Desire2Learn Satisfies My Desire for an Easy-to-Use and Support LMS
February 15, 2014
Desire2Learn Satisfies My Desire for an Easy-to-Use and Support LMS
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
10.2
Modules Used
- Learning Environment
Overall Satisfaction
Desire2Learn is used by Georgia Perimeter College faculty, staff, and students of all departments and disciplines. It is used to deliver courses to fully online students as well as provide support for students in face-to-face classes. The college also uses it to deliver professional development training to staff. It is the only supported LMS at Georgia Perimeter College.
- Desire2Learn does a great job encouraging faculty to follow best practices in delivering "modules" of content to students. The Content Tool, Course Builder, and Instructional Design Wizard encourage faculty to package their content into modules that are easy for students to navigate. With 10.2, faculty also enjoy being able to drag and drop files from their computer into a module!
- Desire2Learn is also easy for an administrator to configure and customize. Administrators will appreciate the ease of creating new custom roles and permission for specific types of users. Administrators will also be happy with the ability to create custom homepages and navigation for different organization units (departments, schools, and colleges).
- Desire2Learn support is fabulous. The support staff is available for faculty, staff, students, and administrators. Their representatives are extremely knowledge about the product and have access to higher level technicians for additional support cases.
- The internal email or mail tool is clunky and hard to use. It garners the most negative comments from faculty, staff, and students. The internal mail tool must be addressed in future releases. It needs a complete re-design.
- The ability to use rubrics to grade discussion postings is also a weak area which has been improved in 10.2 but still needs additional work.
- We recently moved from 9.4.1 to 10.2 (service pack 2). We immediately had to begin plans to to upgrade to service pack 7 due to a large number of "quirks" in 10.2 SP2. We would like to see Desire2Learn implement stronger quality control/testing prior to doing a major release.
- Desire2Learn required a minimal amount of training for faculty switching from a legacy WebCT/Blackboard LMS than originally anticipated. Many faculty were able to use Desire2Learn with fewer than 2 hours of instructor-led training.
- Desire2Learn was able to "convert" legacy WebCT/Blackboard courses with little need for courses to be completely redesigned or rebuilt. This allowed our institution to do a switch to Desire2Learn without having to run the legacy LMS in parallel for several semesters!
- Blackboard,Moodle,Sakai
Our review process found that the Desire2Learn product and newer Blackboard products were similar in most instances. Overall, our reviewer felt that after 10+ years of using a WebCT/Blackboard product they were ready for a change.
Additionally, our administration felt that in terms of staffing, Desire2Learn would be less expensive to run than an open source product such as Moodle or Sakai.
Additionally, our administration felt that in terms of staffing, Desire2Learn would be less expensive to run than an open source product such as Moodle or Sakai.