Making the Educational Experience More Human - John Baker, President and CEO of D2L

JANNAH AMIEL: Hi, I'm Jannah Amiel and today on Raise the Line, I'm happy to be joined by John Baker, president and CEO at D2L, and the creator of Brightspace, which is known as the world's first integrated learning platform. The company's education software is used by nearly 15 million learners around the world in higher education, K-12, healthcare, government and business. John created the company as a college engineering student in 1999 with the desire to use technology to dramatically transform learning. And I for one am looking forward to hearing about what the company's accomplished and what lies ahead as COVID has made online learning a necessity. Thank you so much for joining us today, John.

JOHN BAKER: Thank you Jannah. It's a real pleasure to be here with you. Thank you for what you're doing as well.

JANNAH AMIEL: Thank you. I would love if you could start just by telling us a little bit about yourself, and how an engineering student got involved in online learning.

JOHN BAKER: Yeah, I thought it was going to wind up in the healthcare profession, but took an engineering detour.

JANNAH AMIEL: That's a big detour.

JOHN BAKER: Yeah. In my case, I started D2L in my third year of university, really tried to wrestle down a key problem that I had in my head, which was, what's the most important problem that I could solve that would have the biggest impact in the world? And I couldn't think of anything bigger than transforming the way the world learns and so, I’ve pursued that with passion ever since. Prior to that, actually, I was doing all kinds of work to see if I could pick up some additional skills at university to enter into the medical space. So, it's a real pleasure to actually be talking with you today about these important topics.

JANNAH AMIEL: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm curious, talking about your intro, in 1999, I don't imagine that online learning was huge in that time. So, what was that like for you in the beginning? You identified this problem that needed a solution, but was it a difficult thing to try to introduce online learning and convince people that this is what makes sense and this is where we're going in the future?

JOHN BAKER: Yeah. It's hard to believe it's been 21 years. And you're right, it was hard to do this in 1999. If you can rewind the clock that far, classrooms didn't have internet and so the concept of teaching your class online in university, even at some of the top universities that I would have spoken to in those early days, was a real hard concept for people to get their heads around. In my case, my brother was doing distanced education from one of the top universities in the world and it was through cassette tapes, and faxing in or mailing in his assignments.

JANNAH AMIEL: No kidding?

JOHN BAKER: Yeah. No, this was a big change, but with a lot of persistence, eventually people started to really recognize the power of digitizing and leveraging technology to really have a transformational impact on the experience.

JANNAH AMIEL: What was the spark there for you? You talked about how you recognize like, "Hey, there's a problem," but what really sparked that off?

JOHN BAKER: Really, it's that problem finding. So, you're going to laugh. As an engineer you're taught to solve a lot of problems, but finding problems to solve, that was a new thing for me. And we had a university professor challenge us to go find a problem to solve in my third year of university. And in our case, it wasn't to do with D2L, in our case we settled on reinventing crutches, something that's been a challenge for many people that have had to go on crutches for as long as there've been crutches.

JANNAH AMIEL: Yeah.

JOHN BAKER: And so, we won all kinds of awards with our design. We made it possible to go up and down stairs, took away all the problems that would occur if you're a long-term user of these typical crutches. So it was really fun, and it got me out of just simply trying to solve problems to go out and look for one to actually go off and pursue.

I didn't think about “what's a small problem to work on” I thought about “what's the biggest one that I could tackle?” And back in those days, internet was a relatively new thing and I saw it as an opportunity to really break down a lot of barriers that existed to helping many people get an education they never dreamed possible. You could still say there's lots of barriers to access high quality education today, but back then there were way more and over the last 20 years, we've been systematically trying to knock them all down. So whether that's if you're blind or deaf, we made it possible to participate equally with everybody else in your class, using our technology, all the way through to working with some of the original inventors of MOOCs, to actually put the extra O in MOOC. I'm not sure if we want thanks for that or not, but I was like, "Wow, a massive open course doesn't really make sense unless it's online."

JANNAH AMIEL: That's right.

JOHN BAKER: So to me, these were just simply problems to get addressed, to really have a bigger impact on people's lives. That's why we pursued it.

JANNAH AMIEL: So talk to me about the platform. What is that experience like for learners? When I think about online learning and I think about online platforms, there's just a flood of different LMSs that come into my brain. So I'm curious, what is this platform like?

JOHN BAKER: I prefer to think of it as a better experience than probably what most people have experienced so far. We've built all the different technologies you're going to need to support transitioning that traditional classroom to a fully online experience. So, if you can imagine submitting your assignments online, getting them automatically graded online, taking quizzes, content discussions, instant messaging, all of the typical things you would normally see in terms of creating an online experience for a course. And then in our case, we've just tried to make it really accessible on any device. So it works on any mobile device you might have in your hand -- whether it's a smartphone or a laptop, or whether you've got a traditional desktop -- just making it really easy for you to access that learning experience with whatever you might have in your hand.

And then really importantly, we've actually started to try to transition away from just simply digitizing that experience to helping our clients optimize how learning is done and also supporting a real transformation of the actual experience so that we can actually free up time, both for the student and for the faculty members, so that they can have a better experience hopefully in their educational journey.

