Dap Hartmann provided an amusing read this morning; digging at TU Delft's adoption of Brightspace 2.0. He began by poking at the tendering [1] process for selecting TU Delft's new learning management system. He claims we are virtually the only university that uses Brightspace [2] and the university supports the choice by declaring that the tendering process was "thorough".

I've had at least one run in with this tendering process and I was surprised how opaque it was. In my case, it seemed that the university was already working with a company and had to legally make a tender before continuing to work with them. But an approach can be to post the tender in a way that aligns closely with what the company they already work with offers and only publicly visible for the minimal time. This is seemingly so that no other company has a chance to compete and the predetermined company is all but guaranteed to win the tender. This is a well-known strategy, also used when one is legally obliged to post job advertisements and you already know who you want to hire. I questioned the tendering process and that did not get me anywhere further. This was only one of many negative introductions I had to how TU Delft internally functions. It would be interesting to see how many tenders pass the smell test.

D2L, the company that makes Brightspace, is a Canadian company. We have too many services that trust non-European companies access to our student and employee data. There are open source alternatives that TU Delft could self-host or pay a European company to deploy. I wonder if such things were considered in the tendering process.

[1]	European open call for bids to provide a service or product

[2]	I don't think Dap is correct about this. A simple internet search does show brightspace in use in a number of other universities and Wikipedia cites some business websites and claims that Brightspace had 16% of the 2023 LMS share in the US higher-education market.