Educators in higher education asked for — and received — powerful new assessment tools

Today (22 Oct), D2L launches its Magenta Release — the latest version of its Brightspace LMS — which lets students around the world get structured and meaningful feedback on any learning activity, helping to improve their learning outcomes.  

Magenta gives users structured and meaningful feedback using an easy-to-understand rubric process, an option to be even more objective with anonymous grading — and more.

The Magenta Release includes the following features — many inspired by dedicated Brightspace users:

• The ability to assign and assess learning happening outside the digital environment — like class presentations, skill demonstrations or projects — providing a full view of everything a student has worked on.

• Anonymous grading, which allows instructors and graders to be free of unconscious bias, further ensuring that students will get fair and equitable assessment in high-stakes assignments.

• A new user experience for rubrics makes it easier to evaluate student learning and provide clear and transparent feedback. Rubrics also help provide more timely feedback to students, allowing instructors to more easily identify and act on their needs.

• More powerful quizzing — we continue to make the quiz creation experience quicker and easier to use for instructors by including a dynamic preview for question pools in quizzes and providing more data on quiz attempts with character counts. Students will appreciate auto-saving during the quiz experience, and the ability to take a quiz in full-screen — particularly helpful taking a quiz on a mobile device – making it easier to focus by being fully immersed in the task.

• An option to work with D2Lers to leverage a Data Solutions Consulting package to deliver insights from all their data with experts helping at every step. The service helps users to define data-driven goals, complete a needs analysis and feasibility study, and build the data solution to achieve the goal.  

In the past few years, we’ve made it easier to give important feedback to our teams through the Daylight user experience for Brightspace. D2L is passionate about working closely with our clients and 29% of the features in the Magenta Release were inspired by the open-user community and it includes many of the community’s top-voted ideas.

WHAT HIGHER EDUCATION USERS ARE SAYING ABOUT BRIGHTSPACE

“Brightspace is fantastic as it supports a blended learning approach, which gives our students the flexibility to learn wherever and whenever they need to. Whilst other learning platforms we tested were restrictive, Brightspace enables us to teach how we want to teach, and our students to learn how they want to learn.”
Ellen Buck, Head of Learning Services – University of Suffolk.

“With access to the student’s rubric we can see, for example, if a student is struggling with understanding the content, or if it’s an issue with their writing mechanics. With that knowledge, advisors can take the action that is best suited to each student’s individual situation. This is the SNHU approach to personalised learning. With data drawn from Brightspace, we can intervene with an at-risk student even before they’re aware they’re at risk.”

Matthew Thornton, Associate Vice President, Student Technology Experience — Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU).

“Working within D2L, we now have an established quality-review process. Brightspace allows us to have a regular way of looking at online courses, holding them against a rubric, evaluating them, and then identifying ways to improve them on a regular cycle.”

Jan Kempster, Dean of Distance Education – Pima Community College

“I use rubrics to give student performance feedback. The use of rubrics has decreased the amount of time needed to give the feedback by several hours.”

Jon Moe, Faculty — Normandale Community College

“With many different sets of eyes on the student’s history and course data, they can collaborate to determine who might be the best person to reach out to a student who may be struggling. This means that students receive the kind of individualized care and attention that might not be possible at another institution, increasing their chances of completing programs and achieving life-long, student success.”

Jason (JT) Eborn, Academic Specialist in Data Analysis — Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU)..

“Reporting is a big part of our job. The student data provided by Brightspace is invaluable.”

James Medway, Development Officer and teacher — SNP STEAM Academy 

ABOUT BRIGHTSPACE: A cloud-based learning platform that makes online and blended learning easy, flexible, and smart. Brightspace is a quantum leap beyond traditional Learning Management System (LMS) – it is easy to drag-and-drop content to create engaging courses, supports all mobile devices, has industry-leading up-time, and is accessible for all learners. Plus, Brightspace enables the future of learning with a gaming engine, adaptive learning, video management, intelligent agents, templated interactives for course design, full support for outcomes or competency-based learning, and actionable learning analytics.

D2L’s Brightspace was recently named the #1 LMS in Higher Ed by Ovum Research and #1 in Adaptive Learning by eLearning Magazine. In addition, Aragon Research included D2L in its highly coveted Hot Vendors In Learning list.

ABOUT D2L: Believes learning is the foundation upon which all progress and achievement rests. Working closely with organizations globally, D2L has transformed the way millions of people learn online and in the classroom.