Reflections on D2L Connection Europe 2024
Last week, I was fortunate to be invited by D2L to attend their D2L Connection conference in Amsterdam. This conference is primarily aimed at their European clients and was attended by representatives from a growing number of UK universities in their client base.
D2L, for those who don’t know, is the Canadian company behind the Brightspace virtual learning environment (VLE). This is a VLE product that, as I’ve noted in my annual market analysis, has been increasingly adopted by UK universities.
The conference presented a good opportunity to explore the ways in which Brightspace and the product suite around it are developing and being utilised by their clients. These events are also useful in understanding company strategy and positioning relative to competitors in what is becoming a more differentiated market.
It goes without saying that AI-driven product development and strategy have played a key part in that differentiation. However, company acquisitions are also playing a part, and D2L’s acquisition of H5P was particularly eye-catching this year. This conference also provided an opportunity to get a glimpse of what that acquisition will start to mean for the development of Brightspace going forward.
D2L's growing presence in the UK higher education VLE market
I think it’s fair to say that, to date, D2L—and more specifically Brightspace—is the VLE that has the weakest brand awareness of the four main products in the UK higher education VLE market, which includes Canvas, Blackboard and Moodle.
This is partly due to the length of time Blackboard and Moodle have been used by UK universities, and, to a certain extent, the rate at which Canvas has been adopted by them. However, this is beginning to change year-on-year as D2L have been successful at winning new UK university clients looking to switch their VLE.
The news in the summer that D2L were acquiring H5P, the Norwegian EdTech company behind the popular H5P interactive content plugin, further supports growing brand recognition.
Quite apart from the benefits this acquisition might provide to the product, this new association with a popular and well-used technology in UK higher education offers wider recognition benefits too.
Now, obviously, an acquisition like this is not made solely for those purposes, and what this acquisition also offers is further product differentiation for Brightspace with respect to native capabilities supporting interactive content and learning activities.
H5P acquisition and enhanced native interactivity in Brightspace
D2L’s main conference, D2L Fusion, held in North America in the summer, is usually the main outlet for announcements and developments. However, due to the timing of the H5P acquisition, the Amsterdam conference presented a better opportunity to begin to understand the developing relationship between H5P and Brightspace post-acquisition.
Since D2L Fusion, the Brightspace add-on Creator+ has been branded as all-new, incorporating the range of interactive features offered by H5P. Although H5P will remain a VLE-agnostic tool, D2L did convey at the conference that over half of H5P's content types have now been integrated into the Brightspace gradebook.
These developments potentially challenge the long-standing paradigm of e-learning authoring software being used within VLEs due to a lack of native content interactivity and activity types.
The lack of good native capabilities has long led to a frustrating compromise and quest for workarounds that involve third-party tools, bespoke coding, and the use of SCORM packages. This has been particularly prevalent in online learning, and it can be time-consuming to implement and maintain.
Because H5P is a respected and well-used interactive content tool that’s designed to plug into platforms, it arguably presents the best chance yet at challenging this paradigm.
As H5P is increasingly and differentially incorporated into Brightspace, and implemented within courses, it will be interesting to observe whether advocacy for the product and approach from the likes of learning designers, instructional designers, and academics teaching online and blended courses grows significantly.
If it does, it may provide Brightspace with increasingly positive differentiation as a VLE that is more appealing and congruent for online and blended courses. Incidentally, both are types of provision that have been steadily growing in the UK, and in the case of online learning, there are multiple examples of universities that have adopted a different VLE for their online degrees.
D2L's add-on strategy and potential challenges with Creator+ and H5P
However, there are some notes of caution around a strategy that differentiates a product on the basis of native content interactivity and activity types. The first is what I might describe as experience-dependent loyalty or tool-based professional identity.
Although one might like to believe that the selection of EdTech is based on a cold, hard assessment of the effectiveness of the technology in question, there are other human factors at play.
When a particular EdTech tool has essentially become the cornerstone of your expertise and professional identity, that can lead to a resistance to change or even to contemplate it, despite alternatives being better solutions. Although H5P is certainly popular in UK higher education, there are examples of loyalty to Articulate’s products and the open-source product Xerte.
Another challenge is the fact that this capability is a paid-for add-on to core Brightspace. At the moment, cash-strapped universities are likely to be more resistant to any upsells that might seem like a luxury in financially austere times.
I recently heard of a relatively large UK university that had a case for a university-wide licence of an e-learning authoring tool rejected due to the cost, despite the existence of individual licences spread disparately across the institution.
However, there is a case to be made here. If Creator+ with H5P offers a more cost-effective alternative to other e-learning authoring tools, or there are cost savings to be made in consolidating disparate licences under a single, institution-wide add-on, this will be an appealing option.
There are also other benefits, such as this add-on being seamlessly integrated into a core product that most of the university uses. This contrasts with some standalone authoring tools that can often be limited to specific teams and require specialist support from a learning technologist or equivalent.
Ease and breadth of access to these features present a solid argument, but that may have to be accompanied by a case for why these features can make a widespread positive difference to staff and student experience.
Overall, I did not get the impression at the conference that Creator+ was yet in widespread use, although the University of Huddersfield did present on how they used it. The adoption of Creator+ will be one to watch in the next year as a way of validating D2L's strategy of both add-ons and interactive content and activities through the H5P acquisition.
AI product developments in Brightspace and D2L's approach
While we’re on the subject of product developments, it’s worth covering how D2L are incorporating generative AI-driven features into Brightspace. At D2L Fusion in July, the company announced a new AI feature, D2L Lumi.
