Case Study: La Cité achieves earlier identification of at‑risk students and 60% higher faculty adoption with D2L Brightspace

Early identification of students improves retention rates

La Cité, a French-language college of applied arts and technology in Ottawa, faced flat enrollment and high student attrition in a competitive bilingual market. Past attempts to spot at‑risk students—an off‑the‑shelf early-warning system, manual midterm reviews, and an underused LMS (≈50% adoption)—failed to identify problems early enough, leaving interventions too late and administrative processes inefficient.

La Cité built a custom “Savoir” student‑success layer on the Brightspace platform to capture faculty qualitative observations via a simple red/yellow/green status in week three (and week six). The change drove much higher faculty engagement (about a 60% improvement to nearly 80% adoption), moved risk detection from week eight to week three, cut student‑status meetings from three hours to 30 minutes, delivered real‑time individualized report cards to students, and produced strong predictive results (week‑three red students had ~50% chance of failing; green students had a 91% pass rate).

La Cité

Philippe Proulx

Director of Student Success Services