September 30, 2013
I became a Product Designer in the Integration and Extensibility team at Desire2Learn (D2L) in May 2012. D2L builds a learning management system (LMS) called Brightspace where all digital aspects of a student’s education can be stored and interacted with.
Brightspace is a fully functional school portal that can be purchased by educational institutions, customized, and teachers/students are the main endusers. For example, students can access their courses, see their grades and submit assignments through their LMS. The capabilities expand much further then this.
The products I over looked were mainly synchronous communications integrations. These integrations allow users to launch web conferences for a live online class, check their mail, and start a chat with their classmates through their LMS. Many schools use tools offered by Microsoft, Google and Cisco WebEx to name a few. My team allowed these 3rd party tools to be accessible from their LMS seamlessly through single-sign-on. We built an interface for these tools inside the LMS which matched the look and feel of the site. The integrations were launched over a short development period and we iterated on them through user feedback.
While I was at D2L I was the lead product designer for MEETS for Cisco WebEx, Microsoft Lync Online Rooms, Office 365 Integration. I was also involved with maintenance of Google Apps Integration and Adobe Connect Online Rooms.