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Tag: D2L Fusion

  • D2L Fusion 2018: Product improvements and potential signs of addressing challenges

    D2L Fusion 2018: Product improvements and potential signs of addressing challenges

    This year’s D2L Fusion conference in Houston carved out a space somewhere between the carnival atmosphere of InstructureCon in Keystone and the subdued feel of BbWorld in Orlando (note: we plan another post on each of these conferences to share more details of our observations). This  was the perfect note to hit for where D2L is in its evolution as an educational technology company. A number of things seem to be falling in place for D2L ((Disclosure: Blackboard, Instructure, D2L, and Schoology are subscribers to our LMS Market Analysis service. Blackboard, Instructure, D2L, and Pearson are sponsoring participants in our Empirical Educator Project.)) with its LMS product, but we will have to see if the recently expanded management team will be able to address the ongoing challenges that D2L faces with customer experience and expectations.

    Like Blackboard and Instructure, D2L is in the middle of a transition partially driven by financial considerations. In D2L’s case, the issue is that the two rounds of $165 million aggregate funding in 2012 / 13 lead to expectations of larger market gains. In August of 2017 we shared that “D2L is on a roll, racking up significant client wins in higher education, and the company shows real signs of change in its ability to truly listen to and empathize with customers.” Two months ago we described D2L’s concerted effort to move customers to the cloud and some promising improvements surfacing in the new Daylight user experience. Despite these improvements, however, D2L has lost some marquee customers such as the University of Wisconsin system to offset some of the wins, and the company has remained steady or made slight gains in North America, European and Latin American LMS market share.

    At D2L Fusion, our goal was to get a better read on how actual customers and prospects are reacting to the cloud deployment move and streamlined user experience that we have observed. A second goal we had was to get a better sense of whether D2L will be able to improve its customer service and delivery on promises made to customers.

    Reactions to Cloud and User Experience

    From customers we spoke to at D2L Fusion, the value of the move to the cloud as well as user experience improvements have provided breakthroughs. On the cloud front, D2L now has upwards of 98% of their customer base either hosted through Amazon Web Services (AWS) or in the company’s data centers.  According to a company spokesperson, 55% of what they describe as cloud implementations are hosted by AWS, the remainder by D2L in their leased data centers. All new implementations moving forward will be hosted by AWS and by fall 2019 D2L estimates that nearly all implementations will be on the AWS infrastructure. This will be a significant achievement for a legacy on-premises software provider to make this transition. From our June post:

    D2L has long worked on managed hosting options, but in late 2013 the company introduced Continuous Delivery where software releases are pushed to customers incrementally, such that customers would jointly run the latest versions of Brightspace, their LMS. This move is important, as one primary benefit of cloud deployment is to remove the explosion of software configurations and versions that make it expensive and difficult to diagnose and fix bugs and to release new features.

    Three years later in 2016 D2L announced their move to AWS for cloud deployment.

    At Fusion 2018 we saw a continuation of this strategy, and we heard largely positive reception from customers and prospects, and we are not hearing the grumblings from customers as was evident in late 2016 / early 2017. We should also note that this move to the cloud is more aggressive than that being made by Blackboard and Learn SaaS, but more on that in a future post.

    As for the new user experience and recent changes in product design, it’s useful to first establish context for what’s been happening internally at D2L. About three years ago D2L brought in a new chief operating officer, Cheryl Ainoa, and a new VP of Product, David Koehn. One of their goals was to turn the product development process on its head and, drum roll, put the users first. This means engaging with users, listening to users, understanding their problems and viewing them as partners in the effort to deliver better software. It also means solving the small things that annoy users on a daily basis and shifting away from feature releases as the key metric of progress. For companies that have been engaged in agile methodology and iterative development, this likely sounds basic. For D2L, it was a fundamental cultural shift in how development is done. At this year’s Fusion, we are seeing concrete signs that change has taken root both with the company and with customers.

    Daylight Experience is the name for D2L’s redesign of its streamlined user interface. When it was first announced in early 2017, we were somewhat skeptical as the initial changes were evident in different fonts and cleaner look-and-feel but not significant improvements in the workflow for faculty and students.

    As time goes on and we see more advanced demos, our view is changing. The Daylight Experience does have some real improvements not just in look-and-feel but in fewer and more intuitive clicks to get the same job done. A major focus on the Emerald Release this summer (in time for D2L Fusion users conference) is more fully encouraging usage of the activity stream for higher ed clients (this feature was initially targeted at K-12 market but has been adapted for colleges and universities).

