Published by Sue Johns-Chapman
Published Date 15.06.2026 
Somewhere in the UK right now, a GP or a physiotherapist is probably partway through a course on how to talk to patients about sleep, nutrition, or behaviour change as part of their treatment plan. Before 2021, the only training available to them on this was American, and built around a healthcare system that doesn’t look much like the NHS. Today, that training exists because the British Society of Lifestyle Medicine built it themselves, on our platform, Brightspace. It’s the UK’s first accredited certification programme in lifestyle medicine, and since launching, it’s reached over 60,000 hours of accredited learning, grown their membership by 150% and influenced care for more than 3 million patients a year.
That story is why I wanted to enter D2L for EdTech Company of the Year this year, and it’s a big part of why I’m pleased to say we’ve been shortlisted.
Who we are
D2L is the company behind Brightspace, a learning platform used by schools, universities, professional bodies, and employers to deliver and manage online and blended learning. If you’ve ever logged into a course portal at university, sat an online assessment, or completed compliance training through your employer, there’s a reasonable chance it was running on something like Brightspace, even if you never thought about who built it.
We’re a Canadian company, founded 25 years ago, and we now work with institutions across more than 40 countries, supporting well over 20 million learners. In the UK, that includes universities and colleges, schools, and organisations like the British Society of Lifestyle Medicine.
Our entry for EdTech Company of the Year
In addition to the British Society of Lifestyle Medicine story, we also entered D2L Lumi, our AI suite built into Brightspace. There’s a lot of noise in EdTech right now about AI, and a lot of it amounts to “we added a chatbot.” What we’re doing with D2L Lumi is a bit different. We’re building AI that helps teachers do the parts of their job that eat the most time, while making sure they stay firmly in control of what students see. Every AI-generated piece of feedback or content goes through the educator first. In education, this is the only responsible way to manage AI, because the cost of making a mistake falls on a student – a real person, not a metric.
Alongside that, we entered Createspace, a tool that lets course teams build and edit content together in real time rather than emailing documents back and forth, and Accessibility+, which helps institutions check and fix accessibility issues in their course materials automatically. Both of these features remove a lot of friction from people’s working days, which is, more often than not, what good EdTech actually looks like.
We also referenced our work with the University of Groningen, where Brightspace now runs over 3,000 digital exams a year for more than 190,000 students, including a system that can process 700 to 800 enrolment changes in seconds without errors. And in the UK specifically, Brightspace holds the number one ranking on the APUC framework, the procurement framework covering Scottish higher education institutions.
What being shortlisted means
Being shortlisted for this award means a huge amount to D2L. We spend a lot of time thinking about how to make education better for the people who use our platform: the instructors planning lessons at 11pm, the students trying to catch up after missing a class, the administrators trying to run an exam for thousands of people without anything breaking. To have that work recognised by judges who clearly looked closely at what we submitted, not just the headline numbers but the actual detail underneath them, motivates us to keep going and do more. It tells us we’re building the right things, and it gives us a reason to keep pushing on the parts we haven’t cracked yet.
Whatever the outcome, being shortlisted alongside the other finalists in this category is a reminder of how much good work is happening across the UK right now, and we’re proud to be part of that conversation.
You can find out more about D2L and Brightspace at d2l.com, and follow us on LinkedIn and X for updates.
