Brightspace is an academic and corporate learning management platform. It provides core e-learning features, as well as mobile accessibility and granular personalization and analytics insights.
N/A
eFront Learning
Score 8.4 out of 10
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eFront is a flexible LMS platform for enterprises that need advanced security measures and extensive customization to train masses of employees, partners, and customers. According to the vendor, eFront is designed to be an adaptable enterprise LMS, and gives users complete control over their virtual training environment and data. Additionally, the vendor says it blends well with any other infrastructure. The vendor’s value proposition is that eFront helps the user’s business grow…
$1,000
per month
Pricing
D2L Brightspace
eFront Learning
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Business
$1,000.00
per month
Enterprise
$1,500.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
D2L Brightspace
eFront Learning
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Must contact vendor for pricing information. 30-day free trial is available.
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
D2L Brightspace
eFront Learning
Features
D2L Brightspace
eFront Learning
Learning Management
Comparison of Learning Management features of Product A and Product B
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.
You must have an IT staff with knowledge of PHP in order to install and maintain the system. This is not a plug and play solution by any means. If you have that staff, this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. It's a very robust system. Once we solved initial bugs caused by our own errors during installation, the support desk requests have dropped to almost zero, with nearly 2,000 users online every day. That's a good, solid program.
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.
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.
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'm not sure what else is out there that has the ability to do what our organization needs. We've come across things we didn't like about it, but due to costs of switching and possibly lack of other options, we'd probably renew with eFront. Also, we've invested a lot of time in the software and it seems to be satisfactory at this point.
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.
For most situations, it is extremely easy to learn and use. There are ergonomic issues that seem a bit tedious, but overall, we are seeing a very high success rate with new registrants. They are learning the material and earning their certificates at a rapid pace. This is a good program once it is properly installed by a knowledgeable systems architect.
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.
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.
Two disadvantages: 1. Many staffers who respond don't know how to solve the problem using the User Interface - they want to work from the back end, to which I have no access. 2. The support staff are in Europe and I am in California, so there is an overnight delay in getting a response.
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.
I'm not the most technical person, so some of the training didn't make sense to me. It wasn't a complete training - it was more topical. The people working at EFront were happy to answer my questions later when I resorted to learning it by doing. This was very valuable to me.
It's important to have a robust course catalog before launching. Courses should be QC'ed to be sure there are no errors or other problems. Don't let engineers write quiz questions! Remember that well-formed quiz questions are not designed to trick or fool the user - they are used to reinforce learning through repetition of important concepts. The "grade" isn't as important as the assurance the information has stuck.
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.
Unfortunately I have not had the chance to try other products, however I would think eFront would stack up fairly well against competitors and it provides all the necessary tools to stay compliant and excel at having efficient KICs.
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 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.
