CEO John Baker: You Have Every Right to Be Angry
COO Dennis Kavelman: Information About Recent Service Disruption
Added 2/4/2013: Some Responses to the Responses
Note: comments on this post are moderated. Comments containing profanity or personal attacks will not be posted.
Update: comments have now been closed. Pretty sure we’ve covered all the ground at this point. Facebook and Twitter remain open. 
Original post starts here. From Wed. Jan. 30, 2013
I arrived in Kitchener at about 10 PM on Tuesday, January 29. I had a lousy day of travel and arrived about 7 hours later than planned. During those 7 hours I missed much of news of the performance problems that were impacting many Desire2Learn clients. Let’s just say that many of the D2L-hosted clients were having some pretty big problems.
As I walked into the office this morning at 8 AM, John Baker pulled me into a meeting with several others to get the lay of the land; which includes a briefing on the ongoing plans to fix the issues and writing communications to the clients informing them of the problems and the progress. A critical piece of hardware is not performing as promised, and this has created additional issues that require attention from the hardware vendors as well as the D2L team.
CEO Baker and several other people were working on 0-3 hours of sleep. Phone calls to vendors at 2:00 AM are not good ways to start/continue/finish your day. Never for a second should you think that they don’t take this stuff seriously. As this professor says, people depend on our service and expect high levels of uptime and performance. And they should.
Communications were going out to the service contacts at each impacted client every couple of hours. Still, until the solutions are fully implemented, it’s impossible to send the message that customers really want to hear (It’s fixed!). Here is an example of one of those updates:
10:30am ET Update:
At this time we would like to provide a bit more visibility into what we have been experiencing over the past 24 hours.As part of our major investment in next-generation infrastructure project within our SaaS facilities we began in the fall of 2012, many changes to our environment were required as part of our migration into this new environment.
One of these changes required a sophisticated process of migrating data to our new enterprise storage solution. We made a decision that it would serve our clients best to migrate this data over time, with the help of our vendors using technologies purpose-built for live migration. This methodology prevented the requirement for long, multi-day maintenance windows due to the large volumes of file data that need to be transferred. Effectively this “file virtualization” technology (“ARX”) would allow the seamless use of both source and destination storage during the migration with no impact to users.
The issues currently being experienced have been determined to exist within the ARX technology. We are currently seeing different impact to different customers. For customers whom we had yet to begin the migration of their data, or for customers for whom we had completed the process, we were able to remove the ARX solution from their environment, resulting in a complete restoration of service.
For customers who are in midst of their data migration, the ARX cannot be removed, and we have initiated a separate restoration process that applies to a portion of customers. This process involves a configuration change to the internal format of metadata within the ARX. This change has shown to have a positive impact on the clients for whom this process has completed. However, this configuration change takes time to process, and we are targeting noon EST today for completion with clients seeing ongoing improvements as it makes progress.
There are a small group of customers who are affected by one additional issue that was caused by a recommended course of action that did not produce expected results. We are currently in the midst of backing this change out and a new course of action is being considered. We will contact these affected customers directly.
We will be clarifying potential resolution times specific to each client, in our next update at noon.
That may be more information than some clients want or need, but we’d rather share too much rather than too little information. During the entire day that I’ve been sitting in on the conversations and strategy sessions, it became obvious that a large number of people are actively and directly working on providing a solution. Almost all of the executive team is deeply involved in the action – and it strikes me as more than a little bit amazing that these people all have the technical chops to understand and deal with the problem. Still, a great deal of the detailed work is being done by the Support/IT Staff, since they are the ones who are migrating databases and metadatabases, and they are the ones who are bypassing this or reconfiguring that. The account managers are working hard to provide a communications link to the impacted clients.
Everybody is working toward a solution. Nobody takes this lightly. It’s all hands on deck.
NOTE: The section below was updated periodically throughout the outage. It was posted at the top of this page. Moved to bottom of page on 2/5/13.
