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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Litmos
Score 7.4 out of 10
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Litmos is a cloud-based Corporate LMS. Core features include a course builder, assessments and quizzes, surveys and feedback, eCommerce, virtual classrooms, certifications, course library, SCORM and TIN CAN support, reporting, and gamification tools.
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Pricing
D2L Brightspace
Litmos
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
D2L Brightspace
Litmos
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
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.
Limos is great for introducing a topic, and taking refreshrs yearly on info already know. Some courses are better suited to a live course, with discussion and questions. We support people with complex medical needs, and review with a nurse is critical.
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.
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.
Learner Search: This will be highly valuable for our team especially because our staff do not only use Litmos to take courses but equally use it to search for content that they need to do their jobs in the moment. Users should be able to search using keywords to easily locate specific content.
Knowledge Base Feature: In addition to the search function above, some of our content we find can be better organized in knowledge bases for easy access. If Litmos has a knowledge base feature, it would help us have all our learning content in one place.
Module Copying Feature: The current module copying feature allow us to make copies of module copies from another course but which are still linked to and affected by changes in the original course. It will be useful to be able to copy courses/modules and make them entirely independent of the original course.
Creating Instances of Library Courses: We find that for Litmos courses, it is hard to assign different compliance due dates to separate user groups. It might be useful to be able to create copies of the Litmos courses on the platform so that we can apply different compliance dates for separate teams or groups of users.
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.
For what we need in the very near future, Litmos does not offer us the required capability. Ideally, we are looking for an integrated LMS, coaching, mobile support and content creation platform. Litmos may have the LMS part covered but there are other platforms that do this better along with providing an integrated all-in-one service or at the very least support API integration with other vendors to meet our requirements.
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.
Litmos is reliable, stable, and easy to use. Support is amazing, with great response times and customer success managers. I've implemented Litmos in 3 organizations and am working with another one currently. The features and functionality Litmos offers rival those of any other LMS out there.
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.
If I could give it a negative rating I would. Worst support from any program I have had. Everything is back and forth in the support ticket. The one time I tried to chat they could not support the question. Their support page is so full of sections and products I can never find anything I need, even with a customized home page. I was hopeful that once they left SAP support might improve but it has not. I don't even know who my account executive is. Nobody has ever reached out to me. I need someone to guide me through best practices for our company and there is nobody to do that.
It was a good overview of the platform, but of course it was more of a basic overview of how to use the platform. The team provided a good training, but I would of liked a better deep dive into some of the features.
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.
Some of the best online training I've taken from any LMS platform. It was well put together and kept me engaged the entire time. It has a good amount of HR Compliance mixed with soft skills training that the team liked. Overall, it has a robust online suite of training that any company can use.
The company received a change in learning style from the old to this newer style. From our perspective, it was just a case of swapping out the scores and adjusting the language. The initial show-and-tell about the library we could use and how to use the materials was instrumental. From the learner's perspective, it was all very self-explanatory.
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 made a choice of this tool because of great review message on internet about the advantage of litmos. Also as cost is concerned I saw it to be favourable to me more than other which are Abit expensive. Litmos also have intuitive user interface which made me to fall for it.
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.
Overall we find that Litmos' capability to organize folks by "Teams" is adequate for our needs... though there are some limitations, especially when it comes to supervisory staff being able to assign content to their employees. It would be nice for hierarchal assignments to be possible (directors being able to assign content to their direct reports... AND those under them).
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.
For one of our product lines, what used to require 8-10 onboarding calls now only needs two and we are aiming to get that down to just one or potentially none. Customers can learn on demand using the courses we have constructed for them and continue their learning live with trainers.
By hosting all of our training in one place, we have made onboarding much more straightforward for employees — they can learn the product (same training we give customers) and also get their InfoSec and other training in one place.
