Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review Good examples: - Conducting trainings and courses - Planning meetings and inviting colleagues to attend - Presenting topics to a large group of people - Speech reproduction is very good - assigning rights and copresentor Not so good: - Interaction with other applications - Mute microphones when using multiple clients - Video call quality - Tracking history, private settings
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review We have a global and diverse team with different devices and operating systems. Webex works smoothly on all of them and everyone can collaborate in real-time saving a lot of time and effort, making meetings much more productive. We can easily capture discussion points and decisions for future reference, without the need for manual note-taking. It helps us in smaller group discussions and brainstorming sessions within the main meeting itself. I can even tailor the layout to suit the meeting's purpose and agenda. Webex is intuitive and easy to navigate, even for non-technical users, joining and scheduling meetings is a smooth process. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review While sharing the content of browsers like Chrome or Firefox it becomes difficult to toggle from one tab to another due to menu dropdown from the top. Sometimes while joining a meeting it asks you to download the app again even if it's downloaded. Limited scheduling option through mobile WebEx app Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Cisco Webex Meetings is a platform that consistently performs well and outperforms some of the other solutions that we have used, such as Zoom. It is user friendly and helps our organization accomplish the goal of connecting with external contacts to conduct meetings and share information
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Webex Meetings does not provide enough audio feedback for users with visual disabilities to properly navigate the tool. Students, faculty, and staff who are blind or have low vision may not be able to use Webex Meetings. Users with motor disabilities that navigate via keyboard, may not be able to navigate the web conferencing session enough to participate fully.
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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.
Read full review So personally I have never faced any kind of meeting unavailability issue while scandaling meeting with WebEx the bandwidth is really good and in terms of application performance the same is my opinion what I mentioned for availability it is good and the objective of communication is quite fruitfully achieved with a simple and effective product like WebEx which is often bundled with the purchase of course which is which we have at our company and great discount is being offered so it is easy on our pocket. I really don't have any specific errors which have faced I should mention over here the operation or application uses is quite smooth.
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review We use browsers to join Webex Meetings and it is very good no issue also appears from Webex APP is very organized and does not consume more resources of PC so no issues appeared. We join audio and video in many ways, all of which are good. We integrated it with active Microsoft Exchange with easy deployment.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review I gave this rating for overall support on Webex meetings because if something goes wrong we have the best support here and rarely need to go to help.webex.com. Multiple people have been appropriately trained so finding the answers to any issues we occur is very simple here at work.
Read full review In-Person Training Did not participate in the in-person training due to distance; training was completed online
Read full review It was straight to the point and very informative. effective training often includes clear explanations, hands-on practice opportunities, time for questions and answers, real-world examples, and follow-up support. If you're trying to assess the quality of a specific training session, you might consider these factors. For organizations looking to assess the quality of their in-person training, it's best to solicit feedback directly from the participants. This can be done through anonymous surveys or feedback sessions, enabling the organization to gather firsthand information and improve future training sessions accordingly.
Read full review Online Training 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.
Read full review We mostly use training from Cisco's online training programs which is very informative and can be easily incorporated into our daily schedules without disrupting our normal working activities. There are many online training materials are available on cisco's website as well as other third-party training companies may also provide additional training.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review That we needed complex implementation that we didn't get tells me 2 things: 1) the product was not designed in a way that "just worked" like some of its peers (Zoom /
BlueJeans ) and 2) had our company defined actual user needs and validated / verified that they had bought something that matched those, we would have pursued features / designs more closely aligned with what the product actually does: screen share, sometimes video, definitely VOIP audio (always an option regardless of license), and easy recording and retrieval of meetings.
Chris Carpenter Staff Project Manager, Awesomizer, Fixer, Maker, Collaboration Enabler
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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 .
Read full review Meetings is the way to go! It blends in with our organization's workflow seamlessly. Teams is great but really suffers in the collaboration department from our personal experience. Webex Meetings is much more fleshed out. The features it has are much more convenient and easier to use. There was a bit of a learning curve, but once you are over that speedbump you are able to get much more use out of Webex Meetings.
Read full review Contract Terms and Pricing Model We use the free version of Webex Meetings to allow us to connect with suppliers/vendors that demand Webex Meetings be used for collaboration.
Read full review Scalability 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.
Read full review I can speak to multiple departments at my organization using Webex Meetings. It has been, and continues to be, our longest online meeting software. It has been deployed across the organization and each department uses it. As I have mentioned, our monthly all-organization Town Halls are hosted on Webex. We have also used it to broadcast a panel-based speaker event.
Read full review Professional Services It is a user friendly application. We have had no adoption problems within the company.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review The costly nature of individual accounts across multiple schools made it difficult to maintain the budget when our student population grew exponentially. Often communicated to clients and stakeholders that we were a trustworthy and elevated provider. Limited engagement and interactive features with students often contributed to complaints around student engagement and buy-in. Read full review ScreenShots D2L Brightspace Screenshots