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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iSpring LMS
Score 9.0 out of 10
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iSpring LMS is an LMS developed by iSpring Solutions, a company that provides more than 61,000 clients with an eLearning software ecosystem. iSpring LMS automates corporate training and helps to improve employee retention through quality onboarding, on-the-job training, gamification and engagement mechanics. With iSpring LMS, training and development professionals can launch eLearning fast, without any technical skills. Also, account owners can customize or white-label…
$3.75
per month (billed annually) per user
Pricing
D2L Brightspace
iSpring LMS
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
500 Users
$3.75
per month (billed annually) per user
300 Users
$4.10
per month (billed annually) per user
100 Users
$6.64
per month (billed annually) per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
D2L Brightspace
iSpring LMS
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
Must contact vendor for pricing information. 30-day free trial is available.
Charges only for active users only. No fees for storage or bandwidth.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
D2L Brightspace
iSpring LMS
Features
D2L Brightspace
iSpring LMS
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.
iSpring Learn supports short, engaging courses ideal for corporate training programs, especially in finance-related industries. It pairs well with bite-sized content for compliance training, product knowledge, or soft skills development. For companies that need an LMS up and running quickly, iSpring Learn offers a simple setup process and an intuitive interface that doesn't require extensive technical knowledge. If a company needs extensive customization for branding or workflows, iSpring Learn may not be as flexible as some alternatives.
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.
Automatically re-enrolling employees when a certificate expires. Set it and forget it!
If set up properly from the beginning, you don't have to do much, with the roles and groups settings, you can automate a large portion of the course management.
I can provide visibility to anyone about any employee necessary, allowing me to put more responsibility on my managers, instead of doing it all myself.
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.
Permissions are not clear enough. There have been issues when new features are released. Perfect example is when the review system came online, no one thought to partition departments to prevent other managers from seeing reviews of employees in other departments. Gross oversights such as this rendered time we put into developing this as staple at the company caused a lot of headaches and never should have been released without more consideration.
Courses and catalog should not be hidden in the Additional Options under settings; it is counterintuitive for it not to be in the actual menu of the learning creation area.
Context sensitive rollovers would be nice as they would add a level of explanation as to what process may need to be completed for a task to be complete.
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes, things just aren't intuitive enough. For example, burying the catalog in the settings area makes no sense at all. The same goes for permissions and year reviews. It was a massive oversight that really caused a lot of confusion for all of our managers. It caused distrust in the LMS simply because someone who designed and developed it did not think that an employee review should be private to them, their direct supervisor, or the supervisor above. Instead, ANY manager could read ANY employee review. I have mentioned this several times throughout these questionnaires, and as you can see, I still find it incomprehensible that a company that wants to promote its software as a multifaceted solution could be so blind to something so critical, especially in terms of privacy.
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.
Our account rep Katie Connor is fantastic. She is very responsive to our requests. She does not try to over sell. She has setup training sessions for us any time we asked. Finally, she is a very nice person we like working with. She also has been patient with us as we figure out our renewal
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I reviewed a few different LMSs before deciding on iSpring Learn. I can't remember the names, but I chose iSpring Learn primarily because I liked that it was just a PowerPoint add-on, which made it easy to use, and I liked the price!
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.
iSpring has enabled me to deliver professional education to very high-level learners.
Due to the reviews of my users, many more learners have purchased my courses.
Several professional colleagues have inquired about my experience setting up online courses on iSpring Learn. I told them it was easy, logical, and no hassle; they will love the level of support.