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.
N/A
MindTap
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
MindTap is an eLearning course management solution from Cengage, a digital learning content and technology provider. For educators, it includes pre-made interactive course materials (such as homework assignments, assessments, etc.), analytics around student engagement and performance, and the ability to customize courses. For students, MindTap offers a mobile app to access eBooks, flashcards, quizzes, grades, and due date reminders.
N/A
Pricing
D2L Brightspace
Cengage MindTap
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
D2L Brightspace
MindTap
Free Trial
Yes
No
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.
We started using the application optimally at the beginning as a digital learning and consultation platform. In it we imported all kinds of bibliographic material so that students could access them with the ease of a tap. The application is perfect for those instructors who are not beginners in HTML. In that case, the application very practically allows them to create a complete course in the shortest possible time because it has a state-of-the-art instructional design. It was excellent for unifying all the basic course plans between teachers teaching the same subject, giving the advantage that all courses at the same level would have exactly the same information and nothing would be overlooked
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.
The biggest issue our first-time users have with Mindtap is that ad/pop-up blockers often stop the tool from opening. (Mindtap typically opens in a new window vs inside the LMS) This leads to a lot of initial frustration amongst the students early in the course.
MindTap lacks a really strong set of roles outside of Instructor and Student. There is no Teaching Assistant role or and IT/Course Builder role. Additionally setting up students workers as TAs in one course while they may be a student in another concurrently has been more than a little cumbersome.
The UI is a bit dated and it doesn't implement many responsive web design features, though this can typically be worked around by downloading the free app.
The mobile app experience is not as strong for Instructors as it is for students.
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.
It's hard to imagine not renewing it as the professors would not want to go back to the way their courses were previously populated. The only thing that would cause us to change would be in the textbook changed and the new company offered a better tool
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.
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.
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.
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.
MindTap is the only learning software I currently use, but in the past I have used Pearson and McGraw Hill learning content. All of these companies are progresses at a similar rate and making great improvements to their educational materials. MindTap, in my opinion has the best customer service support and representatives in the business. Our rep. has been very responsive.
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.
The positive impact is to help students practice statistics to solve business problems.
The negative side is that the pricing might be too high compared to other free options available, even though the free options might not have the same features MindTap has.
