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D2L Fusion 2026: Four Signals Shaping the LMS Market
Every LMS conference brings a wave of new features. But the real story is not the feature list. It is what those announcements tell us about where the entire market is actually going. At D2L Fusion 2026, the roadmap was not just a laundry list of tech upgrades and AI enhancements. It signaled a major…
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Blackboard, D2L, Instructure: the Future of AI in LMS
Last month, Anthology, D2L, and Instructure used their annual conferences to outline upcoming product roadmaps and long-term strategies. Moodle will do the same at its own event in September. Together, these gatherings highlight where the LMS market is headed. What stands out isn’t just the new features being announced, but the bigger bets each vendor…
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D2L Fusion 2025: Key Takeaways from the Solutions Spotlight
At the D2L Fusion 2025 conference in Savannah, Georgia, the company shared a wide range of updates—new features, AI-powered tools, and continued efforts to support both education and workforce learning. Here’s a quick roundup of what stood out from the Solutions Spotlight. 1. New Features and Platform Enhancements D2L rolled out several updates to Brightspace…
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D2L Fusion 2024: The Role of the LMS in Transforming Teaching and Learning
Educational technology conferences share the same aspects. Attendees hear ambitious keynote talks and flashy feature announcements, participate in deep-dive sessions and networking opportunities, and navigate huge hotels and long lines for coffee. However, this year’s D2L Fusion conference—held in Toronto—was different in two ways. First, the organizers added an element of local charm to all…
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Our Take on Learning Management Vendor Conferences (D2L, Anthology, Instructure, and Moodle)
Our data shows that, on average, institutions retain their learning management systems for just under eight and a half years and that, overall, implementations have slowed over the past ten years. Given these findings, learning management systems vendors face significant pressure to differentiate their products by highlighting existing features or launching new ones to convince…
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D2L: Transforming How the World Learns
From a small LMS company gaining customers mostly from Canadian institutions 20 years ago to the second most implemented learning management system since the pandemic across North America, D2L (previously known as Desire2Learn) shows that David can become a contender to Goliath. The Inception D2L was established in 1999 by John Baker, a Canadian entrepreneur…
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My Take Away From the D2L Fusion Conference
I was invited to attend this year’s D2L Fusion Conference. This was my first D2L conference. It was held in Boston (Mass.), July 20-22, 2022. Instead of welcoming the regular 1,000 participants, the conference hosted around 700 attendees. The attendance drop is due, you guess it, to the COVID-19 virus and the travel difficulties it brings.…
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Ellucian-D2L Expanded Partnership
The last few weeks were worthy of a Hollywood movie for D2L. First, they announced at the end of September 2021 that they will soon go public. Then, we learned in mid-October that their initial public offering (IPO) would value them at over US$1-billion. And, as the icing on the cake, Ellucian expanded its partnership…
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SUNY to Switch to D2L: What is the Impact for the LMS Market
Last week, SUNY announced that it had selected D2L Brightspace as a common LMS throughout the entire university system. With more than 400,000 students enrolled at SUNY, switching to this system could have a ripple effect on the LMS market. Following the SUNY announcement, we wanted to look at the LMS new implementations over the…
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Open Source in HigherEd Isn’t Going Away
Last week, I presented the webinar titled “The Future of Open Source in HigherEd: What the Data Tells Us” to the Apereo Foundation on the current state of open source in HigherEd. My starting premise was simple: In an era dominated by cloud-native SaaS, is open source still relevant? I expected the answer to be…
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InstructureCon 2026: An Empire Trying to Stay Rebel
I just got back from Louisville for InstructureCon 2026, and the atmosphere was a mix of celebratory community and high-stakes damage control. It is a different vibe when you are the undisputed market leader with a target on your back. For years, Instructure grew by being the “rebel alliance” fighting the “evil empire,” but now…
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K-12 LMS Market Update & Insights: May 2026
Over the past decade, the K-12 Learning Management System (LMS) market has undergone significant consolidation and shifting user preferences. Our historical data shows that while some legacy systems have steadily declined, a clear trio of dominant platforms has emerged to capture the vast majority of the K-12 market share. Using the latest data from the…
