LAS VEGAS, NV--(Marketwired - July 20, 2017) - FUSION 2017 - D2L, a global learning technology leader, has unveiled the Summer17 release of Brightspace, its award-winning learning management system (LMS). With the Summer17 enhancements, instructors save time on common tasks to enable them to reach every learner.

/EINPresswire.com/ -- "Our D2L teams have been working closely with instructors and learners of all ages in hundreds of design sessions. They made it clear they want to spend more time personalizing learning," said John Baker, CEO of D2L. "We've listened to our customers and the new abilities in Brightspace make it easier for instructors -- in schools, on campuses, and in workplaces -- to connect with all of their learners and help them reach their potential."

TIME-SAVING FEATURES FOR K-12 TEACHERS

"Designed to help K-12 educators reimagine blended learning, Brightspace helps instructors deliver a personalized experience for each student -- with fewer headaches, and in less time," said Ken Chapman, VP of Market Strategy at D2L. "Brightspace can be used by students, teachers, parents and administrators at any grade level. It's one central platform that's easy and mobile-ready."

BRIGHTSPACE ACTIVITY FEED
Brightspace for K-12 is a game-changer for teachers as well as students. The new Activity Feed in Brightspace is designed like a social media platform, to be easy to use and set up. The Activity Feed provides a place on the course home page for teachers to communicate easily with students about reminders, upcoming assignments, new content or discussions in an engaging, familiar format to keep all their students on track. Teachers benefit from simple integration with Google Drive and the ability to easily link to YouTube, other videos, their favorite sites, and more.

BRIGHTSPACE LESSONS
Brightspace Lessons jumpstarts the classroom by loading content for teachers. It helps create an amazing blended learning experience using content from publishers, school-provided content, Open Educational Resources (OERs) and their own materials. The drag-and-drop features make it easy for teachers to add, change and arrange content. Suggested pacing helps them to see how the materials fall into their class calendar so they can adjust where necessary. Finally, Lessons provides useful visualizations to see how a course's content aligns to standards, and teachers can map their own custom content with just a few clicks. Setting up lessons for a classroom has never been easier, faster or more intuitive than in Brightspace.

MORE EFFICIENCY FOR HIGHER ED

"Data Access is a well-constructed series of datasets that will allow combining Brightspace data with other data sources," said Cheryl Ainoa, COO of D2L. "We know that our customers want to do their own mashups so we're now offering smart access to data. D2L is the only LMS that includes it as part of the core offering and it's a part of Summer17."

DATA ACCESS
Today D2L announces access to 50+ category-based datasets. This will enable customers to combine Brightspace data with their own data sources and achieve their organizational goals.

While some vendors provide visualizations and others provide data, Brightspace offers both -- gorgeous visualizations and category-based data extracts for business intelligence tools. Institutions will be empowered with the information they need to make better decisions.

As the only LMS vendor included in the 2016 OVUM Student Success Report, D2L continues to lead the LMS industry in learning analytics and predictive analytics, and for designing Brightspace to put the key data in the hands of instructors or advisors when they can make the most impact for their learners. Instructors, as well as learners, can achieve better results such as improved retention, graduation rates, and completion rates when knowledge from data is connected to action.

BRIGHTPSPACE QUIZZING
It's now faster to create a quiz in Brightspace. Shuffling the order of quiz questions is a great way to improve the integrity of a quiz and keep it fresh, and now it's as easy as clicking a button. Within the new Quiz tool, instructors can save setup time by copying and pasting from other sources, such as Microsoft Word, and retain formatting and images when creating a quiz.

DAYLIGHT: THE INDUSTRY'S BEST VISUAL DESIGN
D2L's new any-device Daylight interface was created using cutting-edge responsive design so that the experience will be similar for learners regardless of the device they use, whether they're on a mobile phone, tablet, Chromebook™ or PC. Since not all families have access to the latest devices, this equalizes learning for all.

SIS INTEGRATIONS
D2L introduces new configuration options that will enable system administrators to set up integrations quickly and efficiently. For K-12, the recently Certified adapter for IMS OneRoster 1.1 creates an opportunity for integrating with any OneRoster 1.1 compliant SIS (or Integration as a Service Platform) that provides OneRoster 1.1 Rostering data via REST or CSV. This standards-based approach lowers the barrier to adoption for schools and districts. For Higher Education, The new adapter for Ellucian Intelligent Learning Platform (ILP), gives Colleague™ and Banner™ customers real-time provisioning of users, courses, enrollments and more. The instructor-driven grading workflows support sending last date of attendance, midterm and final grades back to the Student Information System (SIS), reducing redundant and error prone data re-entry by instructors.

A UNIFIED LEARNING EXPERIENCE FOR EMPLOYEES

"Brightspace gives the modern workforce the learning experience platform it requires -- based on personalizing learning, easy content creation and curation, rich video support and valuable insights from data -- to engage and grow employees," said Koreen Pagano, Product Management Director, Corporate, D2L.

MANAGER DASHBOARD
With the new Manager Dashboard^[1], managers can save time by easily managing course enrollment and tracking course completion for teams, organizational groups, and individual users. Managers can create and manage groups based on flexible attributes such as team, sales region, hire date, or other custom attributes.

Rules-based assignment makes it easy to automatically enroll employees based on attributes or reporting structures, ensuring that the right people are getting the right learning content. Activities such as onboarding new hires, skills development and coaching, and leadership development have never been so easy to manage.

D2L IS AN INNOVATOR
D2L's track record of innovation has been widely recognized. In March 2016, Fast Company Ranked D2L #6 on the Most Innovative Companies of 2016 list in the Data Science Category, amongst Google, IBM, Spotify, Costco and Blue Cross Blue Shield. eLearning Magazine rated D2L as #1 in Adaptive Learning, and Brightspace was recently named the #1 LMS in Higher Ed by Ovum Research.

To learn more about the features within Brightspace Summer17 please visit: www.D2L.com/seasonalrelease. To learn more about Brightspace, visit: https://www.D2L.com/brightspace.

ABOUT D2L
D2L is the software leader that makes learning experiences better. The company's cloud-based platform, Brightspace, is easy to use, flexible, and smart. With Brightspace, organizations can personalize the experience for every learner to deliver real results. The company is a world leader in learning analytics: its platform predicts learner performance so that organizations can act in real-time to keep learners on track. Brightspace is used by learners in higher education, K-12, and the enterprise sector, including the Fortune 1000. D2L has operations in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, Brazil, and Singapore. www.D2L.com

Twitter: @D2L

© 2017 D2L Corporation.

The D2L family of companies includes D2L Corporation, D2L Ltd, D2L Australia Pty Ltd, D2L Europe Ltd, D2L Asia Pte Ltd, and D2L Brasil Soluções de Tecnologia para Educação Ltda.

All D2L marks are trademarks of D2L Corporation. Please visit D2L.com/trademarks for a list of D2L marks.

^[1] Currently available in North America for new clients only

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