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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Miro
Score 9.1 out of 10
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Miro is the AI Innovation Workspace that brings teams and AI together to plan, co-create, and build the next big thing, faster. With the canvas as the prompt, Miro's collaborative AI workflows keep teams in the flow of work, scale shifts in ways of working, and drive organization-wide transformation.
$10
per month per user
Pricing
D2L Brightspace
Miro
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
1. Free - To discover what Miro can do. Always free
$0
2. Starter - Unlimited and private boards with essential features
$8
per month (billed annually) per user
3. Business - Scales collaboration with advanced features and security
$16
per month (billed annually) per user
4. Enterprise - For work across the entire organization, with support, security and control, to scale
contact sales
annual billing per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
D2L Brightspace
Miro
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
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.
Monthly billing also available at $10 per month for the Starter plan, or $20 for the Business plan.
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.
I first used Miro in a service design module at university, where we used it for personas, customer journey mapping, and more. I've since used it in marketing for SWOT analysis, RACI models, project planning, and more. I've yet to use it in a wider team setting, but from my experience, some team activities, even a SWOT analysis, for instance, where it is brainstorming-based, are better done in a physical space and then brought onto a digital tool, rather than done purely digitally.
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.
Makes internal coordination between admin team and tutors extremely painless. It's like a single place where everyone can drop ideas, get updates and notes without loss of context which usually happens in long email threads.
Versioning and board history are handled very well, which drastically reduces the workload. They help me track how a policy or math guideline has evolved, and also make it easy to revert changes if something doesn't work.
Comments stick exactly where they are meant to, making internal reviews much clearer. Admins don't have to guess which note refers to which rule or section.
Exports are clean, so even non-Miro teammates get it instantly.
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.
As a designer, I miss some more creative features. I can't even get really into designing small things (like paths). Many of my colleagues have already switched to the Figma board because it is possible there.
Things often get lost in the workflow, especially in teams. Working on the same file often leads to misunderstandings and can be frustrating. For example, if text is accidentally deleted and cannot be recovered, or if images become distorted.
The scale on the board is missing, which often leads to size differences.
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.
Miro saves my day. I would spend at least 4x more time on documenting my projects and work without this tool. It support my day to day role and helps me be successful while saving my capacity. It is not only very easy to start working on it without additional training required, but also adapts to any use case that I might need to implement
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.
It's very easy to use, while having endless features. When I start a new board, I know that there's almost nothing that I cannot put on it, whether these are builtin tools, like documents and diagrams, or whether these are 3rd party services that can be imported onto the board. Using Miro is very easy. When I'm onboarding a new user, I focus on what can be done and not on how, as everything is very intuitive.
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 not encountered events where Miro is not available. It is quite nice and reliable to be fair, even on my freemium version (startup) I don't have reliability issues. It does have sometimes where the screen refresh or "freezes" or "consumes a lot of data" and we have to rewind windows and the likes, this instances are very less
I took the loading quickly to be related to availability which I commented on before, so ditto with those comment on load time here. Although to reemphasize, Miro doesn't crash or just refuse to load like some other programs. The weak point of Miro for me is integration of files like Word, Excel, or PowerPoint (especially the later two). When you embed these, it gets slow, and complicated to bring them up while you're in the application.
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.
We have never reached out to or contacted support because Miro's platform has been incredibly intuitive and user-friendly. The comprehensive resources available, such as tutorials, documentation, and community forums, have provided all the guidance we needed. The seamless integration with our existing tools and the reliability of the platform have ensured that we rarely encounter issues that require external assistance. This self-sufficiency has allowed us to focus more on our projects and collaboration without interruptions. Overall, our experience with Miro has been smooth and efficient, eliminating the need for additional support
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.
There was a series of webinars which Miro hosted with our organization that went over the basics, then progressively became more advanced with additional sections. The instructors were knowledgeable, and provided examples throughout the sessions, as well as answered peoples' questions. There was ample time and experience on the calls to cover a range of topics. The instructors were also very friendly and sociable, as well as honest. Of course Miro isn't a "God-tool" that does absolutely everything, but the instructors were aware and emphasized the strengths where Miro had them and sincerely accepted feedback.
Easy to learn, Miro has a series of videos on YouTube that effectively taught this program to my team members and me. The program is drag-and-drop and works excellently. People pick up on how to use it efficiently, and it's great for organizing ideas more freely. This product is more challenging for some older audiences who are not accustomed to using a touchpad, but for most, it was very easy to use.
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.
Both FigJam and ClickUp have similar features where we can do collective brainstorming and idea mapping. We have gone back to Miro from both of those platforms because of the intuitive nature and usability of the Miro interface. Surprisingly, we do still pay for ClickUp and Figma. Miro has not been able to replace either of these for us because we use them for different use cases. Our team expressed the most comfort and ease of use with Miro versus these two platforms, so we gladly have decided to stay.
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.
Maybe is possible now so... Could be useful to manage in some way source code for the projects? not to edit so when we make solutions with different components in MIro, maybe each component could redirect to the source code of this component
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.
Miro allows me to plan work for the future without having to reference tedious spreadsheets. This gives me better insight into workload forecasting.
Just today, I was able to quickly put together a Miro to show a team member who was confused the workflow for a problem. The easy 'on-the-fly' tools let me create something quickly in real time.
Flowcharts often get a bad rap because people think they are too complicated, but Miro lets me get more work done quickly than just using a doc or sheet.
