Part 3 in our series on how we seek out and apply continuous learning and continuous improvement to all aspects of SelfDesign.
As an online school, SelfDesign® Learning Community relies on its technology to facilitate communication and interaction between our learners, our educators and our contractors. Although many of our families spend much of their time learning off-line and at home and in their community, when SelfDesign learners do use technology for learning, it’s important that it’s suitable for its intended purpose and users, it’s accessible and reliable, and it’s secure and safe.
Our approach to technology systems and programs at SelfDesign Learning Community is similar to how we approach other programs and aspects of SelfDesign Learning Foundation. We have set goals to learn continuously from our users and the technology industry in order to improve continuously — applying experience, feedback, data and metrics to strengthen our information, communication and data systems and to improve the day-to-day experiences of the people using those systems.
SelfDesign Learning Community’s transition to a new learning management system called Brightspace in 2022 is a case study of how we apply our continuous learning–continuous improvement approach to our technology.
Case study: Transitioning to Brightspace
Brightspace is an integrated-software online platform used for creating, delivering, assessing courses and communicating about learning. The BC Ministry of Education and Child Care selected the platform in early spring 2022 as the learning management system for all schools that will begin operating as provincial online schools in the 2023–2024 learning year.
The move to Brightspace was a big change for SelfDesign Learning Community. It required us to re-examine and overhaul much of the technical aspects of how we communicate with learners and families, how we administer the program, how we set up learner portfolios, and how we track learner competencies.
We’ve changed learning platforms in the past. The team leading the Brightspace transition drew on what they’d learned from those earlier experiences.
“We put in a lot of time and effort into this,” says Nikki Kenyon, who led the initiative when she was SelfDesign’s chief learning officer, including contracting an external consulting firm who were experts at supporting organizations to move to Brightspace. “The consulting team we brought on shadowed us as we configured the platform, so they were aware of all the decisions we made and knew exactly how to build the orientation to best support our community during the transition.”
Because of that solid orientation foundation, Nikki says, “few challenges emerged when we started up this learning year, even though we were basically changing how we do every single thing on the learning platform.”
“We were supported in our orientation by a consultant who facilitated our introduction to and practice with Brightspace,” said SelfDesign Learning Community Principal Catherine Dinim of the orientation sessions. “We saw demonstrations and walkthroughs of the workings of the new platform and were able to ask questions and practice use of the platform in real-time with colleagues.”
In preparation for the transition, a call out for educators, families and learners to be part of the testing team brought in feedback from intended users before the system was launched. In the end, the new system configuration and the orientation materials were tested by a learning consultant, a learning specialist, and a parent with children enrolled in SelfDesign, including learners receiving additional learning supports to meet Individual Education Plan goals and a learner from grades 10 to 12.
BC Ministry of Education and Child Care inspectors praised the transition when they assessed SelfDesign Learning Community in late 2022, commending SelfDesign for its “successful transition to the Brightspace Learning Management System.”
“I’m really proud of this,” Catherine says. “Thanks to all our hard work last year and all the people who came together to support the transition and test the configuration and orientation materials, the platform is serving us really well. We’ll be doing very minor, mostly cosmetic tweaks for next year.”
Applying our learnings to other technology projects
SelfDesign Learning Foundation is applying what was learned from the transition to Brightspace to inform our approach more broadly to our technology programs and systems.
“We’re putting additional training in place for new technology systems and programs,” says SelfDesign President and CEO Amber Papou. “We’re also developing our change-management strategy to better support the transition process and to minimize the impact on our end users — our learners, families and contractors.”
It’s just one of the many ways we apply our continuous learning–continuous improvement approach to everything we do throughout our organization.