Last update 6:30 PM, 2/1/13
All organizations have been fully verified and brought back up to operational status. Support staff will continue to monitor system performance, which is currently running smoothly under a normal load. We will continue to fine tune during normal maintenance periods.
3:30 PM, 2/1/13 – The last couple of client sites are going through final verification at this time. All other sites have been brought up.
2:00 PM, 2/1/13 – Many more client installations are back up and running. For the remaining clients that are still down, much of the needed work has been completed. A rigorous verification and testing process must be completed before the sites are brought back up. We have been in contact with the designated person for each account. They will be notified again as soon as their site is ready to be brought back online. Next update expected in 2-3 hours.
8:35 AM, 2/1/13 – Approximately half of the impacted organizations have been restored to full service. Good progress is being made on the other half of the sites. No definite time can be given for completion for any one site, but we will try to keep you posted. Besides returning all organizations to full functionality, another major goal has been to ensure no loss of data. To ensure that no data is lost, the process is slower than taking a more risky approach. BD
4:35 AM, 2/1/13 – The recovery process for the impacted organizations is a case of site-by-site data migration off of the failed system. This process continues since not all sites have been migrated at this time. Each site is notified when their migration process is complete, and you will receive notice from them when it is back up, although you will probably know it before that when your site becomes accessible once again. No completion time estimates can be given for any individual organization. Will update again if additional information becomes available. BD (italics added at 8:35 for clarification)
Quote below from CEO John Baker, 1/31/13
As many of you are painfully aware, Desire2Learn is experiencing significant challenges in one of its cloud data centers that is dramatically impacting some students’ online experience. This stems from the file virtualization hardware not interacting well with the storage environment. Please know that we are doing everything within our power to fix this problem. We understand the severe impact these service problems have on students, faculty members and administrators. We have devoted every available resource, including those of our partners, to achieve a resolution.
This is our highest priority and we will not rest until it is corrected.
John Baker
President & CEO
Desire2Learn Incorporated
Barry serves as the Sr. Community Manager at Desire2Learn. For more information, read his post titled: Desire2Work @ Desire2Learn. For 16 months prior to that date, he was an independent contractor and consultant with a focus on e-Learning and educational technology. Prior to that, he worked inside higher education for 27 years as a faculty member and administrator.
NOTE: Help keyboard image is public domain and found at Pixabay
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I don’t doubt the efforts. However, a fail-safe Plan B seems like it would have been a good idea. Like, no matter the process, it needs to be reversible if it’s clearly going wrong. It seems odd that no plan was in place which will lead clients to think this problem didn’t start a day ago but weeks ago, making it too late to turn back now. That’s actually how the “more information” message reads in the absence of a solution.
I agree with Peter, I also might add, if there was no back-up plan or plan’s that could have turned this process around I’m lead to believe our information could be at risk to an ongoing security breach. Especially due to the fact that Desire2Learn was allowing Java to run on their network. Java is known to have major security vulnerabilities.
I agree, Peter. If this was an upgrade to hardware, why wasn’t the hardware being replaced a fall back position in the event of failure? Such a basic concept! As for the timeframe of the downward spiral, I would agree with you there. I have been having little niggling problems for weeks and thought it was my computer or browser.
Why don’t they just roll back these updates? I have lost faith in D2L. I hope my University switches providers.
As noted above “smart recovery” instead of doing this in a panic!
I am doing a correspondence course my peers, and I need a reliable system.
Blackboard never had these issues!
Desire2Learn has been in the business for over a decade; you would think that they would know how to manage hosting to minimize downtime, or at least have fail over in place.
We like D2L. They have good customer service, and Barry is awesome! BUT….If they are using F5 ARX storage then D2L is obviously still in the rack and stack data center business instead of in the cloud. C L O U D is how it’s spelled guys!!!
Hello Ronald. D2L takes pride in a long history of minimal downtime, but this time we were badly hammered by an unforeseen complication. For the affected institutions, this service interruption has been a terrible experience. The company will be working hard to regain your trust going forward.
BTW, thanks for the personal call out; we think you’re awesome, too!
