e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: D2L

  • D2L Again Misusing Academic Data For Brightspace Marketing Claims

    Update 5/17/16: I made a mistake in my math on the UW Milwaukee improvements. The number of A’s and B’s increased 163% increased 220% for “unprepared” students and 170% for “prepared” students. I apologize for the error.

    Update 7/23: Read this blog post for D2L admission of mistakes and changes to claims.

    At this point I’d say that we have established a pattern of behavior.

    Michael and I have been quite critical of D2L and their pattern of marketing behavior that is misleading and harmful to the ed tech community. Michael put it best:

    I can’t remember the last time I read one of D2L’s announcements without rolling my eyes. I used to have respect for the company, but now I have to make a conscious effort not to dismiss any of their pronouncements out-of-hand. Not because I think it’s impossible that they might be doing good work, but because they force me to dive into a mountain of horseshit in the hopes of finding a nugget of gold at the bottom. Every. Single. Time. I’m not sure how much of the problem is that they have decided that they need to be disingenuous because they are under threat from Instructure or under pressure from investors and how much of it is that they are genuinely deluding themselves. Sadly, there have been some signs that at least part of the problem is the latter situation, which is a lot harder to fix. But there is also a fundamental dishonesty in the way that these statistics have been presented.

    Well, here’s the latest. John Baker put out a blog called This Isn’t Your Dad’s Distance Learning Program with this theme: (more…)

  • 68% of Statistics Are Meaningless, D2L Edition

    Two years ago, I wrote about how D2L’s analytics package looked serious and potentially ground-breaking, but that there were serious architectural issues with the underlying platform that were preventing the product from working properly for customers. Since then, we’ve been looking for signs that the company has dealt with these issues and is ready to deliver something interesting and powerful. And what we’ve seen is…uh…

    …uh…

    Well, the silence has ended. I didn’t get to go to FUSION this year, but I did look at the highlights of the analytics announcements, and they were…

    …they were…

    OK, I’ll be honest. They were incredibly disappointing in almost every way possible, and good examples of a really bad pattern of hype and misdirection that we’ve been seeing from D2L lately.

    (more…)

  • LMS Observations: You had me until you went nihilist

    Mark Drechsler has a fascinating post in response to my recent LMS as minivan about D2L’s retention claims, mostly playing off of this theme:

    I answered another question by saying that the LMS, with multiple billions invested over 17+ years, has not “moved the needle” on improving educational results. I see the value in providing a necessary academic infrastructure that can enable real gains in select programs or with new tools (e.g. adaptive software for remedial math, competency-based education for working adults), but the best the LMS itself can do is get out of the way – do its job quietly, freeing up faculty time, giving students anytime access to course materials and feedback. In aggregate, I have not seen real academic improvements directly tied to the LMS.

    In response, Mark gives “a personal view of my own journey towards LMS nihilism” in a post titled “How I lost my faith in the LMS” that has some excellent points (first go read his whole post, I’ll wait).

    Mark Nihilist.001

    (more…)

  • About Those D2L Claims of LMS Usage Increasing Retention Rates

    In my post last week on the IMS Global Consortium conference #LILI15, I suggested that LMS usage in aggregate has not improved academic performance and noted that John Baker from D2L disagreed.

    John Baker from D2L disagreed on this subject, and he listed off internal data of 25% or more (I can’t remember detail) improved retention when clients “pick the right LMS”. John clarified after the panel the whole correlation / causation issue, but I’d love to see that data backing up this and other claims.

    After the conference I did some checking based on prompts from some helpful readers, and I’m fairly certain that John’s comments referred to Lone Star College – University Park (LSC-UP) and its 24% increase in retention. D2L has been pushing this story recently, first in a blog post and then in a paid webinar hosted by Inside Higher Ed. From the blog post titled “Can an LMS improve retention?” [footnotes and emphasis in original]: (more…)

  • Pitchbook Lists Most Valuable Ed Tech Companies

    Update: Jeez – sorry about the multiple typos (mistakenly showed in thousands instead of millions). Fixed now.

    Pitchbook – a database service for M&A, private equity and venture capital – listed in Hot Topics what they saw as the top ten most valuable ed tech companies based on public valuations ((Note that estimates are as of the end of 2014.)). The definition of startup is a little loose, as one company (D2L) was founded in 1999 and public companies are excluded.

    Below are the market valuation estimates, to which I have added the year each company was founded along with the total funding by each company in parentheses, according to Crunchbase data.

    Company (year founded, funding total)  Market Valuation

    1. Pluralsight (2004, $169m)            $1.0 billion
    2. Instructure (2008, $79m)               $554 million
    3. Lynda.com (1995, $289m)             $456 million
    4. Coursera (2012, $85m)                   $367 million
    5. Open English (2006, $120m)        $350 million
    6. Craftsy (2010, $106m)                   $339 million
    7. D2L (1999, $165m)                        $330 million
    8. Lumos Labs (2005, $68m)           $265 million
    9. Clever (2012, $44m)                      $247 million
    10. Edmodo (2008, $88m)                 $236 million

    (more…)

  • Interesting Comment on Pearson’s LMS Plans From Customer

    On April 1, long-time eCollege (aka Pearson’s LearningStudio) customer Texas Christian University (TCU) gave an update on their LMS selection process to the student newspaper TCU360. In this article there was an interesting statement ((Statement from the original article before it was updated.)) worth exploring [emphasis added].

    “eCollege” will soon be a thing of the past.

    TCU has narrowed its search for a Learning Management System to two platforms, Blackboard and Desire2Learn (D2L).

    “We’ve had feedback, from faculty specifically, that it’s time for change,” Assistant Provost of Educational Technology and Faculty Development Romy Hughes said.

    TCU has used Pearson’s Learning Studio system since 1999.

    “Pearson is out of the learning management system game,” Hughes said. “We need something to evolve with the Academy of Tomorrow and where we’re moving to at TCU.”

    That last comment got my attention. (more…)

  • Dammit, the LMS

    Count De Monet: I have come on the most urgent of business. It is said that the people are revolting!

    King Louis: You said it; they stink on ice.

    – History of the World, Part I

    Jonathan Rees discovered a post I wrote about the LMS in 2006 and, in doing so, discovered that I was writing about LMSs in 2006. I used to write about the future of the LMS quite a bit. I hardly ever do anymore, mostly because I find the topic to be equal parts boring and depressing. My views on the LMS haven’t really changed in the last decade. And sadly, LMSs themselves haven’t changed all that much either. At least not in the ways that I care about most. At first I thought the problem was that the technology wasn’t there to do what I wanted to do gracefully and cost-effectively. That excuse doesn’t exist anymore. Then, once the technology arrived as Web 2.0 blossomed—remember that term?—I thought the problem was that there was little competition in the LMS market and therefore little reason for LMS providers to change their platforms. That’s not true anymore either. And yet the pace of change is still glacial. I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that the LMS is the way it is because a critical mass of faculty want it to be that way.

    Jonathan seems to think that the LMS will go away soon because faculty can find everything they need on the naked internet. I don’t see that happening any time soon. But the reasons why seem to get lost in the perennial conversations about how the LMS is going to die any day now. As near as I can remember, the LMS has been about to die any day now since at least 2004, which was roughly when I started paying attention to such things.

    And so it comes to pass that, with great reluctance, I take up my pen once more to write about the most dismal of topics: the future of the LMS.

    (more…)