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July is typically the busiest month for LMS user conferences, and over the past few weeks we've attended Anthology Together in Orlando (for Blackboard Learn), InstructureCon Online (for Canvas), and D2L Fusion in Boston (for Brightspace). Today's newsletter will focus on D2L Fusion.
D2L Fusion Context
D2L Fusion, held July 20-22nd in Boston, was an interesting, upbeat conference that was the first user conference after the company's big win with the State University of New York (SUNY, selected in late Spring 2021, announced publicly in Oct 2021, with implementations in 2022 and 2023). I noted at the time of the the announcement:
This is a big win for D2L, probably the most significant since their win at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) in 2018, when Brightspace replaced Blackboard Learn. We have called out in our market analysis service that D2L Brightspace has increased its wins for new clients in the past 3 – 4 years. This news from SUNY will likely cause many LMS evaluations to take D2L more seriously up front in the process, which has been the Achilles’ heel for that company. It is quite common for D2L to be overlooked or just thrown in as a perfunctory choice at least until the vendor demos and live meetings take place. In the case of Alabama Community Colleges, for example, several sources told me that the evaluation team was told that D2L was not a serious competitor to consider.Put another way, Canvas is not the only game in town for schools looking to migrate to a new LMS, and with SUNY as well as SNHU and New York University, we are seeing significant examples where D2L wins head-to-head. I have had several people ask me lately if D2L’s wins are signs of pushback against Canvas after the Thoma Bravo acquisition, and for the most part my answer is no. Canvas is still strong, and where D2L wins, the decisions tend to be based on D2L’s merits – its product redesign, its improved customer support, and its ability to listen to customers during the sales process. To me, this is a good sign as we need real competition in the LMS market.
Let's face it, D2L has always been a difficult company to describe. Of the current major LMSs, only Anthology (Blackboard) Learn's 1998 founding is older than D2L's in 1999 (originally named Desire2Learn, rebranded to D2L in 2014), D2L started having a big impact on market with 2003's win at the University System of Wisconsin, and the company successfully stood up to Blackboard in a 3-year patent infringement lawsuit in 2006-09. Yet for a long time D2L remained somewhat unknown and not top of mind for LMS selections - oh yeah, those guys. After the win in the patent lawsuit, and after large funding rounds in 2012-13, it seemed like it was D2L's time to shine, but by that time Canvas was in the process of taking over the market. For several years, D2L leadership seemed stuck in denial over the market changes brought on by Canvas, including a growing market expectation that major system outages were no longer acceptable, especially for one in four customers for up to three days. D2L had money and should have been growing, but that would require real product investment as well as fully moving to cloud hosting, which took several years before the company fully embraced the need for change.Around late 2015 / early 2016, D2L did just that, and focused on the tough work of redesign and improvement. By 2017, we at MindWires had noted in our mid-year report the revived product design work on the Brightspace LMS and even called out market share changes.
The dominant growth of Canvas has changed, with D2L Brightspace having a similar number of implementations this year; the last time Canvas did not clearly lead commercial vendors in new implementations was the second half of 2012.
D2L was not able to immediately build on that early momentum, partially as a lot of the success came from Pearson LearningStudio end-of-life defections, based on a one-time event. Cue three more years of isolated wins at Southern New Hampshire University, New York University, and northern Europe but without significant market share improvements.
In our year-end 2020 report, however, we noticed another change.
D2L’s win rate in the market has increased now that Brightspace is 100% cloud- based, with accelerating market share gains in late 2020 appearing to leave that company poised for even bigger wins in 2021.
This time, there have been signs that D2L is leveraging its improved products, services, and sales processes to make a bigger impact in the market, as can be seen in the following chart through mid-year 2022.
Percentage of Higher Ed New Implementations per Year by Vendor (North America, Europe, Middle East, Latin America, Oceania)
Yes, a lot of those 2022 wins come from a single selection at SUNY, but there are also other wins in northern Europe. Instructure as a company is still performing quite well with its own wins, but D2L seems to be coming on strong. The improvements leading up to the 2021 / 22 changes in market share took many years, and perhaps this time the market share results will change more than just a few points here or there.
This historical context for D2L is important to understand the optimism seen at D2L Fusion.
Product News
In Justin Menard's post on D2L Fusion at LISTedTECH.com, he noted the similarities to a Tableau conference in terms of hands-on learning, and he remarked on the optimism from the users.
During the D2L Solutions Spotlight presentation, they presented new features of their solutions, including Creator+ and Wave. The participants were ecstatic. As I did not understand all the new features, it was surprising to see the reactions. I looked around and focused on the name tags: they were not D2L employees. It had the feel of an Apple presentation, but without Apple employees involved.
Justin was right that Creator+ was one of the biggest news at the conference from a product perspective.
Creator+ replaces the Engagement+ add-on, and it streamlines and improves content creation with templates and themes as well as deeper integration with video tools. I'm not going to attempt to fully describe the tool, but I will note that the demos and conference reaction indicated they were hitting the right notes with users.
The one negative with Creator+ is it being an add-on and not part of the core Brightspace platform. Creator+ makes Brightspace better, and I wonder if there will be pushback as users want to try it out and adopt the new tool.
The other product news that impressed me was the new approach to make Accessible Image Hotspots. The idea is to leverage an adjustable grid with micro-alt-tags to enable keyboard navigation and access to screen readers (I think I have that right).
This is an impressive feature, but perhaps more importantly it is a proof point on D2L's long commitment to accessibility, and pushing the boundaries on accessible capabilities.
There were other news items from the conference, including the release of improved / redesigned Quizzes and enhancements to Assignments, among others.
Overall
D2L Fusion was a successful conference in several regards, and it was difficult to find the weak points. While it is premature to extrapolate half-year numbers and declare that D2L will continue to lead in wins and new implementations, there are signs that D2L is starting to see market share improvements that could go beyond isolated big wins.And the mood of users attending the conference, along with our observations, show a company that is improving in many areas.