{"id":3713,"date":"2022-02-01T14:42:46","date_gmt":"2022-02-01T21:42:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522\/?p=3713"},"modified":"2022-02-01T14:42:48","modified_gmt":"2022-02-01T21:42:48","slug":"john-baker-founder-and-ceo-of-desire2learn-d2l","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522\/2022\/02\/01\/john-baker-founder-and-ceo-of-desire2learn-d2l\/","title":{"rendered":"John Baker – Founder and CEO of Desire2Learn (D2L)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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John founded D2L<\/a> 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\u2019s core product is Brightspace<\/em>, one of the leading Learning Management Systems (LMS) in Canada.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

John\u2019s first client, Virtual High School<\/a>, 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<\/a>, 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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brightspace is known as an extremely scalable and robust \u2018out of the box\u2019 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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…<\/p>\n

Read moreJohn Baker – Founder and CEO of Desire2Learn (D2L)<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":69695,"featured_media":3714,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-founders-parade","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/69695"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3713"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3717,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3713\/revisions\/3717"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec522\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}