This was the most notable AI product development yet from D2L, and it also unifies previously announced AI features that date back to 2023, which include AI-generated practice questions and an AI-driven virtual assistant.
Lumi has six key features:
Lumi Practice
Lumi Caption
Lumi Idea
Lumi Outcome
Lumi Quiz
Lumi Chat
Practice, Quiz, and Idea all involve activities being generated for learning and teaching, based on content within the VLE or that is added to it. With respect to the Idea feature, this covers assignment and discussion topic generation. To a certain extent, some of these features are now fairly idiomatic learning and teaching generative AI features, but there are interesting differences. For example, D2L has incorporated Bloom’s Taxonomy as a means of controlling the level of difficulty for things like question generation.
Personally, I think a level parameter for generative AI is not a bad idea, but I am increasingly of the mind that we should move past Bloom’s Taxonomy. To my mind, it has become widely distorted because barely anyone who uses it has actually read the original paper and understood its origins to properly evaluate its efficacy or how it might be best considered. It has become a crutch for those unwilling or unable to devote serious energies into determining a process through which learners might reach learning goals, and a facile prism for interpreting how technological change influences learning.
However, I do have to admit, it is still widely referred to and used, and my view is likely to be a minority one. So, for balance, it’s worth saying that despite concerns I might have, it adds a well-known vocabulary of terms to a level-gauging generative AI feature.
Another interesting aspect of Lumi is the workflow for this add-on. Product demonstrations emphasised how anything that is generated by AI is clearly labelled and can be reviewed and edited by a human, with emphasis around having a human-in-the-loop. The workflow paradigm for the generative features is interesting because, like some other EdTech, it is what I would describe as a parameter-driven generative model.
You create the parameters and feed it, so to speak, and things are generated on the back of that. This is fundamentally different from something like ChatGPT where generation is conversational and iterated upon through dialogue. Although this does not mean a parameter-driven approach is lesser, it may appear limited to potential users who are utilising conversational AI interfaces to generate and iterate upon ideas and activities in their learning and teaching.
In this sense, the risk—not just for D2L but for other VLE companies—is that this becomes akin to previous attempts to inadequately replicate features and technologies that exist outside the walled garden of the VLE.
Outside of the product roadmap session, it did not feel as though Lumi was pushed or mentioned very extensively. This was despite the fact that AI-focussed sessions were certainly a feature of the conference, including an interesting session on KEATH.ai, an assessment tool from the University of Surrey. I don’t think this was, however, a case of deliberate neglect; rather, I think that as Lumi becomes more and more established, we’ll hear it covered more at future conferences and events.
Does competency-based education align with UK higher education priorities?
One theme that was evident throughout the conference, although more subtly, was competency-based education (CBE), or as it was sometimes referred to, outcomes-based education.
Product developments such as the Brightspace add-on Achievement+ are examples of how this model is seeking to be supported by D2L. Although I can’t point to many mentions or dedicated sessions on Achievement+ at the conference, it felt as though CBE was woven in throughout and was definitely evident in sessions featuring D2L's founder, John Baker.
I think the CBE model has a lot going for it, and there is potentially more to be said for this model in a time when traditional university assessment methods have been challenged and confused by generative AI. There’s also potential future alignment with a UK government skills agenda. However, at the moment, competency-based education models aren’t prevalent in the UK and are not being widely discussed or advocated for.
Therefore, this feels like an area where there’s limited current alignment with current trends in UK higher education. In that sense, there is a slight danger that, as a North American company, you appear to be less aligned in terms of product development with the priorities of UK higher education. However, I don’t see CBE dominating D2L's strategy to the extent that this would constitute a major concern.
Final reflections
Overall, this was a well-put-together conference that had a good balance of sessions spanning product developments, institutional case studies, and bigger-picture sessions.
Positive sentiment was evident throughout the conference from D2L clients, and this is a company that has momentum, not least in the Netherlands where the conference was held. Although there are always questions and challenges with respect to strategy and the product, I would expect D2L to continue their trajectory of growing market share in UK higher education.
Of all the VLE companies, D2L’s messaging is a lot stronger on teaching and learning, and this will be appealing to that fraternity in the UK, particularly when combined with the strategic investment in content interactivity and activity types.
This needs to be balanced with messaging around the challenges that occupy other parts of the institution, such as student retention and continuation, and how the product and add-ons might support that, as well as diversifying and growing student recruitment and universities' portfolios.
There was an interesting session on how Wageningen University had implemented D2L’s Course Merchant as a means of offering taster courses to prospective students, and how this solution helped deal with internal systems challenges of handling non-matriculated students. This is the kind of thing that would be interesting to a different audience within UK universities facing similar challenges, or who are looking at ways to reach other demographics of students or develop their student recruitment funnels.
There are evidently benefits that can be presented for the add-ons to Brightspace, such as Course Merchant and Creator+, but the perception of non-essential upsells in a tough financial climate could be a big hurdle for that strategy in the UK. However, it was clear from the product development session that the core Brightspace VLE is being continually developed, and add-ons do not seem to have drawn attention away from this unduly.
So far this year has not been awash with UK universities looking to switch VLEs, but I expect there to be more movement next year. The coming year and the decisions that some UK universities make around new VLE implementation will be the true test of different VLE company strategies. But it would not surprise me to see Brightspace being adopted by more UK universities and continuing the momentum experienced in recent years.
