Acknowledgement of Desire2Learn Outage

 

I am truly sorry that the current and past Desire2Learn (D2L) outages are crippling the teaching and learning activities on our campus. Our use of D2L runs on computer hardware housed at D2L facilities, which is where these outages are occurring. I have been in direct contact with the leadership of D2L, including the CEO, John Baker, to make sure they understand the devastating impact to our campus and that we will hold them accountable.

 

D2L was chosen as the new campus online learning environment based on the recommendation of an evaluation committee that included faculty members and other important campus constituents. Despite D2L’s many strengths as a teaching and learning tool, D2L—the company—has proven unreliable as a service provider.

 

Given the failures, we are actively planning how the Office of Information Technology might run D2L on hardware under our control on our campus. As you might surmise, that cannot be accomplished for this semester.

 

We will continue to update you about the status of this service outage at www.colorado.edu/oit/service-alerts. OIT is also setting up face-to-face feedback sessions, starting tomorrow, so that you can voice your frustrations. Those sessions will be announced on the OIT homepage (www.colorado.edu/oit). You are also always welcome to send your feedback about D2L or any campus IT services to: oitfeedback@colorado.edu

 

Best,

 

Larry Levine

AVC for IT and CIO