So I came to the website to get a status on the D2l website and as I am scrolling down to read the apologies I come across this on the left side of your page….
“D2LBarry “another year of record growth adding many new clients and millions of learners.” via @JohnBakerD2L on D2L blog desire2learn.com/learninginsigh…
10 days ago · reply · retweet · favorite”
…. maybe slowing down a bit and having a Plan B in place so you can satisfy the customers who have signed on with before adding MILLIONS more. ….OR….at the least, don’t publicly celebrate the companies amazing million new customer growth achievement so the thousands (maybe millions?) of us existing customers coming to this website for some answers as to why your service hasn’t been available for days
won’t have to assume what the real reason is your service has been down for days…..
Seriously, I’m not sure which is worse. Following your link here to find there is still no definite answer as when your D2L site will work again OR having the above tweet you sent out proudly re-posted on the same page you are directing your unhappy customers to for updates as to why your service is failing and unavailable…. (Insert one of those annoying emoticon dudes sadly shaking head while rolling eyes then reaching up pulling hair out with its left hand while it flings its Public Relations 101 text out the window, which is following the Marketing 101 text previously thrown …. Which is following .….).
On a more positive note, I am impressed that John Gonzalez at your Help Desk has answered my emails promptly. Tell John thanks. I can only imagine the emails he must be having to respond to.
Thank you.
Tim
Hi Tim. I’ll be sure to pass your comments along to John. He’s one of many great people in this organization.
I don’t have any issues with the way things are being worked on, I know how hard people work at D2L having known several staff including John for a few years. However, what I am upset with is that students (part-time like me) are being impacted further than just being annoyed by some downtime with their classes. Both my wife and I work full time and go to school part-time at the institutions affected. Having dates for assignments pushed back affects our family life as well. Planned activities, etc need to be moved, put on hold or cancelled as we have to wait to get access to material, then complete assignments or tests at later dates. Please understand that this outage isn’t just about the “kids at school”, but there are many others who rely heavily on this technology to help us manage our schedules of school with our family life and work. I don’t know how D2L can ever fully regain our trust or help us get this time back. I know you will get it sorted, but know that this outage is further reaching than you may have first considered.
Well put, this also makes me angry with our schools for not having a back-up plan also.
Well that’s completely unrealistic. So schools need to buy two solutions?
Like others have mentioned, I don’t doubt D2L’s efforts and hard work at this time.
Unfortunately, it’s one thing to “work hard” but it’s another to “work smart”. Obviously the actions and lack of planning prior to this catastrophic failure are not indicative of the later.
Mikey Mouse operation and that said is an insult to Mikey Mouse! Bye bye D2L.
To make people happy I think Desire2Learn should have created a register for an email alert to advise that the outage has been restored. This way it can be received via Smartphone so we could get back to work. Just an idea.
An email alert from D2L would require that we have separate alerts set up for each school. Not all schools are affected in the same way and many of our clients have not been impacted at all during this time. Most schools have an email/texting alert system and we would rely on them to alert their students as needed.
Barry – That is exactly what you need to do. Generalized emails sent to my staff about a “intermittent slowness” isn’t actually what is going on. Also hearing that you are moving data from one system to another as stated by “some schools” doesn’t tell us if it’s my data being moved or not. All I do know is my students do not have access to their LMS for multiple days. What D2L is doing about is beyond me. As one of the new “millions” of users added to your system lately – our impressions are poor.
So what do the affected online students do?
Are the teachers going to actually call us (STUDENTS)
This online schooling has had so many challenges for me and now it just keeps getting worse were at MACU.
I seriously hope nobody is sleeping here. A plan B, that relies only on a plan A, is not really a great plan. I’m a nursing student, so do not understand how plan B doesnt include a plan C is that fails as well. Anyway, keep your chin up and keep working hard as I’m sure you all are. This to shall pass. Unlike that test I took tonight that I couldnt study for because the module was on D2L. FAIL!
