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.
When I first walked into the Marriott Copley Place, it felt very much like a Tableau conference from 15 years ago: very hands-on. Any attendee can arrive at the conference with a list of questions and meet with experts (or even the developer!) of the specific feature to get their answers.
During the D2L Fusion conference, I attended a few training sessions like: “Getting Started With D2L Brightspace” and “Service Overview” to get my feet wet. The sessions were almost full. While looking at the crowd, I wondered if this was all new users, potential new users or people needing a refresher. It was ‘all of the above’.
The Welcome Keynote was also very client-centred. It had an atmosphere of anticipation and excitement. I learned about the D2L clap, the D2L’s way to promote friendly competition among its attendees to increase their involvement, and the company’s mission to “reach every learner.”
During the D2L Solutions Spotlight presentation, they presented new features of their solutions, including Creator+ and Wave. The participants were ecstatic. As I did not understand all the new features, it was surprising to see the reactions. I looked around and focused on the name tags: they were not D2L employees. It had the feel of an Apple presentation, but without Apple employees involved.
Important Growth for D2L
Since D2L became a public company in November 2021, its attention to client satisfaction seems to be paying off. D2L has been getting big wins in the last few years (SUNY System and several wins in the Netherlands), giving them momentum.
In Europe, since 2016, D2L has been increasing it’s HigherEd system implementations year after year:
In North America, D2L has been present for over a decade and has been increasing its 10% of new implementations yearly. The year 2022 looks promising (note that SUNY is the major reason for this increase), and it looks like D2L is an even more important competitor to Canvas.
The K-12 submarket is still not the primary focus for D2L. The graph below shows that Canvas, Schoology & Classroom are the solutions with the most system implementations within the past five years.
Important Note: The 2022 data is partial data, as shown in the graphs. As you know, we still add data six months after the year ends to present the most accurate portrait of the situation.
Disclosure: D2L is a subscriber of ListEdTech’s portal. This post represents ListEdTech’s data and opinion. D2L was not implicated in this post’s writing.
