D2L Brightspace vs. Jenzabar ONE vs. SurveyMonkey Apply

As a member of a large-scale organization with a wide variety of employment positions, I view Brightspace as primarily an administrative solution for continuous learning and engagement. As an educational platform, Brightspace works perfectly for setting learning goals for particular groups or departments. Furthermore, there are many customization options intent on personalizing the overall user experience for employees. The platform also does a wonderful job of increasing overall engagement, retention, and completion of learning goals. However, I do not necessarily view Brightspace as the learning tool for all employees. There are production employees within my company and they may better benefit from other learning tools that do not require being on a computer.

Incentivized

Jenzabar ONE is strongly suited for an all-in one solution for higher ed. The modern web-based platform make it efficient for end users. An institution that wants a full communication platform to connect with students, Jenzabar is the right product for your school. As with any product, development with Jenzabar One continues which is a good thing but also may cause some schools to want more features more quickly.

Incentivized

I think SurveyMonkey is well suited in company meetings to see how well customers like a certain product or in staff meetings to see how well a new teaching method is doing in comparison to an old one. I honestly think that SurveyMonkey can be used in just about anywhere that customer or employee feedback is valued.

Incentivized

• The grade book is very customizable. There is a learning curve, as there always is if something is flexible, but there are a lot of good options available for grading, displaying grades, and calculation of grades.
• Adding course content of many types can easily be done using drag & drop or copy-paste. It is easy to retain stored content from semester to semester. Updating an item takes three clicks. It is easy to organize and reorganize content and allows sub-sections. It records whether individual students have opened material and how much time they spent using an item.
• I like the flexibility of organizing the dropbox for student submissions. Deadlines in the dropbox or discussions automatically appear in the course calendar.
• I like the range of quiz question options, in particular, the "multi-select" question type.

• Jenzabar ONE makes working within the system possible and secure using remote and WFH options.
• Jenzabar ONE is adept at managing the central functions of the Registrar's Office.
• Jenzabar ONE is capable and adequate for student accounts and billing.

Incentivized

• SurveyMonkey Apply has the best customer service I've ever experienced in a company. They are easily accessible, super helpful and friendly, and they will work until they are able to find a solution.
• The platform for building an application on SurveyMonkey Apply is simple for the user. It's set up with such a clean format that is appealing to the eye and incredibly user-friendly.
• The application system also has a lot of flexibility, making it easy to customize your applications as needed.

Incentivized

• The use of rubrics in the discussion area and the quizzes area could use some TLC. The rubrics actually have to be added to the grade book item for them to be functional. In the Discussion area the instructor is unable to grade them discussions and publish them to the grades area. In quizzes, students are not able to see the rubric at all. If the rubric functioned in these two tools like they do in the dropbox they would be a very useful tool.
• The discussion area could benefit from a few different enhancements. There is currently no way to grade group restricted discussions without having to manually enter the grades in the grade book or setup a different grade item for each group and then someone restrict those grade book items to individual groups. It is not an easy process one way or the other. The discussion area would also benefit from the ability to add categories so that Forums could be grouped by a certain category (i.e. Units)
• D2L needs to invest some time and resources to develop/redevelop blogging, journaling, and wiki in the LMS.

• the Help system does not always correlate to the current version, so updating that with each update would be very helpful
• a method to test users' permission would be very helpful
• it is sometimes tricky trying to figure out which functions to assign to users, so making that process more clear would be great

• An average administration may not have the technical capabilities to adapt and shape it for themselves. While SurveyMonkey Apply has an option for tech support for a price, it is not something always easy for the admin.
• There is no way to cross reference users by Social Security Number or other identifier. In other words, a single applicant with multiple email addresses could potentially apply and receive benefits as the users are tied to email address not email address and SSN.

Incentivized

Our faculty and students are satisfied with D2L, find its features to be mostly intuitive, and it is sufficient for our needs. After version 10.4, D2L will be going to a continuous incremental release model, which will allow them to innovate more frequently. The introduction of version 10 has been a tremendous improvement over prior versions. D2L has integrated well with our ERP (Peoplesoft) and it has become a core part of our technology suite.

I really love the mobile application. Allowing folks to do training on the go is really important and a great feature for us. I do think it can be a little hard to set up courses sometimes. The Web UI can be a little clunky compared to lightweight tools like Atlassian or Notion.

Incentivized

It makes work easier because everything is in one place. Works well once staff is fully trained. Good for connecting all departments so students can be serviced to the best of our abilities. It's a very strong system overall that isn't always the easiest to learn at first, but once you learn, you'll take nothing else for it.

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.

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.

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.

Never contacted support before.

Did not participate in the in-person training due to distance; training was completed online

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.

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.

In looking at Brightspace versus its competitors currently, it continues to provide the widest functionality, great value, and better ability to tailor the user experience of it to our organizations needs. The longer that our institution has had Brightspace, the more we've been able to leverage it for one-off projects and long-term organizational needs, many of which would not have been possible if we would've had a competitor's product.

Incentivized

Jenzabar ONE has 90% of the capabilities of of its competitors, and a price point significantly below those products. Both Banner and PeopleSoft provide capabilities that exceed what we need. Paying for those additional features is not cost effective. In short, Jenzabar ONE does nearly everything we need, and both Banner and PeopleSoft only offer extra capabilities we will not use.

Incentivized

SurveyMonkey Apply (formerly Fluid Review) is extremely user friendly, it speeds up the survey/forms creativity and design. Very reliable and trusted - it is the most popular and used by small organizations to large and well established businesses. You can easily opt for month to month options and that is why I choose SurveyMonkey (formerly FluidReview)

Incentivized

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.

• Implementing the new admissions portal has led to a 12% increase in enrollment as we were able to spend time directly working with students with how it automated previously manual tasks.
• The ACH and credit card payment portal with self-selection of student payment plans has allowed the business office to collect 70% of what we used to send to collections.

• Positive Impact: allowed us to move to a more virtual office, just in time for COVID's forcing all to work from home/remotely.
• Negative Impact: made it much harder to capture all data we need to merge with all applicants since organization created.

Incentivized