Case Study: South Island Distance Education School (SIDES) more than doubles course creation and personalizes distance learning with D2L Brightspace

Bringing students and teachers together with engaging distance learning

South Island Distance Education School (SIDES) serves about 3,000 K–12 students across British Columbia, offering high-quality distance learning to students from many districts. When the province rolled out a new curriculum, SIDES faced a major challenge: nearly all courses needed revision and many paper-based materials had to be redesigned for online delivery, all while supporting year‑round continuous enrollment and running old and new course versions in parallel.

SIDES adopted D2L’s Brightspace to build and deliver flexible, engaging online courses quickly. The platform more than doubled course creation capacity (50 new/revised courses in ~2.5 years), reduced administrative workload so teachers could focus on students, and enabled personalized, interactive learning through features like discussions, rubrics and a learning object repository—resulting in smoother teacher transitions, higher student engagement and improved outcomes.

South Island Distance Education School (SIDES)

karen Flello

Principal