Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review This was the first time I ever developed an inline training system. While I developed all the content, I am not an "IT" person, so i was worried about structuring the system and implementing it in an LMS. iSpring Learn is easy, flexible, intuitive, and really professional. The support staff was immediately responsive and knowledgeable; they made it fun to create a great course delivery system. My users rave about it... and that is after delivering 3 tracks, with 27 modules, and 52 submodules, with 27 quizzes. I plan to enhance the system adding video delivery over time. Great LMS; glad I chose iSpring Learn.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Gamification: Available badges, certificates, and user achievements on training completion. Leadership boards available in the user profile increase competitiveness and motivation among users. Analytics: Org level, departments wise, groups wise, and user-wise in-depth reports with lots of filters. The learning curve at the user level is one great functionality. MS PowerPoint integration with iSpring Learn is a top feature and since most of our users are pretty comfortable with MS PowerPoint, it allows for easy content creation and quizzes. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review I would like to see some different styles of interactions, I feel somewhat limited in what is available. I wish I could edit interactions/role plays/etc. while still moving throughout my PowerPoint. I have to close and reopen the interaction many times, which slows down my process, when I am copying and pasting a lot of materials. The reporting function is pretty underwhelming. I wish it would take the custom surveys and quiz results and present them better in Excel. It takes A LOT of manual effort to really understand the results of the reports. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review In the past I could not encourage my students to take online training. The results and the questions were hard to be given. When I used the iSpring Suite along with iSpring Learn, my dreams came through and most of the time my students are online and take good training with my programme.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review I have no problem using it and it is the same for my students. Anytime I ask them which part is not easy to use, they keep silent and say thank you.
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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.
Read full review I have to say ALWAYS.
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review I can not say enough good about the support. By far the best in the industry. You talk to really people that help. All to often LMS make you leave a message or you must submit a ticket for help. You will not wait more than a day or two for a good response from iSpring.
Read full review In-Person Training Did not participate in the in-person training due to distance; training was completed online
Read full review We can say that most of my students attend my classes twice a week and that's not enough for someone to learn. I put some training for them to do at home and they really enjoy doing them. The kind of progress they make is really satisfying for them and they are always learning.
Read full review Online Training 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.
Read full review As a teacher, I used to spend a lot of time correcting my students' papers. Now with iSpring Learn, my time has been saved and everything is done automatically. All the time I can check my students' progress and I know which exams they have taken or they should take. On the whole, online training has really helped a lot of teachers
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review When I talked to my colleagues or informed them to search for a programme before iSpring Learn, they were not successful in designing and implementing a programme like this. I am sure they have done a lot to implement it in the best and educational way. That was not that easy as we thought.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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 .
Read full review iSpring probably had the least functionality of all of them. Ease of use is similar to Skyprep (Tovuti was by far the most complicated), but iSpring did not meet expectations and had constant glitches that could not be fixed by their tech team
Read full review Scalability 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.
Read full review Really perfect.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Extremely positive. Having such a program motivates our employees to completed courses timely. Having such a program enables us to meet government requirements with ease. Senior Leaders if the organization have been impressed by the results and support the use of the product. Read full review ScreenShots D2L Brightspace Screenshots iSpring Learn Screenshots