LMS Weekly Update: Brightspace Symposium focused on the future

Posted on Wednesday, March 13th, 2019

 

Organizers of the first Brightspace Symposium at Algonquin College, held in the DARE District in late February, describe the event as a successful opportunity to learn and celebrate the school’s first academic year using the cloud-based Learning Management System.

“Our purpose was to bring faculty and guests and Brightspace creator D2L together to learn best practices from each other and find solutions for common problems,” says Farbod Karimi, Chair of Learning and Teaching Services. “We also wanted to have a chance to empower our team to present on different tools and techniques.”

There were 12 workshop sessions in all. College faculty and staff were among the presenters, including: Robert Kershaw, Online Facilitator Training Specialist, Centre for Continuing and Online Learning; Tyler Bourne, Educational Media Specialist, CCOL; Tyler Hendry, Educational Media Specialist, CCOL; Arielle Stirling, Educational Technologist, LTS; Vanessa Tran, Educational Application Support, ITS and Professor; Ana Maria Zurita, Instructional Designer, CCOL; and Mariana Fernandez Magnou, Professor, Media and Design and Educational Technologist, LTS.

“There are a lot of skilled people at the College who are doing great things with Brightspace,” says John Dallas, Manager of Design and Delivery, CCOL. “We wanted to share those things with the College and shine a light on them. We also recognized that as one of many institutions that use Brightspace, we could connect with colleagues who are going through the same scenarios with the technology.”

Participants learned a means of merging course sections using Maestro, “the agnostic middleware”, in a session led by Michel Marcheterre, Manager, Learning Technology Systems and Networks, University of Ottawa. Keynote speaker and presenter Shaun Iles of Mohawk College discussed intelligent agents, a kind of LMS artificial intelligence that is able to monitor activity in a course and communicate directly with students based on that activity. Michel Singh, Chief Technology Officer, eCampusOntario and Philippe Dunac, Digital Learning Specialist, Collège La Cité, discussed aspects of Brightspace that allow schools to identify students at risk.

Karimi says a student panel was one of the event’s notable successes. “Sometimes the student voice is forgotten. Now the provider was hearing it directly, giving positive and negative feedback, all of it useful. Some of the D2L folks came up to me later and said they really welcomed the chance to hear from students first-hand.”

Recordings of the keynote and the student panel, as well as slides from the presentations, are available on the Symposium website.

Among the 147 people registered for the symposium were representatives of Brightspace creator D2L. Dallas says they met with faculty to learn how they use the LMS and what improvements or features they hope to see in future upgrades. The company also gave presentations that offered sneak peeks into new experiences that will be coming to Brightspace in the months ahead.

Feedback from faculty about the symposium has been encouraging for the organizers, Dallas says. Faculty came to learn: to validate that they were using Brightspace correctly, or exchange ideas, or explore how to add elements to their online courses or hybrid activities.

“Overall, it was a very positive and collaborative day,” he says.

Will there be a second symposium, then? “Oh, yes,” says Karimi. “Next year around the same time, for sure.”

 


Comments

Comments are closed.