Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ)

USFQ was D2L’s first client in Latin America and has gradually integrated D2L solutions into all its teaching models, which include classroom, online, and blended learning approaches. The University’s School of Business is a highly rated and internationally recognized educational institution.

The most recent QS global ranking rated San Francisco University of Quito (USFQ) as the leading university in Ecuador. Meanwhile, the Times Higher Education 2019 Latin America leaderboard classified USFQ as the most pioneering institution in terms of “international perspective” in the whole region.

Each year, USFQ campuses receive 8,393 undergraduate and postgraduate students of more than 80 nationalities (including 500 indigenous students and 1,000 international students), 967 professors and other personnel, 10 academic colleges and schools, and 51 vocational programs.

The USFQ School of Business is the number-one school in continuing education. It is the first and only institution in Ecuador to have obtained international accreditation from the International Association for Continuing Education and Training (ACET), a distinction that it has held for three years. This accreditation is conferred on enterprises as large and prestigious as the Disney Institute, the FDA, and NASA—so it’s a matter of pride for the USFQ School of Business that its high quality standards are recognized at an international level.

In 2019, the School obtained its second accreditation, conferred by the International Society for Performance Improvement and Training (ISPI), a leading organization that focuses on productivity and performance enhancements in the education and training sector.

With its focus on international standards and quality measures, the USFQ School of Business is leading the field in digital transformation.

Over the past few years, USFQ has started the process of redesigning its curriculum to ensure the quality and relevance of the education it delivers. It wanted to provide a modern online learning platform that would enable students and professors to achieve their learning goals.

The objective was to digitize the courses of the School of Business in response to globalization and other changes in the education sector. The university decided to modernize its learning platform by working with a partner recognized at the global level.

The School of Business decided to embrace personalized learning to help businesses train their employees, but it realized that it could not achieve this without the help of the right technology partner. After evaluating various solutions for modernizing its learning platform, it selected D2L’s Brightspace platform due to its real-time analytics, flexibility and mobile capabilities.

The support of D2L played a fundamental role in delivering digital transformation at USFQ School of Business. The teams from D2L worked in close collaboration with USFQ to make sure that the migration to Brightspace was successful, and that the institution could take advantage of the opportunities for innovation that the new learning management system offered.

Implementing the Brightspace platform has enabled USFQ School of Business to monitor user experience by administering surveys that assess the students from the teachers’ perspective, and the teachers from the students’ perspective. Brightspace also provides tools and systems that allow the School of Business to consolidate data and analyze satisfaction levels.

USFQ School of Business has realized improvements from being able to apply these findings to its courses and create a continuous feedback loop of learning. Monitoring the user experience and updating the course materials is all done within Brightspace, ensuring that all the content is held in a single platform.

“We love Brightspace because it makes it so easy to follow up on how our learners are getting involved in their classes and how they are doing with their assignments,” says Adela Carrasco, academic coordinator at USFQ School of Business. “It also enables us to see when our professors are logging into the platform and if they are keeping up with grading their students’ papers. Brightspace is a great help.”

For many people, it’s a new experience to log into a single platform and use it to complete their entire curriculum. To get users up to speed quickly, USFQ School of Business relies on the Brightspace platform to make sure that the content it provides is not only interactive, but also relevant to each course and each student.

For example, within Brightspace, students can manage their own forums and conversations to communicate with each other. The Brightspace platform also enables USFQ School of Business to create continuous interaction between teachers and learners: learners can use it to share their progress and difficulties in real time, receive feedback from teachers, and get help with additional content.

The School also uses the platform to make important announcements to students, provide guidelines, share policies, and even sign agreements online: the terms and conditions are uploaded to the platform, where the student can accept them.

One of the biggest advantages that Brightspace has provided for USFQ School of Business is the ease of use of the platform. Other systems require multiple steps to complete basic tasks, while Brightspace saves time for teachers by allowing them to drag and drop content into courses, organize materials easily, and grade papers wherever they are.

One important and novel feature of the Brightspace platform is that once a student completes their program, they can instantly download a virtual certificate that they can share with their peers and coworkers, and even upload to LinkedIn.

“It’s yet another beneficial tool that we can use to satisfy the needs of our students and their companies, thanks to the Brightspace platform,” says María Antonieta Jaramillo, business coordinator at USFQ School of Business.

Today, companies can train their employees without having to worry about setting up their own courses and training methodologies. USFQ School of Business does all the hard work of creating courses and modules that allow students to work at their own pace. The result is a partnership between the academic and business sectors that helps employees keep their knowledge up-to-date and improve their performance at work. It also helps to combat the risk of unemployment by helping employees develop the skills they need to compete in the job market.

“We are convinced that continuous interaction between the teacher, the business school and the students is vital,” says María Antonieta Jaramillo. “That’s what we’ve been able to achieve thanks to the Brightspace platform.”

To quantify the success of its digital learning initiatives, USFQ School of Business measures the relevancy of all its programs. More than 85 percent of course participants agree that 100 percent of what they learn is applicable to their work. This confirms that the school made the right decision to enable innovation in its teaching and learning practices with Brightspace.

Brightspace is also a user-friendly platform. USFQ School of Business has experienced the flexibility it provides in grading and surveys and has been able to adapt the platform to its needs.

Learners at USFQ School of Business are professional people, which is why the institution combines academic experience on the one hand with business expertise and implementation experience on the other. This is the key point for the School of Business, and the main factor that differentiates it from many other universities or businesses that provide continuing education.