Case Study: Te Kura (New Zealand distance learning school) achieves a rapid, seamless Brightspace upgrade and faster NCEA completion with D2L Brightspace

An online school upgrades their learning platform in record time with benchmark quality

Te Kura (Te Aho O Te Kura Pounamu), a New Zealand distance-learning school serving about 27,000 learners from early childhood through secondary levels, needed to upgrade its Brightspace learning platform to support an ambitious fully online strategy and make NCEA course materials available anytime, anywhere. The challenge was large: leapfrogging seven Brightspace versions, migrating data and custom configurations, training staff, and completing the production upgrade with only a five-day window for downtime across a geographically dispersed team.

D2L partnered with Te Kura to deliver a three-month upgrade that used two test environments, staged interim upgrades, OS and configuration updates, custom course development, and a tailored instructor training course. The five-day production upgrade was completed seamlessly, the Online Teaching and Learning Environment was implemented rapidly, NCEA resources were largely digitized and available online (reaching about 40% of students), and students began completing NCEA qualifications more quickly—while Te Kura continues to benefit from cloud-based enhancements.

Te Kura

Sanjay Goyal

Information Resource Group Manager