JANNAH AMIEL: Excellent. You mentioned healthcare, you mentioned that may have been the track for you and that path for you earlier. Does D2L have a presence in the medical and healthcare education?

JOHN BAKER:We do. We work with a lot of medical schools. We work with groups like the Association for Nurses across the US, Massachusetts General Hospital, their Institute for Health Professions, and dozens of others, and globally, so for example, Queensland Health down in Australia or various-

JANNAH AMIEL: Oh. Awesome.

JOHN BAKER:... hospitals all use our technology to support traditional online learning or training for their professions. In our case, we've also done some really interesting work as part of this COVID-19 response to provide some massive open online courses, both things that we've built ourselves early during the pandemic to help get knowledge out, but also to support our clients disseminating knowledge to the broader population. We think about taking an online course in this area as probably more impactful than watching an ad.

And so if we can help get the right knowledge out to as many people as we can, we're trying to do our little part in playing a small role in this.

JANNAH AMIEL: You mentioned COVID-19. So-

JOHN BAKER: Sure.

JANNAH AMIEL:... that's the hot topic, right? We’ve got to-

JOHN BAKER: We've not talked about this before.

JANNAH AMIEL:... touch on that. Never, not once. How has that, in your opinion and from your perspective, how has that affected traditional online learning as we think about it? And obviously a lot of things are moving to online, a lot of things are moving to virtual simulation and things like that. How do you identify what has been impacted by that, an online learning world, and will this last, do you think? Where do you see online learning going beyond this point?

JOHN BAKER: Well, this has certainly been a catalyst for pulling us forward into the future, in my opinion. I don't think we're going to bounce back to exactly the way things were before. This has really sped adoption up. Not all adoptions are equal. Some folks were ready for this transformation, ready to jump into a better experience online and other cases, it's been more of an emergency response mode where we're doing Zooms all day long. And clearly, we've learned a lot over the last 20 plus years in terms of what makes a great online experience and we need to help various different organizations globally transition to creating even higher quality online experiences. I know your organization is a big part of that as well too, but in our case, we think about, "Well, how do we partner with everybody that we can to drive this change and embrace a better way to do it in an online world.”

Now, in our case, back in January, February, probably not unlike you, we were watching a lot of the news, and noticing, "Wow, this is not as minor of an issue as we led onto believe." So we started preparing. Back in February, I made a bold prediction at the time, which people laughed at, which I said, "We could see upwards of 1 billion students globally out of school." That was before a single school in North America had closed. And then in March we basically had to flip a switch. All of our clients asked to go fully online almost overnight, and that was not easy as you can imagine.

JANNAH AMIEL: Yeah, it doesn't sound like it.

JOHN BAKER: So in our case, it was a pretty big transition for a lot of folks. I was so impressed with how quickly people worked together to solve challenges together and make that as smooth of a transition as you can possibly imagine. But now it's about how do we do this more strategically. This next wave of embracing technology has to be about making the experience better and to support what we have in the traditional environment. The goal isn't just to embrace technology, it's to leverage the technology to make the educational experience more human. How do we engage students in new ways that's going to make that experience better?

JANNAH AMIEL: What does better look like to you? We have so many things that we can do online in online courses and in this online learning experience, but as you think about the future, how do we make that better?

JOHN BAKER: Well, for us, we try to strive towards making it easier to help students achieve what they want to achieve. So do you want to become a doctor? And if so, how do we make sure that you achieve that dream, and how do we make sure that as you graduate, you've got the best possible set of skills so that you're going to be as impactful as you can in the world around you? And to me, one of the biggest transformations beyond just simply digitizing is freeing up time so that you can pursue your passion. So I don't know if you know the old definition, the etymology of the word “study”, but we've lost something over the years. Today, if you look up the word study in the dictionary, it talks about mental effort, careful, clinical... well, it's very boring.

But if you actually looked at the old definition, the way it was originally crafted hundreds of years ago, it talks about zeal, passion, pursuit, desire and I think we've lost something in the path that we've taken. I think it's because a lot of different schools, especially professionals -- take the health environment as just one example -- there's a lot more being put on our shoulders every year to learn. And so those competencies, if you will, that you have to pick up, crowd out the other form of study. So if we can make delivering of education more efficient -- whether it's through competency-based or mastery-based models of learning -- it frees up time, and it supports the ability for students to pursue research, to pursue their passions. Maybe they're also a musician at the same time they are pursuing a medical career. It gives us the ability to do more with our lives and to pursue things that we wouldn't have otherwise. That's what I mean by getting into a bit more of a transformation.

That's just one way, by the way. We can graduate doctors that are going to have a bigger impact, or nurses that have more of an impact with their patients as well, too. So to me, at the end of the day, that's what it's really about.

JANNAH AMIEL: Those are fantastic points. Talking to some of my colleagues in education, for some it has been a huge challenge with trying to transition everything online. And some of the challenge that they've expressed and the concern they've expressed is, "I don't know that this is going to be the same learning experience. I don't know that I can replicate what I would do in the classroom physically with my students online. And maybe they're missing a lot of things." How do we help those colleagues, the faculty members, those who are a little concerned about this switch that happens with online learning that this is effective and that this is where we are now?

