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.
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Intellum
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
The Intellum platform, from the company of the same name headquartered in Atlanta, is designed to provide all of the tools needed to create, present, manage, track and improve highly-personalized learning experiences for customers, partners and employees. With it, users can can create assessments, quizzes and NPS surveys directly inside Intellum. The vendor states its Open Asset approach allows users to make any file, document, presentation, link or video a trackable, reportable learning…
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Pricing
D2L Brightspace
Intellum
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
D2L Brightspace
Intellum
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
Must contact vendor for pricing information. 30-day free trial is available.
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.
Intellum leads the field in reporting; something I didn't even know I really needed/wanted until we purchased this LMS. While I realize that most Learning Management Systems are designed to support online, auto-assigned content for people to complete on a device, 80% (sometimes more) of our training is delivered in person (we are a quarry company, and our learners do much better with Instructor Led Training). Sometimes it is difficult to find a workaround in Intellum that allows us the flexibility and consistency we require for managing our in-person learning needs.
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.
Easy to use interface. The quick options to add content to pages, and drag and drop organization, makes it easy for anyone to jump in and start adding information.
Intellum is not just mobile responsive but mobile-friendly. This makes it super easy for people to view our content anywhere they are, any time they want.
Intellum support is always quick to respond when we have questions or need help tweaking our setup. They also have a robust selection of self-service training courses available.
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.
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.
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.
The customer support team is always very helpful and responsive, as is our CSM who goes above and beyond to help us with issues and questions that we have
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 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.
Intellum is in a class of its own. With the good referrals, I got from colleagues in my industry, I was aware that certain processes would be made easier by this software, and we were right. I have seen the positives that have come from this software. It easily takes the cake over its competitors!
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.
The biggest impact Intellum has had on hc1 would be the space for learner engagement. I still have to work hard to direct our clients to the LMS (link from our hc1 solution) but when they do - they love it!
Since the pandemic in 2019, hc1 also has noticed a big up tick in the usage of LMS from our clients because of the need for virtual learning.
