D2L Brightspace vs. TripIt

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

TripIt is great for anyone who has multiple trips at any given time. It is also very good at tracking multiple reservations automatically on individual trips. It's not appropriate for low volume trips or only short trips. It is also good for sharing itineraries with others. It's not good for calendar views.

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.

• Itinerary Management - TripIt does a great job collecting all of your travel information, including your flight and hotel information all in one location, so that you don't have to deal with multiple vendor apps, emails, or even printouts of that info. It also handles multiple upcoming trips for even easier management and organization
• Notifications - TripIt notifies you of changes to your itinerary, such as delays or gate changes, which is great to have that information pushed to you rather than having to constantly look at flight boards for updates.
• Apple Watch integration - As an Apple Watch user, TripIt has gone the extra mile to provide a useful watch app for travelers, making your travel information available on your wrist. This makes it even easier to catch changes to your itinerary, and not have to juggle a phone while you already have a passport and luggage to worry about!

Incentivized

• 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

• Some addresses sometimes do not load (But this is becoming rare these days)
• Add some color to the icons (again minor improvement)
• Ability to create cross destination group trips with different cities to have a full overview of the trip and crossover points

Incentivized

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.

I have been using it for a while now and I did renew it every year because it is the best way for me to keep my travel plans in one place with easy visualization

Incentivized

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.

For me- Tripit was super easy right out of the gate. Initially, using Concur required a little bit of training.

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.

Ive only had the receipt scan feature crash 1 time; no other issues- in fact the app is more on top of details than I am!!

Incentivized

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.

pages load fast, notifications are great. up to minute. after deboarding- my next steps are displayed. Syncs with the hotel & frequent flyer rewards programs too.

Incentivized

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.

I have never called their support. That is a great question especially when rolling out into a medium to large organization. Concur is a well-respected company, so I can only suppose their Support is reasonable. I have not experienced their support.

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.

Set up clear workflows & processes for the masses! No problems with software, only end users...haha

Incentivized

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.

TripIt is designed specifically to help individuals manage their travel info in one place. Before I used TripIt, I had to manually save my travel info in a Google Drive folder, add flights to my personal calendar, then manage multiple airline apps to get flight alerts. TripIt has made my travel much easier.

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.

Tripit is working great for everyone, each department meeting both company and individual needs.

Incentivized

• 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.

• It makes it easy to see if your are missing a hotel stay.
• It makes it easy to see if you are missing a flight.
• It makes it easy to send reservations to someone's email and have it added to their TripIt.

Incentivized