4 Ways D2L Helps Set Educators Up for Success

It’s simply not enough to make digital tools accessible to educators in hopes that they will adapt and begin using them in their classrooms. Teachers, like students, need to be equipped with the right knowledge, skills, and competencies to seamlessly use technology. This also applies to implementing a new learning management system (LMS) for the first time or migrating from an old system. So how can we help educators and users effectively use an LMS? The answer is simple: Set them up for success.

In this blog we look at D2L Brightspace success coaching goals for K-12 educators and break down the ways in which we partner for success.

Success Coaching Goals

Our aim is to enable leaders and educators to build familiarity with D2L Brightspace and connect in-class and online learning experiences to foster learner success. Beyond knowing how to use a tool, our Success Coaching program helps educate teachers on how tools work together to create a holistic online learning experience that aligns with your learning goals. We accomplish this by:

1. Personalizing and implementing communication and professional development plans designed to support rollouts and deepen adoption
2. Partnering to align academic policies with technology
3. Providing coaching to improve familiarity with D2L Brightspace and build strong teaching practices with technology
4. Using metrics to communicate adoption progress and recommend next steps

Let’s take a closer look at each one of these four steps.

Personalizing Rollout Plans

We work with schools and districts to discover their teaching and technology-enabled learning goals and identify the activities needed to achieve them. The first step in our Success Coaching program is meeting with a Customer Success Manager to get some background and uncover specific customer needs.

For example, perhaps you are looking for a 100% adoption rate of a new LMS in your district, or perhaps you want teachers to learn how they can help build competencies among students. Once we have an understanding of a customer’s specific goals, we then create a Strategic Success Plan designed to support rollouts and deepen adoption.

Aligning Academic Policies with Technology

The purpose of an LMS is to use digital tools to make stronger and more meaningful connections within the teaching and learning ecosystem. A school or district technology ecosystem is a distributed, interconnected, and open structure that houses digital tools—course content, assignments, grades, and metrics—that seamlessly work together. Your LMS not only needs to be part of your technology ecosystem, it should also be used to align with curricular expectations.

With our Success Coach program, we outline what tools can be used within your LMS to help meet learner needs as well as how to use them. For example, if your district’s goal is to align in-class teaching opportunities with student achievement then your personalized plan would include using Gradebook Mastery View. This is an additional page of the grades tool that provides an overall suggested level of achievement for each outcome and each learner within a course based upon a selected calculation method. It provides a single overview of class performance related to outcome comprehension and mastery of topics. The overview can also be a tool to share with learners in the class, or it can be hidden from student view and used only by instructors.

Providing Coaching

The Success Coaching program is designed to provide tiered support based on different comfort levels of teachers using the product. Our Success Coach team is full of former educators, meaning that they work with a pedagogical mindset. Rather than being centered on training to transfer knowledge, our program is centered on coaching educators and administrators to enhance knowledge, skills, and development.

Together, we create a strategic success plan based on the needs identified in the first step. Depending on what our customer is looking to accomplish here are some of the activities we can incorporate into our plan:

• Q&A Sessions: Weekly drop-in Q&A sessions for teachers to ask questions about effective use of D2L Brightspace in their classroom.
• Webinars: Enablement webinars tailored to your course environment and aligned to your academic goals.
• Materials: Pre-recorded webinars for teachers to view on their own time; resource pages for teachers to find necessary information.
• Meetings: We can meet frequently with the district team to share progress and discuss next steps and future sessions.

Using Metrics to Drive Adoption

In order to easily measure teaching and technology-enabled learning goals we use metrics to keep track of progress and see how far our customers have come. Based on the example in the first step, if our customer’s goal is to have a 100% adoption rate, we look at associated metrics, such as tool usage and unique logins, before we launch our Success Coach program.

Throughout our program, we refer back to these metrics to help us understand what is working for your teachers and what is not and provide need-based assistance based on the data. If we look at the same metrics a couple of months later and see that a school is still not hitting its goal of 100% adoption, we can alter our coaching approach and introduce different strategies to help achieve success.

Whether you have been using your LMS for years or have recently migrated to a new system it’s important that you and your students are set up for success. Our Success Coaching program helps educators maintain and expand their knowledge of their LMS to foster learner success.

Written by

Zeina Abouchacra

Zeina Abouchacra is the EDU Content Marketing Specialist at D2L. She has worked in the higher education sector in various communications positions as well as a researcher and a teaching assistant. Specifically, teaching undergraduate-level communication university courses. Zeina is currently working towards completing her Master of Arts Communication degree at the University of Ottawa.