Blackboard Learn by Anthology vs. Seismic Learning vs. Trainual

A school with a well-established technology imprint with their students (for example, ours is a BYOB school where every student has their own laptop and must bring it to school every day and where over 99% of our families have reliable broadband at home) is a reasonable scenario for using The arrogance and intransigence of the sales force is quite disconcerting… They are no longer the only game in town and don't yet realize it. Less well-off schools/families may find it a challenge if students must be on campus or at a public library in order to use the technology. Obviously, during the pandemic, this became problematic for some districts.

Incentivized

If you are onboarding new employees or consultants and you have a complex product, solution, or your business is layered and complex, this can help distill down the layers into basics so that new team or partners can build their knowledge base up the right way. This ensures they are learning what needs to be learned, and not what they surmise or assume, which can be incorrect and cause issues down the road - this is especially sensitive in our field. Training of all kinds can be done easily with this tool.

Incentivized

We have offices set around the world, and hiring new team members in certain countries makes it a bit difficult, especially now to fly out or fly in to help get them situated and fully trained. This really helps close the gaps in between the distance and training. Makes onboarding a heck of a lot easier.

Incentivized

• Blackboard Learn makes submitting assignments electronically simple and provides a variety of built-in Web-based tools like e-portfolios, wikis, and blogs that our students use to create their own content.
• Blackboard Learn is intuitive and easy to navigate from a students perspective
• Blackboard Learn has many integrations available for connecting this LMS to other tools we use at our institution.

Incentivized

• Open to feedback and ideas and constantly innovating and iterating on their product to serve new needs that arise
• Making me feel like more than just a customer: They aren't transactional and focus on building the relationship and making me feel heard.
• Extremely easy to use product so building content takes little time, and I can leverage other subject matter experts to build content as well.

Incentivized

• Tracks progress for training.
• Easily determines a new hires competency in handling tasks on their own.
• Houses all of our documents and videos in one location versus several.

Incentivized

• Blackboard Learn has some limitations when it comes to submissions
• It is not that user friendly, I had to spend some time to get a hang of it in the beginning
• I have been struggling a bit with deletion of manually added courses

Incentivized

• Media import (audio, video) are still in infancy. Reliability of uploaded content isn't 100%.
• The Events function lacks some features that are more built out in other platforms.
• Reporting interface has a bit of a learning curve, but overall isn't bad.

Incentivized

• The subject organization could use work! It's just jumbled and needs folders.
• It's very cumbersome to have to click back and forth to subjects when you are within a task. I wish there was a larger side bar that could show ALL subjects, topics, and tasks in one glance with drop-down menus.

Incentivized

There are several aspects of Desire2Learn that outweigh the benefits of using Blackboard. I find that the Desire2Learn system is a bit more user friendly and looks more up-to-date. However, the decision to renew systems is not up to me because the entire University uses the same system. Regardless, I think I would choose Desire2Learn over Blackboard because of its improved user interface.

Worried about its acquisition by Seismic and hope that they don't change the product or the terms drastically.

Incentivized

It is very usable for both faculty and students. The interface is pretty intuitive and most students can use it without a lot of additional training. Faculty do need some training to effectively use the interface, but they usually get it pretty quickly. We have had to create some additional programming to give faculty a way to delve deeper into the content.

It's completely simple and intuitive, anyone can pick it up. The hardest part is looking for a save button and finally figuring out you don't need one. We don't provide training for users and never have complaints. For creators, we provide best practices, but using Lessonly itself requires nothing .

Incentivized

My Blackboard support comes from the university I work with. They are responsive--eventually... but it takes them sometimes a week to respond to a reported issue. For example, I reported 2 issues last week and one was resolved and I was contacted about one still open option today. That is too long for a tech issue. I have not contacted any support offered directly by Blackboard, which may be a completely different experience altogether.

Incentivized

The support team is very friendly and eager to help you learn the ins and outs of Lessonly. They can set up training for large groups or send links in a chat for individual help. They are quick to respond and if one person doesn't have the answer, they will collaborate with others to help find the answer.

Incentivized

During the entire sales process, the Trainual team was great to work with. After the sale, their onboard process was top notch as well and was very quick to answer any questions and actually were open to customizing the platform to meet our specific needs. They have been great this entire time.

Incentivized

Blackboard's Managed Hosting was top-notch in getting us up and running quickly.

Incentivized

Coursera offers a variety of modules in which a team is able to work on then, but [Blackboard Learn] offers more options to understand how are the team members developing and which tasks have offered a harder challenger for them. [Blackboard Learn] also offers a variety of reports that can be generate by a team lead.

Incentivized

I felt some of these products had more features than were necessary and needed for our team. Some of them were limited on the number of content creators that were allowed which to me forces you to use one or two people to create content where I would rather see it done by key members of each department.

Incentivized

• This is our first time using anything like this!
• Previously we just wrote task items in shared Google documents. It was the best of what we could do at the time, but this is a whole different world, and we love it! Being able to integrate quizzes and photos and interactive video is excellent!

Incentivized

• At one of the institutions that I worked for, the ROI was excellent for the number of users we were serving; however, I could not speak to other instances as I was not aware of the overall cost of the contract.

Incentivized

• We've had an increase in quality overall as a company, as we are able to continually train our employees outside of our New Hire Training program.
• We've seen stronger communication as we are able to send out material to our stylists about products, policies, procedures, etc. and they are able to provide us with feedback. After all, it is their tool for learning and we want to know the best way to provide that information to our Team Members.

Incentivized

• Saves time for the team for training
• The fact that everything is in one location is really good!
• Allows us to edit and change and adjust as the business does
• Keeps us flexible and not cemented to a way of doing things

Incentivized