Articulate 360 vs. D2L Brightspace

I am not a fully trained instructional designer, but I found the user experience to be enjoyable. I have crafted my own revision of a course using Articulate 360 and while the process was lengthy, I found edits and changes to be relatively easy to implement. I also had a great deal of fun making tweaks, organizing and adding imagery. I think with regard to creating online courses/products for students to utilize, this is a great program and serves several levels of instructional design well (from me being brand new to this, to my supervisor who is newly certified, up to a longtime LD). I don't know that this is wholly relevant to courses that are live, be they in-person or virtual (Zoom webinars for example). Most of the material created in Articulate 360 tends to sit on the side of an on-demand, at-your-own-pace as far as coursework is concerned. A live course with an instructor, while it could be utilized in a live setting, the way it would be used I am unsure would be as dynamic or worthwhile as other more traditional options.

If you're an educational institution (K-12, Higher Ed, etc.), this is an amazing tool, and it will provide you all the functionality to support anything you may want and need it to do. If you are looking at Brightspace as a tool for corporate training, I'm not sure exactly how good or bad it will be for you. My guess would be that it likely depends on your organization's size. Along that line, what I can speak to is how we use it for our customized training and in-house professional development/training, and it works fantastically for that. While we primarily use it for normal higher ed coursework, we regularly do training and professional development for all of our employees and I manage those along with our HR department. Because we use it for many other things as well, all of our employees are familiar with the product, which makes our trainings go that much smoother and makes my job that much easier.

Incentivized

• Rise is clean and professional. It looks polished to users and is easy for learners to follow.
• They have outstanding support.
• Storyline allows you to create some very engaging intricate interactive learning.
• Generally, their products are user friendly.
• They are considered the Gold standard in elearning authoring.
• Their courses can be read on phones, tablets computers. etc.
• They also have a powerpoint add in for making really nice slides.
• Their review tool, allows you to easily send the courses to reviewers who can update in course.

Incentivized

• Allowing users to embed content links from YouTube or Google Drive enables learners to experience a richer lesson.
• Providing a powerful editor that allows developers to also include content from Adobe Stock as well as textbook publishers and cloud storage companies gives more power and creative ability to instructors.
• Providing scaling for mobile and traditional computer systems ensures students will not have issues on the go.
• The customization of home pages and groups enable courses to be used for small training sessions with breakout groups, large courses with separate sections, and even just more engaging courses that present themed icons and logos.

• I'd like to see more variety in the types of interactions available. The ones that exist now (hot spot, drag n' drop, flip cards, etc.) are useful, but it would be nice to have more options without having to build something custom in Storyline to pull over. For example, I'd like a more elaborate sorting activity, customizable drag and drop activity, game options such as crosswords, options that allow user response, and more variety in the quizzing and assessment.
• The built-in branching scenario feature requires a bit of trial and error. I'd like to see a snapshot, at-a-glance view of the scenario so it easier to see where the branching is, or where its missing.
• The built-in assessment features are pretty limited - the Knowledge Check block has only multiple choice, multiple response, fill in the blank and basic matching. There is the option to pull in a test bank which is great, but it would be great to have more options built-in without having to develop something more elaborate in Storyline.

Incentivized

• One can feel a bit rushed on the Brightspace platform during the log-out period. Security requirements may require this, but it makes end-users more conscious about getting through content than taking notes.
• From my experience, there is not a direct connection between the platform and Outlook.
• Some content on the platform can feel redundant.

Incentivized

Articulate 360 is an essential tool in our organisation's workflow. The money that we make through its use, far outweighs the cost of renewing our licenses. Articulate 360 has exposed us to new clients that we may not have otherwise encountered if we did not subscribe to the Articulate services.

I would never give any system a perfect score. In the technology environment today we need to be constantly looking at ways to improve the user experience and LMS companies like Desire2Learn need to know that we have options today with other systems and they need to stay current with features and listen to their customers.

I rate the overall usability of Articulate 360 ​​with an 8, because of the many possibilities the software offers me. The software ensures that almost anyone without knowledge of coding can develop an interactive online course in a fairly simple and pleasant way.

