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 If you are onboarding new employees or consultants and you have a complex product, solution, or your business is layered and complex, this can help distill down the layers into basics so that new team or partners can build their knowledge base up the right way. This ensures they are learning what needs to be learned, and not what they surmise or assume, which can be incorrect and cause issues down the road - this is especially sensitive in our field. Training of all kinds can be done easily with this tool.
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 Open to feedback and ideas and constantly innovating and iterating on their product to serve new needs that arise Making me feel like more than just a customer: They aren't transactional and focus on building the relationship and making me feel heard. Extremely easy to use product so building content takes little time, and I can leverage other subject matter experts to build content as well. 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 Media import (audio, video) are still in infancy. Reliability of uploaded content isn't 100%. The Events function lacks some features that are more built out in other platforms. Reporting interface has a bit of a learning curve, but overall isn't bad. 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 Worried about its acquisition by Seismic and hope that they don't change the product or the terms drastically.
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 It's completely simple and intuitive, anyone can pick it up. The hardest part is looking for a save button and finally figuring out you don't need one. We don't provide training for users and never have complaints. For creators, we provide best practices, but using Lessonly itself requires nothing .
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 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 The support team is very friendly and eager to help you learn the ins and outs of Lessonly. They can set up training for large groups or send links in a chat for individual help. They are quick to respond and if one person doesn't have the answer, they will collaborate with others to help find the answer.
Read full review In-Person Training Did not participate in the in-person training due to distance; training was completed online
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 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 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 I felt some of these products had more features than were necessary and needed for our team. Some of them were limited on the number of content creators that were allowed which to me forces you to use one or two people to create content where I would rather see it done by key members of each department.
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 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 We've had an increase in quality overall as a company, as we are able to continually train our employees outside of our New Hire Training program. We've seen stronger communication as we are able to send out material to our stylists about products, policies, procedures, etc. and they are able to provide us with feedback. After all, it is their tool for learning and we want to know the best way to provide that information to our Team Members. Read full review ScreenShots D2L Brightspace Screenshots