JOHN BAKER: Well, we have 30 years of research showing it can be effective, and so I think it comes down to partnership. So, not a lot of faculty have received a great deal of training in terms of how to make that transition to fully online. So, if we can partner together, groups like yours along with mine, working hand in hand to help faculty make that transition, it makes that job so much easier. And so, they know that they've got great instructional design, there's good pedagogy in terms of how they're teaching, and then we build-in assessment. So a big part of this is making sure there's not just assessment as an exam at the end of the year, but being able to help students with that formative assessment, helping them demonstrate mastery as they're going through the program. You literally, in our system could even see a curve showing you how you're developing on each indicator that you're supposed to be demonstrating mastery of.

And so, you may not get it right, and that's okay because the system will tell you, "Hey, none of your students got this." And so, it gives teachers and students the ability to adapt and close those gaps and graduate with the skills you're are really going to need to enter that profession.

JANNAH AMIEL: Fantastic. What do you think would be the next big pioneering development in online education? I've heard some say maybe we've capped out as far as what we can do online in teaching. I want to hear from the expert on that.

JOHN BAKER: No, I think what I'm actually talking about is the next big thing. I know it feels like it's been here, for me, for a long time. And I remember sitting down with the Macy Foundation, with Osmosis and others mapping out “what does that future of the health professional education look like?” And what I'm talking about is still something that is the future. As we try to embrace these new ways of doing things, it takes time for us to embrace them. I do think it is a game changer because the studies that I'm looking at show students are learning twice as fast, scoring higher on exams, retaining the knowledge for longer. So that fundamental shift towards more of a mastery-based approach does make a big difference. And I think it's going to require a lot of help. Other things, you spoke about technology, so virtual reality, augmented reality, is going to certainly have a big role, being able to have your portfolio of all of your work follow you throughout your entire life.

All of these things are going to be big, impactful pieces, but at the core, I think, it's really around providing more opportunity to make that educational experience more human, through feedback and a pedagogy of engagement, making sure that we're doing everything we can to help those individual students that we're teaching achieve more than they dreamed possible, not what they hope they could achieve, but more than they dream possible.

JANNAH AMIEL: I love that.

JOHN BAKER: And if you go way out, I would say we will be talking a lot more about imagination and creativity and sparking all of those skills. We talked a lot about soft skills today in terms of education, but I really think of those as durable skills. I think that's going to be another element, whether it's entrepreneurship, your company as an example, going into one field and then demonstrating entrepreneurial ways of helping others through your craft. And so to me, it's making sure that we're doing our best to constantly improve the education we're providing to our mutual clients.

JANNAH AMIEL: That's awesome. I'm really inspired by just your curious spirit and the story of what that spark was for you. And I think about our audience, we have a lot of students and early healthcare professionals, and they listen in on these, and those that are entering the fields and entering these new roles in their life, they want to meet the moment, they want to do something to make a change. You spoke about just identifying the problem to solve. But, what would be your advice to those that are listening now, and they're starting to feel that spark and they want to do something? How do they start, what would you say to them?

JOHN BAKER: Well, don't be afraid to pursue it. That is the old definition of study -- pursuit, passion, zeal, desire. These words mean something. Follow that spark, see where it takes you. I actually think one of the tough things, I don't know about you -- but pre-mastery-based learning, or this competency-based models, lots of people use different terminology attached to this -- I think many students felt they had to get 100% every time. I don’t know about you, but I certainly felt the weight of that. 

So, this actually is different because it all of a sudden shows that there's a learning curve. You go from not knowing something to actually demonstrating true expertise in it. So, I hope that we can build a better system that encourages people to go explore these passions as well too. I wouldn't hold back. To me, life's too short not to do things you really care deeply about.

JANNAH AMIEL: Yeah. I agree about that. That's inspirational. And I'm excited to see what D2L, Brightspace, this online learning management, what this does because we are here now and it's really exciting to see some advancements that have been made. I think about the first online course I took years and years ago and what that looks like today, and it's very exciting. I'm excited to see you grow and put that human touch on and I think that's going to set you apart from everything.

JOHN BAKER: Oh, thank you very much. It's a real privilege to be working in this space. It's a real honor to work with so many great clients all over the world and also great partners.

JANNAH AMIEL: Yeah. Awesome. John, thank you so much for being with us today and sharing all this information.

JOHN BAKER: You're very welcome. And again, for the students that are out there, just go pursue that passion. The world really needs you. You're going to have a real big impact on many people's lives. So, thank you for doing that. And don't give up when things get hard. It's not an easy journey to go pursue these things. We're all here cheering you on, there's no question.

JANNAH AMIEL: That's right. Awesome. Thank you so much, John.

JOHN BAKER: You're welcome. Have a great day.

JANNAH AMIEL: I'm Jannah Amiel. Thanks for checking out today's show. Remember to do your part to flatten the curve and raise the line, we're all in this together.