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Brightspace - It's the whole package and more!
Updated November 16, 2021

Brightspace - It's the whole package and more!

John Bayerl | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Brightspace

Working within a higher education institution, we need a product to deliver online courses through and to enhance all our other offerings, Brightspace has been that product for us. We are also part of a larger system of colleges/universities, of which there's about 32 of them, whom all use Brightspace. It is used throughout our entire institution, and we've even found uses for it beyond the primary purpose we purchased it for. We have found it to be a tremendously useful tool in delivering our regular credit-based courses through (online, face-to-face, hybrid, etc.), facilitate customized training, use for departmental collaboration, a communication tool for our whole institution (including with our students), and more. Without Brightspace, we would likely need multiple other software contracts and tools to effectively be able to do all the things we end up using it for. It may be one of our most costly software contracts that we have, but because it does so much for our organization, we would have to spend a lot more and be less efficient without it.
  • Provide an online platform for education/training.
  • Serve as a institution-wide communication channel.
  • Allow for customization to institutional needs.
  • Consistency across the platform.
  • May take time to customize to best fit institutional needs.
  • Individual/customizable sites that can be used for specific purposes.
  • Organization-wide communication tools.
  • User/Group-based roles/permissions.
  • Integrations with other products.
  • Increased customer/student retention.
  • Increased ability for service offerings to customer/student.
  • Improved data gathering ability of customer/student behavior, interest, etc.
In looking at Brightspace versus its competitors currently, it continues to provide the widest functionality, great value, and better ability to tailor the user experience of it to our organizations needs. The longer that our institution has had Brightspace, the more we've been able to leverage it for one-off projects and long-term organizational needs, many of which would not have been possible if we would've had a competitor's product.

Do you think D2L Brightspace delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with D2L Brightspace's feature set?

Yes

Did D2L Brightspace live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of D2L Brightspace go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy D2L Brightspace again?

Yes

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.

D2L Brightspace Feature Ratings

Learning Management
9.6
Course authoring
10
Course catalog or library
10
Player/Portal
10
Learning content
10
Mobile friendly
10
Progress tracking & certifications
9
Assignments
10
Learning administration
10
Learning reporting & analytics
10
Social learning
7

Brightspace Support

There are many avenues for support with Brightspace. D2L manages a great community website that customers can collaborate in. Our institution has our own dedicated Technical Account Manager who is always available if we ever have questions or needs. The site itself runs really well, and luckily there's not a large need for us, institutionally, to contact support from D2L directly very regularly. Even if we did need to contact support, the service is always excellent.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
I'm not sure if we have purchased premium support, and if we did, I'm not sure what that support is in contrast to what would be considered just "regular support" provided when purchasing/using the product.
Yes - Some bugs take time to identify, solve, and ultimately fix. So, I feel as though when we identify a bug and then report it to D2L, it is resolved in a timely fashion based on the appropriate severity of the bug. I have never experienced a time where I thought, "D2L should've fixed this already, it has taken way too long and is hurting my users/organization."