The University of British Columbia
UBC - A Place of Mind
The University of British Columbia Vancouver campus
ETEC 522 – Ventures in Learning Technologies
  • Startup
    • How to Begin?
    • Objectives
    • Course Manual
    • Outline & Schedule
    • Participation Guide
    • Assignments
    • ☛ Introduce Yourself!
    • 👥 Authors
  • W01: Emerging Markets
    • W01: Emerging Market Teams
  • W02-04: Bootcamp
    • Global Dynamics
    • Who is the Customer?
    • What is a Venture?
    • 👥 Opportunity Horizon
    • W03: Analyst Bootcamp
    • A Game with Three Pitches
    • Deconstructing a Pitch
    • 👥 Pitch Critique
    • W04: Entrepreneur Bootcamp
    • Venture Genesis
    • Opportunity Activation
    • The Right Stuff
    • 👥 Founders Parade
  • W05-12: Opportunity Forecasts
    • W05: Personalized Learning
    • W06: Mobile Learning
    • W07: Game-Based Learning
    • W08: Big Data & Learning Analytics
    • W09: Immersive Experience
    • W10: Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
    • W11: Microlearning
    • W12: Wearables
  • W13: Launch
    • Venture Forum Resources
  • Forums
    • W01 – Emerging Markets
    • W02 – Market Projections
    • W03 – Pitch Pool
    • W04 – Founders Parade
    • W05-12 – Opportunity Forecasts (A2)
    • W13 – Venture Forum (A3)
    • Analyst Reports (A1)
  • Global Feeds
    • Announcements
    • Eva’s Café
    • Radio 522
  • LOGIN
Sort By
Show only these categories:
Show only this category:

D2L Founder John Baker

By Ryan Day on September 29, 2018

The Company

Photo shared under creative commons license. Attribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:John_Baker.jpg

D2L is an educational technology company best known for their learning management system Desire 2 Learn, recently rebranded as a Brightspace. Brightspace is used in K-12, Higher Education, and Corporate Learning. D2L also offers services to help organizations get Brightspace up and running. Training is a major part of the support services they offer their customers. There are a number of selling points that makes Brightspace appealing to customers including its accessibility, security, cloud integration, user interface, and partner integrations. Brightspace has built-in analytics tools as well as additional add-on functions.

 

According to their website over the last nineteen years they have expanded to a company with over 750 employees with offices in Canada, the United States, Australia, Europe, Singapore, and Brazil. They’ve won a number of awards  including an award for being among Canada’s Best Managed Companies between 2013-2018.

 

The Founder

John Baker was born in Newfoundland in 1976. He founded Desire 2 Learn while studying Engineering  at the University of Waterloo. He was 22 at the time. It was during this time in school where he got the idea for D2L. On the corporate webstie it describes how he saw technology changing quickly around the world but the university experience staying the same. He graduated with Honours B.A.Sc. in Systems Design Engineering. He has since gone on to win several awards and continues to be the President and CEO of D2L.

Lessons to be Learned

I think it’s inspiring to see someone so young and Canadian succeeding in business. I also think it’s impressive that he’s still there and an important face for the company.  What I find most interesting however is that none of the Executive Leadership have backgrounds in education. Most are in law, business, and science.  The people in education that are doing exciting things and running successful businesses typically do not have backgrounds in education. I think part of the reason for this is that many of the people entering into the field of education are motivated by service over profit. So people trained in education tend not be as interested in starting for-profit businesses. Alternatively I wonder if there is something wrong with how the field of education is taught that discourages innovation and entrepreneurship.

As a Student of ETEC 522 if I’m serious about starting a business venture I wonder if my time would have been better used taking a business program. I realize this is a bit of a controversial thought so I’m interested in the comments below! Please let me know what you think.

 

References

https://www.d2l.com/about/leadership/

https://www.d2l.com/about/

Rating
Average: 0/5 Stars
 
 
 
 
 
0 Thumbs Up!

Read More | No Comments

  • Previous
  • Next
Show only this category:
How to Begin

Custom Search

Tags

2014 2015 2016

Faculty of Education
Vancouver Campus
2125 Main Mall
Vancouver, BC Canada V6T 1Z4
Website pdce.educ.ubc.ca/
Email pdce.educ@ubc.ca
Back to top
The University of British Columbia
  • Emergency Procedures |
  • Terms of Use |
  • Copyright |
  • Accessibility