AWS Business Intelligence Blog

How D2L transformed educational analytics using visual data preparation in Amazon Quick Sight

This post was written with Surekha Rao and Andrew Wooster of D2L.

At D2L, we’re on a mission to transform the way the world learns. As a global leader in learning innovation, we work closely with educational institutions worldwide to make learning more inspiring, engaging, and human. Our flagship learning management system, D2L Brightspace, serves as the foundation for countless educational experiences, generating valuable data that can drive meaningful improvements in teaching and learning outcomes.

Our Performance+ analytics suite is designed to help educators and administrators monitor engagement, identify at-risk learners, and evaluate the effectiveness of assessments and course design. With intuitive dashboards and predictive analytics, we enable timely interventions and personalized support for learners. However, as our learning ecosystem expanded, so did the volume and complexity of data we needed to manage, including learner engagement metrics, course performance, and institutional KPIs.

In this post, we show how D2L enhanced its Brightspace Analytics offerings in the Performance+ package using new data preparation features in Amazon Quick Sight. This advancement democratizes data insights across educational institutions. It enables educators and administrators to transform raw data into actionable insights through simple clicks without requiring technical expertise.

The challenge: Scaling analytics while maintaining usability

As our user base grew, we faced increasing pressure to scale our analytics capabilities without compromising performance or ease of use. Educational institutions often operate under tight budget constraints, and many lack dedicated data science teams. We needed a solution that could democratize data insights across various skill levels while remaining cost-effective and predictable. Before adopting Quick Sight, we encountered several technical challenges that limited our ability to scale analytics effectively:

  • Affordability and cost predictability – Many of the tools we previously used had complex pricing models tied to user volume or compute usage. This made it difficult to forecast costs and extend analytics capabilities to our customers in a sustainable way. For educational institutions with limited resources, this unpredictability posed a significant barrier to adoption.
  • Regional availability and data residency – Because we serve institutions globally, we needed a solution that could support multi-Region deployment and align with evolving data residency requirements. Our previous tools lacked the flexibility needed to address data sovereignty concerns, and we experienced latency issues when serving users in geographically dispersed regions.
  • Technical barriers to insight – Perhaps most importantly, traditional data preparation tools often required specialized skills in SQL or scripting. This created bottlenecks in the analytics process, because educators and administrators had to rely on technical teams to prepare and modify data before they could access insights.

Solution overview

The new Quick Sight data preparation experience has been revolutionary for our approach to educational analytics. By providing a visual, low-code interface for data transformation, Quick Sight removes technical barriers and empowers users of all skill levels to work directly with data.

The enhanced data preparation capabilities introduce support for Aggregate, Filter, Pivot, Unpivot, and Append transformations (as shown in the following screenshot of the updated navigation pane), all through a fully visual, low-code interface. These capabilities were previously unavailable without technical expertise, and they’ve significantly streamlined our data preparation process.

For educational institutions, educators and administrators can now:

  • Access and transform data independently – Faculty members can clean, alter, and join data without needing SQL or scripting skills. This reduces dependency on technical teams and empowers more people to work directly with data, leading to faster insights and more agile decision-making.
  • Quickly generate actionable insights – The point-and-click interfaces and visual workflows help users build workflows and dashboards quickly, which is ideal for the fast-paced environment of education, where timely interventions can significantly impact student success.
  • Scale analytics across departments – With intuitive tools, institutions can scale analytics across departments without needing to train everyone on complex coding or Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) tools. This democratization of data access helps create a more data-informed culture throughout the organization.
  • Optimize resource allocation – By reducing the need for specialized data engineering resources, Quick Sight helps make analytics more affordable and predictable for educational institutions with limited budgets.

The following workflow demonstrates how raw Brightspace data sets are visually transformed into a combined and insight-rich data set. This transformation enables deeper analysis of learner registrations and user demographics, empowering data-driven decisions across curriculum planning and support strategies.

Data sources and integration

One of the key strengths of our Quick Sight implementation is its ability to pull data from multiple sources. Quick Sight integrates with our Brightspace Learning Management System (LMS) and its Brightspace Data Sets (BDS) from Data Hub, capturing rich data on learner engagement, course performance, and instructor activity. We also support customers in bringing additional data through various Quick Sight data sources, including:

  • File uploads for one-time (ad-hoc) analysis
  • Database connections (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, Amazon Aurora, MariaDB)
  • Data platforms (Databricks, Spark, Teradata)
  • Query engines (Presto, Starburst, Trino)

This flexibility helps educational institutions create a comprehensive view of their operations, combining learning data with information from other systems to drive holistic improvements.

