Forbes

Desire2Learn (D2L) is transforming education through technology.

The Waterloo, Ontario-based company is positioned as the leading SaaS provider of learning technology for the education and the corporate markets.

“We can leverage technology to have a fundamental impact on student learning outcomes, or in corporate cases, to really rethink performance management. Imagine the old way students sit in the classroom. Everyone would proceed through the course material at the same pace, take the same assessments and have access to the same content. As we go digital, all of a sudden we are introducing things like adaptive learning, so that an individual student can have a personalized learning experience, understand that they’re falling down on this one particular outcome, and automatically create new resources for them to reassess the material until they get it, before they move forward,” says D2L founder and CEO, John Baker.

According to research from Global Industry Analysts (GIA), the global market for eLearning is projected to reach $168.8 billion by 2018. The study states that the “eLearning market is one of the most rapidly growing sectors in the global education industry. Not surprisingly, D2L is growing fast and now has offices around the world in Toronto, Waterloo, Vancouver, Boston, UK, Brazil, Amsterdam, Singapore and Australia.

Today, D2L provides its open and extensible platform to over 1,100 clients and 13 million individual learners in higher education, K-12, healthcare, government and the corporate sector, including Fortune 1000 companies. Baker also sees his e-learning platform as a way to bridge the gap between the “haves and have-nots” in education resources.

“The attainment gap is a great example where it’s the have nots that have this gap: 46 percent of students finish at a four-year program in six years. That’s the average for across the US. The education system is not working for them. We’re closing that gap by helping schools improve their retention.

[Commentary] A look at how Comcast has exercised the power it already wields, should give any fair-minded regulator pause when considering the proposed purchase of Time Warner Cable.

A Comcast-Time Warner Cable deal would wipe out any notion of future competition within the broadband industry. You could argue that consumers don’t have meaningful choice as it is, since cable companies long ago conspired to stay out of each others’ markets, a fact that Comcast, without any irony, points to in favor of a merger.

But this proposed deal is not simply about one huge cable company buying another. Comcast-owned NBC stands apart, however, as in both Olympics it has restricted access to these live streams to pay TV subscribers whose bundle includes CNBC and MSNBC, channels also owned by Comcast. No cable bill, no streaming. Even more disconcertingly, Comcast (along with Time Warner Cable) has played an active role in the push to ban municipalities from offering broadband access.

Twenty states currently have cable industry drafted laws that place significant restrictions on both public initiatives and public/private partnerships to create broadband alternatives. These bills have the aim of preventing the spread of projects like Google Fiber, which promise consumers far greater Internet speeds, unbundled from TV service, at reasonable cost. The recent, precedent-setting peering agreement in which Netflix is now paying Comcast directly for improved delivery of its streaming video to customers, is a technical bypass of net neutrality rules that effectively renders them irrelevant. With the reach and power Comcast already enjoys, customers are paying escalating prices for services that can charitably be described as mediocre.