Michael and I have made several specificcriticisms 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 examples cross a line. They misuse and misrepresent academic outcomes data – whether public research-based on internal research – and essentially take credit for their technology “delivering results”.
This week brought welcome updates from D2L that go a long way towards addressing the issues we raised. As of Monday, I noticed that the ‘Why Brightspace? Results’ page now has links to supporting material for each claim, and the UWM claim has been reworded. Today, D2L released a blog post explaining these changes and admitting the mistakes. D2L even changed the web page to allow text selection for copy / paste. From the blog post: (more…)
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.
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 was already clear to me going in that there’s a big shift happening in the LMS market. I expected to see D2L benefiting from that. But I wasn’t prepared to see the number of new clients they’re on-boarding. I’m trying to get a list to illustrate the size of the growth. In his keynote, John had three slides’ worth of new logos. These aren’t expanded client relationships, which is the kind of thing that Blackboard tends to highlight these days. These are new clients.
Second, the economic downturn is affecting the market, but the effects are somewhat unpredictable. John’s story about PASSHE, a system with fourteen different universities, migrating to D2L in a couple of months, is remarkable. There’s only one thing that can drive a fractious group of state colleges to act that quickly in unison: a budget crisis.
And finally, I do see a vision for the future of the LMS emerging from D2L’s development work (although it’s hard to convey a clear sense of it in the interview format). It’s a vision that is significantly different in some ways from Sakai’s, Moodle’s, or Instructure’s. My sense is that it’s also different than Blackboard’s, but I’m not familiar enough with the details of Blackboard 9.1 and their roadmap to say so with a great deal of confidence. Desire2Learn is headed straight into the thicket of some thorny cultural change management problems at the university. Adopting and sharing learning objectives, sharing learning content, taking a systemic approach to ePorfolios, discovering metrics in student activity and performance data—each of these efforts individually is hard to sell in a university culture and results in failure more often than success. D2L appears to be betting that the problems are actually easier to solve together than separately because you can get synergies from integrating the technologies behind them. It’s not clear to me whether they’ve fully articulated their approach that way, even to themselves, but it is, in fact, what they appear to be trying to do.
I have more to say about what I learned about the conference, including about the company’s announcements about their mobile plans and how they stack up against the other market entrants, but I also have a Jim Farmer post, a post about another new LMS entrant called NIXTY, and probably the most important Sakai conference post to get up as well. And next week I’ll be at Campus Technology all week, which both limits the amount of blogging time I have and will undoubtedly provide fodder for new posts.
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) with respect to alternative products and services in the eLearning space.
From what we gather, he has been making statements that are not supported by the record in the Court or by the actions of the Patent & Trademark Office. If your organization is called, we invite you to suggest to Mr. Small that we are always willing to engage in an open dialogue with you and him.
We remain confident that Learning Environment version 8.3 is an appropriate design-around to the patent claims – as we announced nearly one month ago. We also remain confident that the patent’s claims are invalid and that the Courts and the PTO will ultimately invalidate the patent.
As there is no www.factcheck.org for this litigation, we continue to encourage you to review the documents and the facts. We are happy to discuss any questions that any client, or other interested people, may have. Just let us know!
It’s unsurprising that an aggressive company engaged in a lawsuit with its competitor would use the suit to try to poach customers. But I’ve never heard of a company having their lawyer act as a sales guy. If it’s true, it certainly demonstrates a pretty high level of chutzpah.
I’m very curious to find out more. If you’ve received a call like this or know anybody who has, let me know. I’m particularly interested in who called and in what factual claims they made about the legal situation.
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 the rest of the community. I’d like to lay out exactly why I think Desire2Learn is doing an enormous public service and what we can all do to help ensure that their good behavior pays off in the marketplace.
