John founded D2L in 1999, at the age of twenty-two, while attending the University of Waterloo. D2L is a global software company that believes learning is the foundation upon which all progress and achievement rests. D2L’s core product is Brightspace, one of the leading Learning Management Systems (LMS) in Canada.
John’s first client, Virtual High School, was founded by his father, Stephen Baker. Stephen founded the online high school 20+ years ago. It is understood that Stephen, a teacher at the time, wanted to provide an online learning experience for his high school students. John stepped in and built something for him as a result. As you might expect, Brightspace continues to be the LMS for Virtual High School. Other private online high schools in Ontario, such as Blyth Academy Online, also use Brightspace. D2L became a major player in the high school market when they secured a contract with the Ontario government, becoming the LMS for almost all students in the province. The contract, signed in 2018, was valued at $84 million. D2L has continued to expand into post-secondary education and is expanding globally with offices in Australia, Brazil, Europe, Singapore, and the U.S. The company recently went public (November 2021) on the TSX with a valuation of about $1.1 billion. Stock is currently trading at $15.10 (as of February 1, 2022).
Brightspace is known as an extremely scalable and robust ‘out of the box’ LMS. There is essentially no technical skill required to manage it, unless you plan to do extremely complex things with it. That is another advantage of Brightspace: the tools are very robust, so there are endless opportunities for customization and complexity. The platform is extremely intuitive and simply looks great. As a Principal of an online high school, I have personally used Brightspace for 4 years. I have also used Moodle, Blackboard, Edsby, Canvas, and Google Classroom. Given the scale of our school (roughly 5,000 students) and my very small tech team, Brightspace has been the best option for us. While not a tech person per se (my background is in teaching English and History), I am capable of operating as the LMS manager in the school. It was relatively simple to pick up the skills to understand Brightspace on a very deep level. Brightspace is a great Canadian product that I highly recommend.
Hi Nathan,
Thank you for this post. Your review of D2L (and its founder) is clear, concise, and well-articulated. In my current professional role (Project training manager/supervisor) I have used a number of learning management systems over the years and concur 100% with your feedback. When it comes to schools and educational environments, Brightspace is scalable, robust, and intuitive. I have used Brightspace for several years in different capacities and strongly believe that it’s by far one of the best LMSs out there.
Hi Nathan! This is so cool, that you posted DL2. I am about to do some research on it. BC has chosen it as the LMS that will provide the platform for online learning. There are a couple of things I especially appreciate about it: 1. It was founded by Canadians! 2. There is minimal technical skills required to use it (huge relief for teachers). I have yet to dig into Brightspace and check out its mechanisms. I’m very excited about it!
Hi Cindy,
That is very exciting! Any new LMS can be overwhelming at first, so my advice would be to keep things simple as you get started. There is a really great Brightspace community where you can find documentation and conversations from fellow users. I have spent a lot of time in there and learned many things. If you ever need help or want to know how I leverage the system, just let me know; I am always happy to share my knowledge!
Thanks so much, Nathan! I think we are bracing for a learning curve as we incorporate platforms like Moodle, Studyforge into Brightspace. I’m really curious to learn it and re-design my language courses. Moodle has some trouble embedding Mandarin Chinese characters so I’m curious to know how Brightspace will deal with that. Cheers!
I am not sure how Brightspace deals with Chinese characters, however, I hope that it handles them easily! We build out all of our content in HTML pages (though we did not do this from the beginning). I believe Chinese characters work well in HTML. I don’t know that much about HTML, but I think it has something to do with using the right character set for your document. A quick Google search says to set it at UTF – 8.
Building pages in HTML ended up being the best way to build content for us, but of course, it requires a developer with that skill set. If you don’t have it, using the Brightspace editor is pretty darn good by itself!
I love the fact that D2L’s first client was his father! He was obviously influenced and inspired by his father’s success and had a small network to help build up his own brand and network which is always a great way to grow a business. John appears to have a great drive towards expanding in other markets as well which shows that he is dedicated to his product and belief in it’s worth which is always something to look up to in an entrepreneur. I also admire that he saw an existing product and thought, we can do better. I think taking an existing product and tweaking it to enhance the user experience is also a super way to enter the market.
Alexis -completely agree that it’s nice to see something start at a familial level and scale the way D2L has, it also shows the effectiveness of John as a leader, and his ability to maneuver through rather tumultuous waters (educational tech industry) so well. Like many of these founders, I think this serves as a great model for the likes of those in the MET program that the shift can be made with a little perseverance, luck, and a good idea. Particularly; I like that they started local and grew from there and as colleagues have posted above, D2L is now going across the national stage while growing internationally.
Thanks Nathan for sharing, it also highlights an important point that ventures should keep their clients/target audience in mind in terms of product/service design. Brightspace being easy to use and accessible is already a win-win situation in my books adding to the fact that it requires minimal technical skill to manage fits nicely into most people’s multi tasking lifestyle. As Alexis mentioned, having the mind set of refinement and improvement is a fantastic way to boost attention for your venture, they’re all admirable qualities which John Baker demonstrates in his work