I’ve been super-busy with a consulting gig over the last few weeks and have fallen off the wagon with my blogging. This is one of the many reasons that I am grateful to have Phil as my prolific yet profound co-publisher and that we have attracted a group of terrific featured bloggers.
Anyway, I thought I would get back to business with a long-overdue post about D2L’s learning analytics product, called “Insights.” There are several pieces to the product, but I’m going to focus on the component that they call the Student Success System. I have blogged from time to time on Purdue’s Course Signals project, (now commercialized in an offering from Elucian), as having set the bar for student retention analytics. More recently, I wrote about Blackboard’s Retention Center, which is clearly following in Purdue’s footsteps. My impression of Retention Center is that it is a reasonable Version 1 product that captures some but not all of the value of Course Signals.
D2L’s Student Success System also follows in Purdue’s footsteps. But rather than simply playing catch-up, I would call it an incremental but meaningful improvement over Course Signals in most aspects. From what I can tell based on initial conversations with D2L about the product details, this now appears to be the system to beat. (I reserve the right to change my opinion based on implementation experiences from clients, which are particularly important for this product.)