Ted GirardQueen’s College of Nursing
Abstract
Queen’s School of Nursing, and Health Quality Programs department uses Program-Level Communities in Brightspace. These communities are set up for each program, and are used for automating student interaction, data collection, and administrative tasks as well as coordinating clinical requirements.
Notes
The program-level courses are not for curriculum/course content. The communities are set up as course offerings so that they can be copied from year-to-year.Students are enrolled in the program-level courses upon acceptance into the institution.When students are accepted, the 4-page letter with instructions is cut down to 1 page. The instructions direct students to log into the LMS, access the program-level course, and do the other admin stuff upon entering the LMS.
The first 90 days: Engaging with students before they get to campus
What
- Required forms, training modules, quizzes
- Set Brightspace notifications
- Calendar subscribing
- Access to university and clinical resources
- Student support services
How
- Move the “start” of the program back 90 days
- Treat the first 90 days as an online course
- Apply pedagogical concepts to administrative tasks
Benefits of Using Brightspace Communities – Students
- An introduction to Brightspace
- Platform consistency with courses
- Everything in 1 place
Benefits of Using Brightspace Communities – Staff
- Fewer emails (written & sent out manually)
- Less paper (and digital documents)
- Automated processes
- One master student list
- Stretches administrative submissions over several months, instead of all at once
- Fewer sick days
Uses for Communities
- News & announcements
- Events calendar
- How-to videos/technology support
- Social media
- Course introductory videos
- Student Handbook
- Intensive week information
- Required form submissions
- Online discussions
Thoughts/Reflection
I wanted to attend this session because of our recent implementation of D2L. We’ve been using it for more strategic programs and are now considering a widespread rollout for all employees to use D2L as a central training/learning hub. Assuming this takes hold, what are the next steps? I’m seeing the possible use of Brightspace to expand to more community based site. In thinking about new hires within our company, having a community site that every employee is enrolled in could prove to be helpful. Including things like our company history, resources that are available, etc. could be beneficial. It would also help us get through some of the housekeeping work that we typically have to do at the beginning of the strategic courses. Having all of the students do this work when they first join the company would allow us to cut down on that work at the beginning of the courses.I thought session was very well done in terms of explaining how they implement these communities at Queen’s School of Nursing. Now I just have to figure out the best way to implement these in our organization.
Matthew Evins 