“Domo now makes it easy for even our non-technical clients to feel comfortable with analytics.”
Kara Schimmelfing
Data Solutions Consultant, D2L
A global leader in EdTech, D2L is the creator of Brightspace, the #1 Learning Management System technology. D2L’s open and extensible platform is trusted by millions of users, and thousands of schools, academic institutions, and corporations around the world in higher education, K–12, healthcare, government, and the enterprise sector.
Industry
High Tech
Challenge: D2L needed a BI tool it could use to power a new Self-Serve Analytics product for its learning platform.
Solution: Domo Everywhere makes it simple for clients to build custom visualizations, even if they have a non-technical background.
Impact: Within the first six months of launching the new feature, 43% of eligible D2L clients have used the new feature, with 77% of those using it regularly.
D2L makes Self-Serve Analytics a reality with Domo.
D2L is the maker of Brightspace, which the EdTech company bills as a learning platform for people that care deeply about making sure students reach their potential. Reporting and visualizations are a key component of that promise. Educators use it to measure learner interaction data to understand how students are progressing through a course, where they are succeeding, and where engagement can be improved. The data is used for everything from securing financial aid to meeting accreditation requirements to boosting student retention.
However, the company found that its previous BI tool had become an obstacle to generating the insights required to help users and their students achieve all they could. “We had really outgrown it,” said Megan Walker, product management manager for D2L. “The user experience wasn’t ideal, and we wanted to improve that by picking a new partner that would let us level up the whole product.”
When evaluating its BI options, the Brightspace platform needed a tool with the flexibility to meet the needs of its wide variety of education and corporate clients around the world. Their criteria around localization, translations, security, access, integration, usability and breadth of features quickly culled their list from every BI tool on the market down to just one: Domo.
Self-serve understanding with Domo.
D2L relies on Domo Everywhere, Domo’s embedded analytics solution, to deliver a new Self-Serve Analytics product in the Brightspace platform that allows users to build their own custom visualizations.
The company stands up a Domo instance for each client, which it then populates with the client’s data and pre-built templates to help them get started. Domo CourseBuilder was used to create an automated onboarding guide to help clients get started faster. D2L saw remarkable adoption of its new Self-Serve Analytics product, with 43% of its eligible clients turning the feature on within the first six months of launch. Of those clients, 77% use the new feature regularly.
“There’s so much value for our clients to be able to go in and work with their own data that they would lose if we were to just present something for them. That’s where we’ve been getting a lot of really good feedback.”
In addition to providing clients with more value, Domo has enabled D2L to drive more revenue by being able to offer additional functionality as part of their premium package. “Clients can buy hours with us to build something specific, such as a report for audit requirements that are unique to their part of the world,” said Kara Schimmelfing, data solutions consultant for D2L. “It’s helped grow our premium analytics offering because we’ve been able to articulate a lot more value in that package than ever before.”
Consistency meets simplicity.
According to Walker, a key challenge for D2L was that siloed systems meant the data that fueled its dashboards didn’t always align with data that showed up in other places in Brightspace. “Being able to leverage the federated agent for our embedded dashboards and being able to load our datasets directly into Domo for our Self-Serve Analytics means our source data is now far more consistent,” said Walker.
In addition, Schimmelfing says that Domo has enabled a wider variety of clients to leverage data. “Before Domo, clients had access to raw data that just came with a package of our software. Those that were technical were able to run with it,” she said.
“Domo now makes it easy for even our non-technical clients to feel comfortable with analytics. It really enables a lot more people to be working with the data.”
With the pandemic, many D2L clients were forced to quickly pivot from face-to-face learning to a completely-remote model. Domo helps those clients understand how their new online education model is working. “With this tool in their hands, they can have a lot more data at their fingertips,” said Walker. “They can answer questions from their leaders more confidently, be able to prove where things are working, and highlight areas where they can improve.”