At this time of the year, it’s good to reflect on the progress made in the last 12 months and how we can apply what we’ve learned to the future. In fact, reflection is a key pedagogical tool that helps us contextualize our experiences, discover new insights, and think about how we’ll apply it all to help us grow.
Looking back at last year, one of the key things I learned was that we can achieve our goals better by focusing on the activities that will help accomplish them, rather than by focusing on the goals alone. I’ll give you an example from my life to illustrate this idea. I’ve had a goal to run 10 kilometers in under an hour. But instead of focusing on running 10km in an hour, I dedicated myself to each individual run—and to trying to get a little bit faster each time I ran that distance. And when I wasn’t running, I would incorporate other wellness activities into the mix. The results have been good. I got my 10km down under 51 minutes—something I never dreamed possible at the beginning of the year.
I’ve had this goal for many years, but the key difference this year was that I didn’t tell anyone about it, I just focused on the activity and reported progress.
I think this approach to self-improvement directly relates to how we think about learning at D2L. At D2L, we’re focused on the learning moments that are deeply human—that help people grow and achieve more than they dreamed possible, and that ultimately create the conditions for communities to thrive. Each learning moment along the journey is what gets us closer to our goals. This will remain key to our focus in 2024.
With that in mind, I look forward to building on the many successes we had in 2023, including:
- seeing positive results with Creator+: We witnessed notable increases in engagement through Creator+, like higher completion rates and better grades—critical achievements that we’ll expand in the coming year.
- creating a more accessible learning experience: Not only is D2L compatible with the latest accessibility standards, we met them the day they were introduced. That’s because we’d already been working toward meeting the next standards of accessibility. It’s a testament to how deeply entrenched accessibility is in the way we work.
- strengthening cybersecurity: In 2023 we joined forces with others on critical cybersecurity initiatives like the Secure by Design Pledge, which I was pleased to speak about at the White House in August. Cybersecurity is an ever-present challenge for our clients, and we were pleased to once again deliver better than 99.9% up time in 2023.
- providing excellent services and support: In 2023, our services team began testing AI with our clients to improve our course content experience and launched an Ethics, Privacy and Policy in AI course to better support organizations looking to use AI in the workplace. They also deepened our customer relationships internationally, including in India, meeting with more of our clients face-to-face in places like Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro and Melbourne.
In 2024, D2L will celebrate its 25th anniversary. Looking back, I couldn’t be prouder of what we’ve achieved and of the lives we’ve helped to change for the better. But there is still a lot of work to be done. We’ll take it step by step.
Oh, by the way, I’m working toward a new running goal now—but I won’t tell you what it is.
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