Watch out Blackboard. There’s a new big fish in the pond. Desire2Learn, a Canadian education technology company founded in 1999, has just announced that it’s secured $80 million in funding. That’s huge for the edtech world.
The massive investment in Desire2Learn signals a seismic shift in the world of edtech investments. Look for even more startups and established companies, slogging it out for the past years without much investor interest, to start getting big deals to fundamentally change education. According to NEA, $1 trillion is spent on K-12 and higher education globally and technology is starting to transform how education works.
Could this be the start of a new generation of learning? Or just another investment? Either way, I’m excited to see this kind of news happening in our world of edtech.
TechCrunch spells out the details of how Desire2Learn works:
Comprehensive cloud-based learning platform – Delivers a unified, scalable learning platform through both public and private cloud infrastructure.- Mobile-centric education experience – Provides full support for mobile devices and tablets to increase engagement and enrich the learning experience.
- Digital content discovery and distribution – Empowers instructors with new digital content through numerous top publisher partners from around the world as well as through open content marketplaces.
- Learning analytics – Offers complete learning analytic engine to optimize content and learning pathways, provide predictive models, and to support improvements in retention and learner outcomes.
- Open API integration – Supports open standards including The IMS Global Learning Consortium specifications, Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) and extensibility with other learning applications.