    The product showcase slide that arguably got the most enthusiastic response from the crowd was the one that focused on the small changes that users had been clamoring after for years – things like “Due Dates in Manage Dates Tool”, “Fixed Headers in Grades”, “Learning Groups”.

    New features from D2L Fusion conference

    These are not sexy, headline-making announcements, but they matter to users. D2L has long been viewed as a platform for people and institutions that like to have a lot of control over how to configure and run an LMS; however, the breadth and complexity of options often came at the expense of an intuitive user experience. While D2L has had a solid product for a sub-set of the market for years, they have had difficulty being viewed as ‘intuitive’ or ‘easy to use’, at least since the advent of Canvas and the resultant change in user expectations. The streamlined design afforded by the Daylight Experience, and the progressive disclosure of more advanced features, could change this situation if they’re able to get it in front of potential customers for a serious look.

    Customer Experience and Expectations

    On the second question regarding customer service and delivery on promises there are several reasons to be upbeat, but also reason for concern. Several new customers we spoke with, from Europe, Latin America and North America, all spoke about “partnership” as being a key reason for their choosing D2L over the competition. During lengthy procurement processes, these institutions got the sense that D2L was eager to engage and work with them to achieve their goals with broad service offerings as well as an eagerness to shape product development to suit these new clients.

    That said, D2L has a mixed record on follow through. A number of sources we have spoken with over the past 6-12 months have discussed a pattern of the company over-promising and under-delivering when it comes to implement promised changes. For example, these sources have told us they went into the relationship with this same expectation of a partnership, of having a voice in product direction, only to find out they are having trouble getting D2L staff to respond in a timely manner. It is not clear yet on how prevalent these concerns are, but we do believe they will need to be addressed in order for D2L to make material changes in overall market share.

    D2L has made two key hires in recent months, seemingly in recognition of potential market opportunities as well as persistent internal challenges. One targets growth, the other customer satisfaction. Puneet Arora, a former sales executive with several SaaS companies, has been brought in as chief revenue officer, and April Oman, a veteran customer success executive with a number of enterprise software companies, has been added as as Senior VP of Customer Experience. Arora is new to the education space but seems to be asking a lot of the right questions, and his task is to grow the user base in a meaningful way. Expect to see some changes in how D2L positions itself and who they try to sell to, shifting the balance away from administrators and towards faculty and student end users. Oman’s role is a new one and speaks to the need to develop a stronger relationships and partnerships with customers. This will be critical as D2L tries to establish themselves as much more than a software solution and as they attempt to improve customer experience.

    Better Position but Needing Results

    The center of gravity of D2L’s executive team is more diffuse than it used to be. Much of the longer-tenured leadership of D2L is based out of the Kitchener, Ontario home office: John Baker, CEO; Nick Oddson, CTO; Melissa Howatson, CFO; Jeremy Auger, SVP Strategy; and Ken Chapman, VP of Market Research. Ainoa, Koehn, Arora, and Oman (the new hires), however, are all in the Bay Area in California, and Tracy Strauss, SVP Marketing, is out of Los Angeles. There seems to be a deliberate approach to finding new ways of thinking from a broader field of expertise.

    D2L appears to have largely revamped its approach to product development that is more responsive to customer needs, and is putting resources into building partnerships. Yet they have not made the market gains envisioned after winning the Blackboard patent wars and then raising two large rounds of financing. We still see a two-horse race for new implementations (LMS product switches) in higher education, largely shared between Canvas and D2L, but the second horse that is looking better than it used to still needs to make further adjustments and run faster.

  • LMS Revival: D2L picking up new customers and showing they can listen

    LMS Revival: D2L picking up new customers and showing they can listen

    D2L the company and Brightspace the company’s LMS are undergoing something of a revival in the past year. It’s not as if they have dropped in terms of market share – in fact the have a history of strong client retention, losing few customers – but the early 2010’s did not lead to rapid customer growth as they had expected after raising two rounds of a combined $165 million in 2012 and 2014. If you read that second post you’ll find that I stated that their growth claims “defied logic” at the time. Recently, however, D2L is on a roll, racking up significant client wins in higher education, and the company shows real signs of change and its ability to truly listen to and empathize with customers.

    As I sat down to write my analysis of the D2L Fusion users conference and what it meant to the Brightspace LMS, I noticed that several of the same themes I described last year applied to this year’s observations – just updated in terms of effect on customers and whether the changes seem to be sticking. To explain my current thoughts it is useful to start with commentary from last year.