I don’t blame d2L, I blame Portland State for purchasing such a worthless and unreliable system. As much as you might want to characterize the problems you are having as “unusual” and “unforseen” the truth is d2L has never been a reliable system. PSU should have stayed with Blackboard.
Hi Lisa. Before joining D2L a few months ago as an employee, I was a faculty member and administrator at a school that used D2L. My experience with the company over a nine year period is very different from your perspective. Reliability has been one of their hallmarks over their 13 year existence. Yes, right now we are all feeling some pain, but this is not business as usual at D2L.
Thanks for your efforts, but the problem lies much deeper.
Online is my only option for education. With that said, I am trapped in a failed system designed to rape me of my hard earned full-time wage that would be better spent toward diapers and baby formula. However, I have a twinkle of hope that one day my education will make a difference for my family. But in the meantime, I have to pay horrendous tuition costs which is even more for online classes, get a measly education (if I make an effort), pay fines that I will never benefit from (Rec Center $40), and have to worry about my family and social life because PSU can’t keep D2L functioning effectively. I can’t wait to be graduated at the end of this year. Maybe I’ll get a job at PSU and make some serious changes that put students first!
D2L is ridiculous!!! It would be great if we could get rid of D2L at my University. Major inconvenience!!! Great planning D2L, job well done.
It’s going on what 4 days now, just great. I would not be surprised if next week we are seeing the same we are working hard to fix this problem message.
Do you have any idea how much time has been lost or wasted by students and faculty? Seriously, what is your best estimate? When PSU adopted D2L we were assured that D2L would be supported by redundant CSPs. Obviously, that assurance was a lie! Short of being collectively brain-dead, how is it possible that no one at D2L considered the possibility of such a catastrophic failure? Such incompetence is inexcusable!
Why was D2L working for me all day today and now all of a sudden it’s down?
This is terrible!!! It’s been down for over 24 hours
“All Hands On Deck” sort of brings images of a sinking ship to my mind. Maybe you should have just gone with, “Oops.”
OOPS!
I would like to put my .02c in on this mess, as a student impacted by this. As we all know, at the end of the day, digital technology is unpredictable. Should there be a “flip of the switch” backup plan, perhaps, but at the same time, who is to say the the technology within the technology wasn’t the backup plan. Look at ships…they’re intended to be unsinkable, yet they have bilge pumps for the unfortunate and there are still ships that sink.
One thing that I can say…having transferred from a community college that was obsessed with BlackBoard and Pearson as a whole…the transparency is a blessing! Try dealing with the Connect service…it is a disgusting example of an online learning portal! There is no tech support on the weekends for students, no way of following any issues they may be having because they have no concern of even mentioning there is a problem being worked on, let alone the progress and some kind of sensation of concern.
While I am definitely inconvenienced by this, the effort of transparency and concern makes me more willing the embrace the “**** happens” theory!
Over-n-out
D2L has fallen like a titanic hit the iceberg and sinked.
They will fix it by exam time don’t worry.
Only thing is what do you do until that time especially for those of us taking distance courses.
We have the desire to learn but it seems you won’t let us. This down time is not acceptable.
.
You state above: “This process continues since not all schools have been migrated at this time. Each school is notified when their migration process is complete, and you will know it is complete because your site will be accessible once again.”
Tell me why we can not be notified that we are on that list. It would at least be something more than the last 8 hours of updates stating “no update at this time”.
Our communications protocol is for us to communicate with the identified person at each school, and for them to at communicate with their students and employees. Sorry.
Our outage has affected us for days. You have communicated with our identified people at my school. None of that communication included a list of schools that will be migrated, only that some schools will be migrated. Your communication is not telling us anything.
The schools may be have different data and some may not be affected but this does not mean a complex system should or cannot have an alerting system that users at will can elect to add their email address to this alerting system, when the system is down or experiencing ‘slowness’. The response you gave me was like because every school is differently configured and may or may not be affected and therefore is not a viable solution is not a good response. I need my access to keep ahead with my class work. Now I am falling behind. My school only sent out to alerts one Wednesday and the other Yesterday and both were advising the system would be up soon. NEVER HAPPENED!