Overall, the learning environment works as expected. However, there are plenty of bugs. For example, for a few versions, trying to print out a PDF from the Content screen in several browsers would produce a blank page. We inform D2L support about these issues, most of which are known issues. However, they are very slow to respond. D2L seems to spend more time selling than actually coding and testing their product. Most of the issues are not major -- however, there have been a few that are unbelievable. In fact, this past week we had a sudden issue where the "Submit" button in quizzes would not appear if users had a certain browser/operating system combination. This is a major problem, if students cannot submit their exams! D2L is slow to respond to these kinds of situations, which do occur more often than I would like.

Both students and instructor enjoy the 24-hoiur access. After, all isn't that the point of online learning. As an instructor located in an Eastern time zone state it is great to connect with students located in a Pacific time zone state. I have gotten comments about the early hours I am in the course room grading assignments . . . 4:00 a.m. PST; 7:00 a.m. EST So, it's sleep time for my students and "first cup of coffee" time for me.

Easy to navigate; little to no delay from one section of the course room to another; actually fun to use after overcoming the learning curve.

It took forever to get someone to respond--either by email or by phone--directly to a pricing and licensing question. It is unfortunate that a company that has such potential as a streamlined course building/authoring tool not only missed the boat with service but also proves itself to be all fluff and no substance.

Incentivized

I have had excellent support from Desire2Learn. Any ticket that I submit is acknowledged immediately and the correction is usually almost as quick. We use this for thousands of classes and it is pretty well liked by both faculty and students. We have been using it for almost 4 years now and most of our instructors have become pretty proficient with it.

Did not participate in the in-person training due to distance; training was completed online

The training provided online did not, necessarily, fit the version of the system that I was using. Screens were somewhat different and not all options were readily available. This could have been due to customization on the part of my institution however, I rather believe it was due to version changes and training materials not yet being updated.

It is pretty straight forward and easy to implement is you are already creating eLearning. If you have old courses created in other versions of Articulate I recommend you update them to the new version even though it is not necessary (especially From Storyline3 to 360) but if you don't you may find difficulty opening and keeping things straight

Incentivized

The D2L implementation team listened to our concerns and built a system based upon our needs. We wanted to keep them after the initial implementation.

Adobe Captivate has a ton of incredible functionality. You're able to fully customize user experiences through interactive elements, buttons, transitions, hiding and activating various elements, and so on. But overall Captivate is insanely difficult for someone new to the tool to learn. Most of what I learned about Captivate, I had to do by trial and error or by watching Paul Wilson's YouTube videos. I find Articulate 360 to be far more intuitive

Incentivized

I have used Blackboard Learn 8 and 9. I am currently learning about Canvas. Blackboard is overall much clunkier and lacks the intuitive feel in some parts of D2L. Its grade book is much harder to control and manipulate than D2L's. Its navigation menu can be more radically modified from the default than D2L's, but this doesn't seem that useful to me. Discussions in Blackboard can be more easily reorganized than in D2L, but no grading of discussions is possible. Blackboard Assignments is a good innovation which allows markup directly in the students' submissions, but it displays student work in a confusing manner that doesn't allow for any customization, and its markup options need further tweaking. Furthermore, no rubrics can be used in Blackboard in any way to grade any kind of work (that I am aware of). Overall, I would choose D2L over Blackboard.

During my first semester working with Desire2Learn the integrated learning management system was more down than up. This meant reconfiguring assignment due dates, frustration for both the instructor, students, and help desk staff. After an upgrade, Desire2Learn has been reliable.

• I am an independent user so far so no ROI; however it has clearly made a positive impact on my course as my students love the clear navigation interface and know exactly where to find content.
• On point to consider is that it has no forum option on its lesson option so this hinders some asynchronous users from interacting with others on the course.
• Users have expressed many positive feedback from using Articulate 360 which increases productivity and engagement.

Incentivized

• I cannot speak to whether this system is less expensive than the more fully featured Blackboard, but employees are far less efficient, frustrated, and require frequent calls to the help center to set up fairly simple course templates.
• I have been asked to consider teaching courses which will be completely online at my current institution. I have done such online courses several times at other universities, but I have decided Desire2Learn is too frustrating and cumbersome to do so. I am now exploring using Google Drive to teach a course online. Otherwise, I will not teach online until required or I find an alternate system.