Blackboard Learn by Anthology vs. WizIQ LMS

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

They have to try out within their own use case scenarios with a sample learner, and test the features of their course and delivery needs. As there is not a content structuring tool, the course author has to have expertise in content and instruction design to create their own materials. The rest is easy to test and check. Test it on all browsers and test the functionality under various internet service speeds.

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

• WizIQ virtual classroom offers an Interactive whiteboard, Screen Sharing, youtube video play, media content upload option.
• Class Recording in MP4
• It provides you with a wonderful experience of a Virtual classroom with better Audio and Video streaming.
• The platform offers courses feature where users can create a paid course, enroll the student in a course and earn.
• Search functionality to find courses/classes from the list
• 24*7 after sales customer service
• Supported languages for the virtual classroom: English, Arabic, Spanish, Czech, French, Greek, German, Turkish, Hindi
• It provides a Virtual Classroom integration option with Moodle, WordPress, Joomla, Java, PHP, .NET websites.

• 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

• Although all are good but WizIQ needs to improve in these fields...It goes offline once in a while which is a headache as it needs to be constantly managed and needs to be kept under observation all the time.
• It is better for less userbase management as its browser platform is not stable for a larger number of participants.
• We need to manage each online department separately.
• Audio sound needs to be more clear.

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.

I need to overcome some of the important limitations which have been pending for more than 6 months indicating inability of the vendor or lack of clarity among the development team about what we want and how it can be done easily on their platform and MySQL at virtually no cost without ending up in a feature modification custom development and cost. Teaching and learning with respect to an Indian scenario is different and needs to be adapted to the local needs and realities.

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.

I have understood and used most of it by now after 6-7 months of exploration and use. Though there are small glitches that could be easily resolved by WizIQ, I feel comfortable to handle the product by now. However, clients find it a challenge to explore and do not wish to spend time to learn

Incentivized

It has been very good till date.

Incentivized

I have not experienced any of these issues as yet.

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

Very responsive and accommodating during the sales period, then totally unhelpful, rude and dismissive when you are unhappy with the product. Now ignoring my messages.

It was remote and not in-person.

Incentivized

It was a product presentation and not a live work through kind of training. I had to remember the presentation from remote and then go about the tool/ builder. It was difficult to handle and I had a lot of doubts and clarifications to address in my initial rounds of launching my courses.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

I have developed my own expertise and that is for sale to my clients as a part of my consulting services. I have much to share for assignment and assessment models, course design aspects and mentoring aspects as this is a remote self paced service. If the courses are live and managed still there needs to be mentoring and support to help the learner.

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 selected WizIQ because I used them when I subscribed for org.wiziq for nearly 10 years. It was firstly trusting in their technical support system in place and their new plug-in. Other products that are available for free or a nominal amount, e.g. Zoom and Google Meet are way better in their performance and features in my opinion.

Seems pretty good to me as of now. Of course there are usage slabs and commercials to handle before scaling up.

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

• By using the WizIQ our team has launched more than 130 courses for internal staff capacity building.
• We also monitor which learner is doing well in the overall assigned courses.
• Created a list of courses which help everyone who is new to the organization.

Incentivized