Taking a distance course at Laurentian U. This is crazy.
The university is over 400km away so driving there is not an option.
This is crazy.
This is absolutely ridiculous!
This has gotten to a level of idiocy. Days of not being able to access course content, that I am forced to use because my university bought this horrible d2l package. It was painfully obvious over last weekend there was a problem with regular time outs, yet D2L seems to have waited for everything to crash before trying to do something. This has an impact beyond “school” as our lives have to be reshuffled now because of poor tech support. Further reason why face to face instruction is the only reliable method of teaching.
You guys seem to be playing around and not being honest about this outage.
I work for a company that uses data centers and cannot afford to have service interrupted.
we have hot-hot backup systems in separate locations from the primary. Are you guys serious?
You guys paint your company as the best in the business, but your service or lack there of tells us otherwise.
I hope my school drops you and gets service from a company that is ready to respond immediately and is able to fix issues in a matter of minutes not days!
It is possible, we have colos go down at work and within minutes the backup colo is in service.
by the time this is fixed, i have lost much study time for my 6 week algebra class..but i am optimistic it will be fixed.what a situation?
D2L is an extremely unreliable technology. It goes down very frequently and dramatically affects the work students and faculty are trying to do. There is no consideration for the affects this systems failures have on everyone, except the poor D2L staff who have to fix it, well that’s your job. Next time get a system that truly functions, or have a back up plan. D2L staff continue to minimize the problems with their technology despite the fact that it has been down for days, and we are just finding out now the true cause why and are continuously given false hope that it will be working. Own up to your mistakes D2L, and schools, get a better provider so staff and students don’t suffer. We pay too much to not be able to do our work because of a crap system.
What happened in the pilot?
Was there a pilot?
Was there a sufficient QA team? Test cases?
I was not impressed with the UI when it was working. SOOOOO many bugs, not intuitive, and poorly organized.
As a former systems project manager, this system would never have left the development floor.
D2L has a 13 year history. It’s not a pilot. Some clients have been using the learning environment for over 10 years. Like anything else, some people are positive about the features and UI and others are less so. Thanks for the feedback.
Barry, your reply comes of as disingenuous to me: “formerdesigner” did NOT say that D2L is a pilot, he/she said that D2L does not appear to have piloted this transfer adequately enough to know whether this transfer was going to go smoothly or not. Your response in no way addresses that point.
He was talking about the UI, bugs, and organization. Maybe that was a separate point from the pilot comment, but I took it as a whole.
Mr. Dahl,
I understand the problems with system migration. You have to trust what the vendor tells you. The normal problem is that your company’s purchasing people are being told the situation through the vendor’s sales team. Neither of those groups understand the details that can cause big problems in IT-land. In the case of failure, contingency plans are difficult to implement without affecting your clients, so you can’t win. It takes time to move huge data sets while keeping integrity, especially live. The comment above about “rack & stack” vs. “cloud” shows a lack of understanding about the nature of the “cloud”.
From my side, there is one problem that you can look at if you choose for future reference. I still have not been told anything by my school indicating the extent of the problem. Individual instructors have been taking whatever actions seem best to them. One tells us that the problem hasn’t been big enough to affect class and another provided the next 3 weeks of materials through a different medium.
What has my school been told, and when? Have they dropped the ball in letting us know to implement our own contingency plans to keep our classwork moving? If your company did not tell them up front that the potential existed for a major outage, then shame on you. If they didn’t pass it on, shame on them.
As for reliability, I have only been using D2L for 15 weeks. I learned in week 3 to download course content to my local system because of the outages and slowdowns at our school. When I had an assignment to find a “bad” website, I chose our school’s D2L interface. I think anyone who has been in the world for a while (as opposed to in Academia or School) has the same basic reaction to D2L. For the feature set presented to the student, it is clunky and buggy, not to mention the hidden “features” that change the content of posts in web design classes, apparently for security. If you are going to do something, then let me know so I know the difference between a slip of the mouse and something that cannot be changed.
