e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: U-Pace

  • Giving D2L Credit Where Credit Is Due

    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 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…)

  • 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…)