Brightspace

Brightspace works very well in higher education. I believe they are making a lot of strides toward the K-12 area as well. I am not as familiar with the business case, but from what I have seen in the administration of the product, it can scale and be configured in many different ways.

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.

Brightspace offers, by far, the best customer support! I am always able to connect with chat support instantly to solve any issues. Our account managers check in monthly to make sure there are no issues on our end and Brightspace host frequent trainings for both faculty and administrators. Brightspace also host excellent professional development trainings with tips for facilitating online courses.

Their platform is also very easy to use.

Even though [Brightspace] has some cons the pros outweigh the cons. I would recommend this to a colleague.

Brightspace can be a great platform for institutions looking for a multi-platform solution that works with standard cloud technologies and can provide a beautiful experience. The LMS can work well for online-only courses as sections can be segmented from each other inside of the same course, and grading can be automated depending on the scheme being implemented. Experienced instructors can still create useful workshops and courses with this tool, but it can be frustrating for newcomers or those used to other "plug-and-play" or "drag-and-drop" options. I would recommend trying the tool out and making some demonstration courses in which you are a student and learner in order to feel how it works and compares to other options on the market. Brightspace is definitely powerful and can provide a good experience once all stakeholders adjust to its handling.

As a member of a large-scale organization with a wide variety of employment positions, I view Brightspace as primarily an administrative solution for continuous learning and engagement. As an educational platform, Brightspace works perfectly for setting learning goals for particular groups or departments. Furthermore, there are many customization options intent on personalizing the overall user experience for employees. The platform also does a wonderful job of increasing overall engagement, retention, and completion of learning goals. However, I do not necessarily view Brightspace as the learning tool for all employees. There are production employees within my company and they may better benefit from other learning tools that do not require being on a computer.

Brightspace is great for any school that offers online or blended courses, or any school that requires students to complete assignments online.

Brightspace has been particularly useful in my hybrid classes where we alternate online and face-to-face meetings. This platform is an excellent resource for bridging the gap and helping guide students through content and assignments. I teach language classes specifically, and I feel that Brightspace is very nicely suited for helping students with writing courses, especially the incorporation of Turnitin.com which allows students and instructors to see how outside material is used in students' assignments.

It's great for 100% virtual courses. Discussion boards, quizzes, tests, supplemental material, all easy to access and use.
But I think it's also great as an addition to a face-to-face course. I think, in this aspect, it is underutilized. It would be a great way to add content to a course, and a great place to direct students to go to if they have questions once they are outside of the classroom setting.

From my experience, D2L is useful for most college courses, from those that are lecture-based to small, collaborative classes. There are individual features that require workarounds here and there, but with a couple of semesters' experience, it is entirely functional. I suppose there are people who find using any LMS challenging, and that would then include D2L, but otherwise, I can't say that D2L would not be appropriate for any institution of higher learning.

Based on its current state I advise everyone to stay away from them.

I think the college has implemented D2L very well, which is why it is baffling to me that more professors aren't using it. I think enough professors are using it that the college isn't going to abandon the service any time soon, but it seems to me like I am in a minority.

Our users are mostly faculty and D2L is user friendly. Faculty seem to enjoy learning new things and students just love it!

I'd always ask about accessibility, of course. I'd also ask about archiving processes and upload limits.

The ability to set and control dates per item is very important. It must be uniformly detailed in order to work correctly. Also, the ability to copy and/or import specific items, activities, and/or documents from other sections in the platform has made the system the most flexible I have ever used.

Most of Desire2Learn is easy to use depending on how computer illiterate you are. It could be changed for easier use.

Faculty also have problems changing items in their course and often need to call in for help.

If you are primarily interested in having a place to aggregate files for people to share in order to facilitate a course, Desire2Learn a great choice. It's easy to put materials together and it's not hard to access them. However, unless you have a sophisticated interface to layer on top of it, it isn't going to really work for multimedia presentations. I would also not recommend it for mobile learning.

If you are looking at different LMS tools for your organization, I would approach the decision similar to how I would approach voting for a political candidate. Look at all the options and choose the lesser of the evils.
If you have a solid local support team, Desire2Learn can be a fairly functional tool. I am not a large fan of the Desire2Learn support team, however that seems to be an issue with many of the big players including the last LMS I used, Blackboard.

Desire2Learn is good for organizing material for students in a variety of ways.

I would recommend Desire2Learn over most versions of Blackboard. It has features that are not available in other platforms. While there is room for improvement, it is much easier overall, to set up a new course from scratch, than other platforms.

Content delivery with PDF or downloadable files is what I see as its strength. Including embedded video or other media is not a strong point and comes with a warning that it might not work on all computers/platforms

I feel it is well suited for most of the academic functions that we use it for. Some of the math and logic classes don't care for it because of the equation editor problem.

Works very well for course delivery as well as for non-traditional uses - i.e. student portal, resource site. In my experience we used it both ways. It is a solid, asynchronous learning environment. One suggestion would be to add a synchronous, video environment directly into the tool. That would be useful for conference calls, live presentations, etc.

I believe D2L is most helpful as a supplement to face-to-face classes. I run into the most problems/frustrations with highly customized online or hybrid courses. The faculty I work with who teach face-to-face courses and use D2L as a supplement are reasonably happy with it's performance. I have been working with higher-ed LMS's for 13 years now and find that D2L requires a bit more tech skills from faculty than something like Blackboard. I would say it is similar to Moodle and going way back WebCT. If you are tech savvy and don't mind tinkering D2L will work for you. If you have a population of people who are likely to be thrown by inconsistent interface design and some non-intuitive tools then D2L may be problematic.

Can the system support multiple languages? We will have international students that travel across three continents, can the system support an organization structure such as this?

The system does handle students moving from Asia to Europe, but timezones have to be manually set in order for schedules to appear at the appropriate time. Language preferences would also need to be manually set.