I do hope that you get things fixed soon, but even more I hope that the new owner of D2L will spend some time on the interface and make me think I’m using a best-in-class product.
Regards,
Jack Cain
As indicated by several other posts, this disruption has had a major impact to the students and staff at Portland State. As an urban campus our school caters to working students and professors. Our days are filled with work, school and familial duties. Many of us are already squeezing 16 or more hours into 8 hour days. Your failure has had a MAJOR negative impact on every person connected to our school, no matter how tenuous the connection. You have provided no clear answers to when we will have access to our learning system and there is no way to get the time back all of us have lost. This outage is unacceptable and I pity your employees and vendors who are cleaning up a mess they are probably not responsible. We are all going down with this ship.
Portland is not the only college affected. Many Universities and Colleges are effected! Including working professionals taking on-line masters courses. We have paid a lot of money for these courses. Your lack of testing has disrupted mess. I have several major projects due in the next few weeks and thanks to D2L a lot of us will be scrambling to catch-up. Sorry does not cut it anymore. We want action, and would appreciate an update every 1/2 hour.
No kidding, 100% agree. Fixed problems when deadlines pass us by does us no good, I am getting hurt by this no matter how it shakes out…
First, let me just say, those who say D2L is unreliable, have you been working with D2L for more than a year or two? The major issue here is a NEW piece of technology that was recently implemented. Obviously the new technology is not as reliable as D2L was given to believe.
That being said, there are a number of issues I see with having implemented this technology in the first place. Any hardware/software that cannot be stopped or reversed once started should not be considered lightly. As others have said, a fail-safe should have been in place. Furthermore, the idea of live migration of that volume of data seems like a true logistics nightmare. Would it not have been better to postpone data migration to a time period that schools are not in absolute need of access to the D2L system daily; for example, between semesters? ARX was a risky decision, and clearly this risk did not pay off. By trying to avoid downtime, it has been inadvertently created. Just saying sorry does not help this situation. Those responsible for this decision should be held accountable. There are those of us wishing that our universities had never changed systems. WebCT might not be the greatest, but at least I never experienced problems like this. D2L’s reputation has been damaged to an incredible extent. I am fairly forgiving of mistakes; we are all human. Many are not so forgiving, and fewer are quick to forget. Good luck with the long-term effects this will have on the company.
What’s really concerning me here is how Barry (and D2L, in general) appear to be actively avoiding giving users/clients any explanation of (1) why they made a switch just weeks into the Spring semester of almost every North American college and university (what’s wrong with the Dec. intersession, or waiting until the end of the Spring semester?) and (2) why they appear to have not put into place any sort of contingency plan that would have allowed them to switch back to the original hosting configuration (thereby minimizing/eliminating downtime) if things went wrong.
After the problems have been solved, there will be more information shared about the technical issues that were incurred. I most certainly cannot comment about those things because my position is far removed that level of knowledge. I’m not trying to dodge anything, but I’m also not willing to speculate about things of which I have no knowledge. Those people with the knowledge will share what they can after we know how it ends. I don’t think they’ll tell their story until they have the whole story.
Here at University of Manitoba it’s been working sporadically. I appreciate that, but why can’t it just be permanent lol? I feel like this isn’t typical of others issues
A technology change this major should never have been attempted when it was anyway. Summer break? Winter break? Have you heard of these downtimes? Many schools share them.
I don’t know much about the system issues and I don’t doubt that the D2L team is working hard on fixing this issue but this is the 4th day I can’t access my account, I feel completely lost, all my classes are online and I feel like my life just stopped. I know it sounds overly dramatic but it is honestly very stressful that I am trying to “go to class” and do my work and I can’t! PLEASE this is taking too long and I am starting to miss blackboard even though I love the organization and design of D2L.
I am also frustrated with the down time and the lack of support from D2L. All the apologies, explanations, and assurances mean nothing to me at this point. When can we expect solutions?