    Update on Listening and Product Changes

    From last year’s post:

    As I have described to several executives at D2L, there is an interesting gap between the progress we have seen with the company’s product improvements and the reaction we hear from many of their customers. With the tighter integration with LeaP and the improved usability, particularly in content authoring, I would have expected to hear more customers react to the changes. But when talking directly to many of the institutions using the Brightspace LMS, staff describe D2L as if the company and product line had not changed in several years. What is not clear is whether this gap is due the company missing the mark (and my judgement of improvements not aligning with what colleges and universities want) or whether there is just a lag where it will take time for most customers to believe in and take advantage the new product designs and features.

    2016 has been an eventful year for D2L. [Chief Operating Officer] COO Cheryl Ainoa, a longtime veteran of Yahoo! and most recently Intuit, joined the company in April. Although this move was not advertised through press releases or even blog posts, I believe this is a significant change to how the company operates. [snip]

    And this gets back to the gap noted in the first paragraph. When I talk to people at schools migrating from D2L or considering whether to migrate, I do not hear much about the recent product changes or the new management described above. For several of these schools, the issue isn’t even whether they like or dislike the recent product and management changes, it’s as if these changes are a non issue in their decision-making. No conclusions yet, just noting the gap.

    What I noticed since last year are two updates to the above analysis.

    Listening – Besides adding a new COO, D2L has made several other executive-level hires in the product in the past two years, and to me it seems like we are seeing a new way of thinking largely caused by this new group. The interviews with executives were much more consistent than in past years, and there is a new focus on actively listening to customers. It’s not that D2L didn’t have conversations before; it’s more that they didn’t know how to truly listen and empathize.Part of this change according to D2L exec interviews was that in the past it was easier to talk to CIOs, but now they are learning how to talk to faculty and end users. All interviewees seemed to be singing from the same hymnbook. For the most part.

    Narrow but Excellent – The product focus is less on big-news features and more on small-news everyday items. In the past D2L has seemed too interested in being able to do some chest-thumping “We’ve got CBE. We’ve got Predictive Analytics. We’ve got Adaptive Learning.” while missing something on what current and even prospective customers need in their daily lives. The new focus is more on taking the drudgery out of end-user activities with a mantra of “narrow but excellent”. They are trying to fall in love with problem solving more than in features, even if these problems can be non-sexy.

    One example from the Fusion users conference was making it easier to shuffle questions within a quiz. Sounds trivial, but Canius College staff have a description that captures the essence of the change. Yes, you could have done this before, but it was a chore. Now it’s much easier to the point that more people will want to use it.

    Later this month, D2L will introduce a nice feature for Canisius faculty who use their online quiz/exam tool. D2L’s quiz engine has powerful features for randomizing question order in a quiz or exam, and can even deliver a subset of questions at random from larger question banks. This is nice, but until now it was a bit of a chore if you only wanted to randomize delivery of, say, five to ten questions, since you needed to install those questions in the question library, and then import them into a random section within the quiz. Along the way, there were a lot of clicks and the process wasn’t always so intuitive. With the update coming late July, D2L has installed a checkbox feature within the quiz editor: “Shuffle order of questions at the quiz level.” Simply add your questions directly in the quiz, click that box, and the quiz will deliver those questions in a random order to each student.

    The Brightspace product demonstrations during the conference keynote got significant spontaneous reactions from crowd (along with hallway discussions) likely reflecting this improved ability to listen
    to customers. And the improvement to quiz question shuffling led to one of the biggest reactions.

    Here are the major product announcements / new functionality as of this summer:

    Another product change worth noting is the new Data Hub. This is a re-architecture of how data can be exported to allow bulk access to data, either manual or through application program interfaces (APIs). The announcement is significant as we have noted in the past that D2L has had challenges getting data reliably and quickly to customers. Data export is not an easy problem to solve due to the complex technical challenges involved in analytics, and D2L had its share of customer challenges several years ago. However, we heard from at least one customer with early access to the Data Hub that their situation is improving. Sounds trivial, but this could be significant. We will have to keep a close watch on this development.

    Update on Market Share

    In last year’s post I noted:

    On the sales front, D2L has experienced somewhat slow but steady growth in new US / Canadian higher education clients as seen below, but they have not had the big-name wins of the caliber of UMUC, Tennessee Board of Regents, University System of Georgia, as they had 2013 and earlier.

