got it set up right before you deploy this method across your whole course. We have a limited number of spots for this in-person training, so sign up at this link.
This is just a sample, and I encourage you to vary the appeals in your messaging for every email. The message that appeals to one instructor may not appeal to another instructor, so mix it up!
Step 3: Involve Your Executive Sponsor
Sometimes, you get a great response to email communication when it comes from a higher-up. Work with your executive sponsor to determine whether they would prefer for the email invitations to come from the executive sponsor.
Further, help your executive sponsor to understand how this new tool will help students succeed. You've collected research on this tool when you documented the ideal use of your tool (see previous article). Give them brief statistics or anecdotes that they can carry with them into other meetings. This will help your executive sponsor boldly answer questions and confidently advocate for your adoption campaign.
Step 4: Task it Out and Make it all Work Together
You have your support team calendar, your communication plan and your executive sponsor on board. Now, all you have to do is add the tasks, due dates and details to your task management tool (Sharepoint, Basecamp, Asana, Trello, etc.). Include things that could get lost in the shuffle like checking in with your help desk team to ensure that they are on track with developing their internal knowledge base, that job aids and handouts have been created by the training team, and that you're including this initiative in your regular executive sponsor updates.
What's Next?
Now that you've determined how and when to roll out new tools to your instructors, it's time to get serious about collecting high-quality success cases.
Check out the rest of the Adoption Planning Series:
Looking for more ideas and inspiration on how to build and grow the usage and adoption of Brightspace? Check out the Higher Education Adoption Playbook!:
Not in Higher Education?
If you are a Corporate or K-12 Customer, we have an Adoption Playbook just for you!