What are the terms of D2L’s SLA with its CSP? Will will proscribed financial compensation be passed on to adversely affected D2L clients?
It’s a shame that D2L decided to make motifications in the middle of the term. Couldn’t you all have waited till break or maybe have been doing maitanance while we were all just on winter vacation? Now students nation wide are having to struggle to keep up with their classes due to the inconvenience. Not everyone can attend school so the online option is a necessary. It’s sad to me that even though we pay good money to go to school (often doing into severe fincancial debt) the best we get is “Were Sorry”. Tell that to my collectors…
How about a refund for part of my tuition? These online courses are incredibly expensive and I am clearly not getting what I’ve paid for.
Agree
So, what do I tell my students? Do you have any idea how poorly this reflects upon my university and by extension, on me? We can’t afford to have continuous problems. We didn’t have these problems with BlackBoard.
You have pretty much lost all credibility with me at this point.
I will most likely have to work an extra week because I believed you would fix this issue earlier this week. I am not happy and will not be recommending your platform to anyone–most likely–never!
My students are stressed, I am stressed and I am worried this will impact their learning.
Max Macias
It seems to me that the legal battle against Blackboard has resulted in significant capital erosion leading to a less than healthy investment in technology and support coupled with a need to improve cash-flow quickly and permanently.
I need D2L to be back up immediately. I have an online assignment and test due tomorrow, and today is the ONLY time I will be able to complete it. This incredible unprofessional, and I have paid too much money for this inconvenience. My only hope is that my professor gives us an extension, so that I don’t get a 0 on a major assignment or exam. Thanks for nothing.
I have faith in the D2L website and the ‘crew’ that works so hard to keep it running. I have been taking online courses for two years and have seen nothing but a positive attention to keeping D2L functional. I appriciated very much the update from the president of D2L when I tried to login this morning. Things happen. I think with situations like these its not so much a need for another back up as I have not seen an issue like this before so it is rare, (my positive opinion), but a need for the instructors involved to contact the students directly through their regular college email. I think the people working hard to get D2L back online should be applauded, thanks for the hard work!!
Shelley
Well last I had it up and running again finally and this morning I went to log on and it was down again! This is negatively effecting me and almost every other student here at Western Illinois University. I know our school just switched over to desire to learn recently, and I heard it was because it was cheaper than what was previously being used. But when it is at the cost of a students ability to learn and complete their tasks it’s just not right. I remember desire to learn having issues before this semester, but never this bad before. IF THIS IS NOT WORKING BY THE END OF THE DAY, I CAN GUARANTEE THAT A PETITION WILL BE STARTED TO RETURN TO WHAT WAS PREVIOUSLY USED. This is not intended as a threat but I can not afford this effecting my learning. thanks
I have a couple questions for Desire2Learn Incorporated. I understand the schools that sill do not have access to D2L must be address individually, so these are my questions:
1. How many schools are still effected by this fiasco?
2. On average, how long will it taking to fix each school since they must be address individually?
3. Can you post a list of the order that the schools will be addressed so that students and faculty of each school could have an estimate when their school’s D2L should be fixed?
4. Can you keep the list created in question 3 updated by marking which schools have been fixed so that students and faculty could keep track of the progress?
D2L has always been a poor site if you ask me. Formatting and editing is sub-par at best. Not to mention the fact that I have to have a seperate email from my University .edu account? Faulty and broken? not surprised at all. Now my deadlines are going by and I cant do anything, great. Even with an extension I would still be looking at 2x the work for next week to catch up, thanks for NOTHING, PATHETIC!!!
Complaining here is pointless guys. Instead, direct your words to your school and let your school know that you want them to stop doing business with D2L. The best complaint is the one that’s felt in the wallet. Make D2L earn your business back with a better product and better service.
Complain to the right people in your University. Complaining to your technical staff probably isn’t where you should direct your ire. Try your university president, vice president(s) or provost.
Agreed about complaining to our respective universities, beyond entry level tech or professors. I finally did this morning.