    They had won Kaplan University as of last year, but since then they’ve also won with EDMC, Saint Leo University, University of Cardiff, University of Ottawa, Bournemouth University, and most recently Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), among others. In other words, over the past 12 months D2L has won several big-name accounts in higher education. ((Disclosure: I advised UMUC during their strategy and evaluation process in 2011-2012. Bournemouth, SNHU, and D2L are subscribers to our LMS market analysis service.))

    The net effect has been a dramatic uptick in the percentage of new implementations (schools switching from another LMS to a new one) for D2L. The following chart looks at new implementations in North America (US and Canada) and Europe highlighting the top four academic LMS solutions (Blackboard, Moodle, Canvas, D2L) in half-year increments, with a remarkable spike in D2L’s activities in the past 12 months.

    This data aligns with our anecdotal conversations where, more often than not, there seems to be a pattern of new implementations going to Canvas or D2L – an emerging two-horse race for new implementations.

    Part of the reason for the recent acceleration and for the unknown future is the fact that quite a few of D2L’s wins for Brightspace have been large systems (single decision affecting multiple campuses, e.g. Kaplan University) or large enrollment single institutions (e.g. SNHU). And many of these are for schools with large, centrally-managed online operations. The large systems have benefitted from the Pearson LearningStudio (aka eCollege) end-of-life forcing many for-profit systems to change LMS, with that activity mostly running its course by the end of this calendar year. Big wins, but quite dependent on a small number of deals.

    The recent win at SNHU is very important to understand, however. It is not driven by end-of-life (SNHU moving off of Blackboard Learn in a voluntary migration), and this comes from a long-time Blackboard customer. Quite often people equate SNHU with its College for America (CfA), one of the leading competency-based education (CBE) programs in the country. But SNHU is much bigger than CfA, and it is the fastest-growing university in North America overall. According to an article last year in EDUCAUSE Review, SNHU’s online enrollment has grown at 253% per year over the past several years.

    It certainly seems probable that this increase in market wins is related to the change in how D2L listens to customers and the resultant change in emphasis from big-news capabilities towards smaller-news but customer-pleasing improvements to everyday functionality. It is important that Brightspace has such a deep feature set, but have the company understand customer everyday needs is more important.

    What we do know is that D2L has increased its number of higher education wins over the past 12 months. What we don’t know is whether and how strongly this trend will continue.

    Update on Conference Attendance

    This was the first on-site Fusion visit we’ve had in a couple of years, leading to the title and commentary in last year’s post “Changes at D2L: A second-hand view from users conference”:

    The reason I titled this post as a second-hand view is that D2L is the only major LMS provider (and I include Moodle and Sakai here) that discouraged our participation in their users conference (and we did not attend), citing concerns over direct conversations with attendees without getting their permission first. Other providers are happy to allow and even encourage this type of interaction. In the nature of full disclosure, we think it is important for the reader to understand this difference in access.

    Michael and I value the ability to not just hear official presentations and get in-depth demos, but to also go, roam, and talk to customers.

    True to their word, D2L management have changed their approach on how analysts can be involved in their conference. This year we were invited to attend (along with others), and more importantly, we were allowed to freely talk to the users and prospective users at the conference. I even had several people from D2L pass me in the hallway and ask if I was getting the access to customers that I needed. I did.

    This change aligns with the aforementioned improvements and focus on how D2L as a company listens to customers. Less control and more desire to learn (sorry, couldn’t help myself). A welcome change.

    Open Questions

    While most of what we’ve seen in the market and at the conference has been an improvement over the past few years, it is important to understand the tall order of the changes being made.

    Learning to listen, especially to end users, really represents a cultural change, and these changes are not easy. They take a lot of management time and energy to implement, and they take patience. Will these changes take hold and further permeate the organization? Certainly we’re seeing results over the past 12 months, but companies have plenty of pressures to fall back into old habits.

    In terms of market positioning, the competition is not standing still. We’re also seeing improvements coming from Blackboard’s change in executive team, and we’re seeing Instructure to continue their strong improvements to Canvas and their support. New entrants like Schoology and older solutions like Moodle are also improving, albeit more slowly than the big commercial vendors. Further complicating the matter, a lot of D2L’s new business came from a handful of large decisions. Will D2L’s market momentum of new implementations continue, particularly in North America and Europe? I expect we’ll learn a lot when we look at the data at the end of this calendar year.