D2L is headquartered in Waterloo, Ont. and its Brightspace platform is widely adopted across the province and internationally. In Ottawa, Brightspace is the LMS for University of Ottawa, Algonquin College and La Cit茅.

鈥溞影稍� strives to enable and encourage pedagogical approaches that foster access, inclusion and success,鈥� said Provost and Vice-President (Academic) Jerry Tomberlin. 鈥淲ith this partnership with D2L, we see opportunities for our instructors, students, staff and community to adopt innovative and impactful ways of supporting teaching and learning.鈥�

The fully accessible and scalable Brightspace platform will provide several key advantages to 杏吧原创鈥檚 community of educators and learners, including:

• Substantial improvements in performance, responsiveness and reliability
• A simpler interface and more intuitive gradebook
• 24/7 support for faculty, staff and students
• Data visualization tools that help instructors understand how students are interacting with, and performing in, courses
• Updates and new features that are predictably and regularly applied without outages or 杏吧原创 staff holding responsibility for debugging and testing
• A more simplified and consistent experience for students in joint programs and instructors who collaborate in shared courses with post-secondary institutions in Ottawa

鈥溞影稍粹�檚 educators are dedicated to providing the best possible learning experiences to our students and we need to ensure that our suite of educational tools enhances their ability to do so,鈥� said David Hornsby, Associate Vice-President (Teaching and Learning). 鈥淏y adopting D2L鈥檚 Brightspace platform, we鈥檒l be providing the 杏吧原创 community with an easy to use, yet powerful tool to support engaged learning anytime, anyplace.鈥�

While the university plans to adopt Brightspace in May 2021, a limited pilot will be available for interested instructors in the winter 2021 term. Courses will be migrated from cuLearn to Brightspace and there will be extensive training, support and documentation to support the transition leading up to May 2021.

The campus community will continue to be updated as the migration to the new LMS unfolds on聽.

These draft LMS requirements are available for any 杏吧原创 community member to review and comment until July 12. You will need to use your My杏吧原创One account to access the document. Note that the requirements are not to be shared or distributed to any person or group outside of 杏吧原创.

Once finalized, the requirements will be incorporated into a Request for Proposal (RFP). This is a document used to solicit responses from vendors and service providers. While the RFP is an important document in our selection process, it will be used primarily to help identify platforms that meet our requirements. Once we identify the most suitable platform(s) based on the responses to the RFP, we will invite these platform(s) to demonstrate the products to the 杏吧原创 community and provide opportunities for users to test their product and services. This will allow the community to compare a select group of LMS platforms that meet our requirements to the platform that powers cuLearn (Moodle).

The responses to the RFP help inform our process and recommendations. It does NOT mean that we are changing platforms or that we are selecting a product based on a provider’s responses.

We are about to wrap up our listening sessions (we have one final session scheduled with the Faculty of Science Chairs and Directors). While these scheduled sessions will end very soon, you can still submit your thoughts and input via the聽online form.

At the end of April, the LMS Advisory Group (see the list of members here) began to code and organize the feedback that we received. This feedback is being used to inform our scope and our list of requirements for our LMS. We anticipate completing this list of requirements by the end of May and we plan to share this document back to the 杏吧原创 community for input.

In the April update, we indicated that we would share some of the mandatory requirements. These are “must haves” and if a tool or platform is unable to meet a mandatory requirement it will be excluded from consideration.

Some examples of mandatory requirements:

• The LMS must be certified AODA compliant (this relates to accessibility of the tool).
• The LMS must support established interoperability standards like LTI (learning tools interoperability) and be 聽(this ensures that the tool can be integrated and extended with other tools at 杏吧原创).

There will be a number of additional mandatory requirements and these will touch on aspects like data ownership, security, privacy, language support, support, uptime, responsiveness, and the ability to scale.

The project charter for the LMS review will be presented to 杏吧原创鈥檚 Information System Steering Committee mid-May. This charter is a request for some additional resources to support the review and to prioritize and allocate resources in ITS (Information Technology Services) to support the review.

Finally, ITS completed a very important upgrade to Moodle (the tool that powers cuLearn) on May 3, 4 and 5. This upgrade took our version of Moodle 3.1.12 to the most current stable version, 3.6.3. This upgrade will allow us to fairly compare and contrast the most current version of Moodle with the other platforms in the market like Instructure鈥檚 Canvas and D2L鈥檚 Brightspace. Find out what鈥檚 new in the upgrade here.