D2L unveils new offering for creating digital course content

D2L has launched its D2L Brightspace Creator+ Package, allowing anyone to create engaging digital course content using workflows integrated into Brightspace.

The company notes that this will save course creators time, effort and money.

"We've listened closely to our customers, and we understand that educators want to create content independently, with no software coding experience," says John Baker, President and CEO, D2L.

"Administrators and instructional designers want a solution that is more budget-friendly, scalable without seat limits and simpler for learners. With these needs in mind, we developed Creator+ to help empower our customer base to deliver exceptional learning experiences.

"Each year, we demonstrate our commitment to supporting learning, and creating tools that are highly accessible and easy-to-use for everyone, everywhere. Creator+ is purposefully built, in partnership with educators and learning design experts, to support the development of better learning experiences."

Citing research from The Grattan Insititute, D2L says teachers in Australia work longer than the standard 40-hour week, with respondents to a survey noting they worked about 44 hours a week on average.

Based on a 40-week school year, this equates to approximately 160 extra hours.

The same study found 92% of teachers don't have enough time to prepare effectively for classroom teaching and 86% of teachers report not having enough time for high-quality lesson planning.

Creator+ removes the requirement for expensive, interactive content authoring software, helping Brightspace customers reduce administrative work through offerings that are embedded directly into Brightspace and more straightforward for end users. This helps free up time that can instead be spent with students.

The Creator+ Early Access Program launched in May 2022 and builds on over 20 years of award-winning course design from Brightspace.

The program facilitates collaboration between education leaders and learning design experts, who provided vital feedback.

The benefits of Creator+ include:

• Ready-made templates to quickly build visually engaging content that is also highly accessible and mobile-friendly.
• The Practices tool, which keeps learners engaged with a wide variety of practice exercises and question types.
• Consistent visual experiences with the Content Styling tool.
• Flexible and highly accessible interactive elements in courses without any coding skills.
• Reduced complexity with seamless screen recordings through the Video Capture app.

Tony Maguire, Australia & New Zealand Regional Director at D2L, says the introduction of Creator+ will provide multiple benefits to creative developers, teaching professionals and organisations looking to maximise their training program budgets.

"Creator+ will help content creators and creatives, who often use multiple tools when developing content for education platforms, to address deeper accessibility through inclusive designs. This platform will also benefit corporate content owners who may need to quickly and economically tweak content for their employee training programs," Maguire says.

"Our teaching professionals will be at an advantage, too, because they will be able to utilise more authentic modes of assessment and leverage the deeper use of video capabilities.

"Put simply, Creator+ will offer the local market technology that offers accessible capabilities so that no student or employee's educational needs are overlooked or are costly to those who need it."