D2L Brightspace vs. symplr Talent Management Solutions

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.

Incentivized

If their HRIS system holds all their data - employees, supervisors, positions then HealthcareSource can really take advantage of that data and save you a lot of time. We looked at a lot of systems and one of our needs was both Applicant Tracking and Performance Management and these systems work very well together. Other systems we looked at didn't have all our most needed features - we needed a vendor that could do both, integrate with our HRIS, report back data in a customizable fashion, and be user friendly. Some systems listed the features but during the demo and product reference calls we found they didn't perform as advertised. Some had reporting but the reporting was missing key data or didn't export in a data friendly manner. We have found HealthcareSource to be not only "pretty" - aka user friendly/non-cluttered but also had the engine under the hood as well that met our data analyst needs.

Incentivized

• 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.

• When any company implements a new program they have specific needs that they want customized for them. Healthcare source did a great job providing excellent customer service to our HR and IT professionals working behind the scenes to help us maximize the programs potential at our organization. They did not limit us to any standard uses or prohibit us from reaching our internal goals. Some examples include specialized reports, data uploads of employee data and time frames for our annual reviews.
• They provided us with training and retraining and more training on using the system. This included training new members of our team when we had turnover in HR and inviting us to conferences and webcasts regularly.
• The presentation of the software was very appealing and that may seem small but it really helps appeal to the employees that use it for their reviews.

• 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.

Incentivized

• To allow our team members choice, we offer training as either/or. The current system does not record either/or completions
• To end enrollment of new hires for training at a set date, requires also ending the training of all those not yet completed.

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.

Looking back we can say that every year we used Performance Manager and other products too like HeathcareSource's Compensation and Position Manager we saw the ease of use for employees and HR staff members increase, we saw employees getting more comfortable with the product and HR Staff getting better at expressing their needs to the HealthcareSource team and this made us want to stay with the same company, when things are getting better each year we know we are in the right place.

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.

The product is very intuitive to the end users and our online documentation seems sufficient to train our new employees.

Incentivized

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.

On the previous rating scale, I kept thinking "it depends". If I know it's an easy question or easy fix, the response is super fast. If I know I am asking something complex, custom or I just know it's not going to be able to be answered by 1st tier, it can take some time. I have worked on these issues with them (they are all very nice) I do now have avenues for finding things out from one person. We had one issue where we had a major problem and it required a software patch and their support team worked throughout the weekend to create, QA, and deliver the patch as promised. I was very impressed

Incentivized

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.

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 Health Stream and Healthcare Source have to-do lists, completion lists, and tracking. However, the functionality of Healthcare Source is far superior to HealthStream. The notifications are much better and helpful. The tracking on Healthcare Source is easy to use and see. Overall the interface in Healthcare Source is more intuitive.

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.

• NetLearning has increased our nursing CEU credits with the most efficiency. Now nurses can take courses on NetLearning and have it track their hours.
• On a compliance standpoint, NetLearning has benefited us when we are being audited and we have to show what trainings or classes an employee has made. Also, to make sure that their certifications are up to date.

Incentivized