Michael and I have made several specific criticisms of D2L’s marketing claims lately culminating in this blog post about examples based on work at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) and California State University at Long Beach (CSULB). I understand that other ed tech vendors make marketing claims that cannot always be tied to reality, but these […]
John-Baker
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 […]
Interview With Desire2Learn CEO John Baker
As promised, here’s the interview: I have a couple of take-aways from both the interview and the conference. First of all, I was astonished at how much D2L is growing. Based on what I saw at the Sakai conference, what the market surveys have been saying, and what I know from talking to people, it […]
Is Blackboard's Lawyer Calling D2L's Customers?
Here’s an interesting bit from D2L’s patent blog: Clients have been calling us to let us know that Matthew Small, General Counsel of Blackboard, has been calling them. From what we understand, his purpose appears to be twofold: (1) to encourage clients to switch to Blackboard ; and (2) to create FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) […]
Why Desire2Learn CEO John Baker is Our Hero
While most folks paying attention to the Blackboard patent scandal have sympathy for Desire2Learn, I’m not sure how many people realize just how altruistic the company is being by fighting the patent. From a purely financial perspective, it is clearly in D2L’s interest to settle and pay a royalty, even though doing so would harm […]