Case Study: Durham District School Board achieves centralized, on-demand professional development with D2L Brightspace

Simplifying how professional development is delivered

Durham District School Board (DDSB), a K–12 district northeast of Toronto with roughly 135 schools and about 12,000 staff, needed a single, organized way to deliver and track professional development—especially mandatory health and safety training—and to support remote learning during the pandemic. Before the Hub, PD was fragmented across face-to-face sessions, the staff portal, and scattered online offerings, making onboarding and completion tracking inefficient for HR and departmental teams.

DDSB launched a dedicated D2L Brightspace Professional Learning Hub that presents personalized landing pages, uses Learning Groups for automatic enrollments, and leverages Quizzes, Awards, Intelligent Agents and other Brightspace tools to deliver on-demand, role-specific courses. The Hub now hosts 200+ courses and has driven major adoption: 19,000 users, 170,000 logins and 80,000 awards to date, with substantial year‑over‑year increases and measurable outcomes such as thousands of staff earning district-issued devices—streamlining training and saving staff time.

Durham District School Board

Linda Ford-DeCunha

Education Officer