Real-world impact: Transforming educational decision-making

When integrated with Brightspace, Quick Sight serves as a driver of data-informed decision-making in education. By bringing learning analytics into daily workflows, we help educators and administrators make smarter, real-time decisions that positively impact learning outcomes.

For example, instructors can now quickly identify patterns in student engagement data, spotting potential issues before they become problems. A professor might notice that students are spending significantly less time on a particular module compared to others, suggesting that the content might need revision or additional support resources.

Similarly, administrators can track institutional KPIs across departments, identifying areas of excellence and opportunities for improvement. They can analyze course completion rates, assessment outcomes, and platform adoption trends without waiting for technical teams to prepare the data.

The impact extends to areas outside operational efficiency. By democratizing access to data insights, Quick Sight helps foster a culture of evidence-based decision-making throughout educational institutions. Faculty members become more engaged with data when they can explore it themselves, leading to more innovative approaches to teaching and learning.

Scaling analytics across the educational ecosystem

Today, a significant portion of D2L customers access our analytics solution, demonstrating the growing recognition of data’s value in education. Our Performance+ add-on package customers get access to embedded analytics capabilities that scale with institutional needs.

This approach makes it possible to scale analytics across institutions of various sizes while maintaining a predictable cost structure. For educational organizations with limited resources, this predictability is crucial for long-term planning and sustainability.

The low-code data preparation experience of Quick Sight has been particularly valuable in this scaling effort. By removing technical barriers, we’ve made insights more accessible to users of various skill levels, helping educators, administrators, and business teams use data in their daily work.

The future of educational analytics

As we look to the future, our focus is on accelerating adoption and embedding analytics into everyday practice to elevate both learning outcomes and operational productivity. We see several key opportunities:

  • Deeper integration with teaching workflows – By further embedding analytics into the teaching experience, we aim to make data-informed decisions a natural part of instructional practice rather than a separate activity.
  • Enhanced predictive capabilities – Building on the machine learning (ML) features of Quick Sight, we’re working to provide more sophisticated early warning systems that can identify at-risk students with greater accuracy and suggest targeted interventions.
  • Cross-institutional benchmarking – While respecting privacy and data governance requirements, we see opportunities to provide anonymized benchmarking that helps institutions understand their performance in a broader context.
  • Expanded self-service analytics – Building on the low-code approach of Quick Sight, we plan to further help non-technical users create their own reports and dashboards tailored to their specific needs.

Conclusion

At D2L, we’re committed to providing institutions with tools that scale, support compliance, and democratize access to data. Quick Sight, integrated with Brightspace, plays a key role in delivering on that promise.

The new data preparation experience represents a significant step forward in making analytics accessible to everyone in the educational ecosystem. By removing technical barriers and providing intuitive tools for data transformation, Quick Sight helps institutions of different sizes use their data for meaningful improvements in teaching and learning.

In a period where educational institutions face increasing pressure to demonstrate impact and improve outcomes, accessible analytics is essential. With Quick Sight, we’re proud to offer a solution that makes powerful data insights available to a variety of customers, regardless of technical expertise or budget constraints.

As we continue this journey, we remain focused on our core mission: transforming the way the world learns through innovation, engagement, and data-informed decision-making. With partners like AWS and services like Quick Sight, we’re confident in our ability to help educational institutions achieve more than they ever thought possible. To learn more about how Quick Sight can transform your educational analytics, explore the following resources:

About the authors

Surekha Rao is a Director of Product Management at D2L, where she has spent the past 14 years advancing innovation in education technology. With over 4 years in product leadership, she has guided the strategy and launch of transformative solutions spanning generative AI, analytics, assessment, and engagement tools. These initiatives have helped institutions improve learning outcomes, strengthen educator efficiency, and create more connected learning experiences. Her current focus is on data and analytics, driving initiatives that equip educators and administrators with actionable insights and enable evidence-based decision-making at scale.

Andrew Wooster is a Senior Director of Engineering at D2L. Andrew is responsible for the overall technical strategy and delivery of data, analytics, and AI products and features, working to help his teams bring customer value to the forefront in a quality, performant, and scalable way.

Barret Newman is a Principal Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Calgary, AB. With over 15 years of IT experience, Barret is a technical thought leader focused on helping EdTech customers migrate, modernize, and innovate on AWS. When Barret is not working, he enjoys spending time with his partner and two cats, automating and integrating every device in their household, and drinking plenty of coffee.

Vignessh Baskaran is a Sr. Technical Product Manager owning Data Connectivity and Data Preparation domains in Amazon Quick Sight, a capability of Amazon Quick Suite. Leveraging his background in Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing, he led the product strategy and development of the new data preparation experience in Quick Sight, focusing on making complex data transformations accessible to all users. Outside of work, he enjoys watching cricket, playing racquetball, and exploring different cuisines in Seattle.