Desire2Learn: Needs Design Overhaul to Make Intuitive, Nightmare to Use

I formerly used Blackboard which I sometimes found clunky and poorly designed. Desire2Learn, however, is considerably inferior in a number of ways. The largest complaint I encounter and which I regularly hear is that Desire2Learn is not intuitive. To set up an assignment one must create a separate dropbox, grade item, and calendar entry. Editing these requires going between multiple tabs to different locations. The system is extremely challenging to learn and often requires me to make multiple calls to our help center -who in turn often have to search for where one turns on a simple assignment, links it to a grade item, etc. This system seems almost 1990s in design because none of the setup or use of the system is in the background. Instead of a clean, Excel-like spreadsheet for grades, the user must learn the multiple steps to set up grade items.

Grading in Desire2Learn is also cumbersome. In Blackboard one can open a student's essay and edit the essay with comments, strike-throughs, red-lettered additions, etc. directly in the system. Desire2Learn requires you to download the student's paper, edit it in Word, and then upload it back into Desire2Learn. One can directly leave a comment and enter a grade in Desire2Learn in a box to the side, but you cannot directly grade/edit the actual essay. There is a feature where you can download all your students' essays to your harddrive, edit in Word, and then wholesale upload them again but I do not know anyone who actually uses this seemingly cumbersome process. Instead a number of colleagues just have their students turn in paper or email copies to grade rather than use Desire2Learn. I just learned there is a new app for the iPad that DOES allow direct grading for Desire2Learn but I have not used yet and thus cannot review the interface.

Desire2Learn and the fully featured version of Blackboard are similar, but Desire2Learn is far less intuitive, requires many more hours to set up a course, and is more limited in grading options. It may be that after more years of use with Desire2Learn that I will not find it frustrating. Our new faculty simply find Desire2Learn overwhelming because again it lacks intuitive feel. There are simply too many tabs and fields required to set up a simple assignment or module. The system appears to have the bones to be a quality system, but it desperately needs a complete overhaul by a team specializing in user-focused design. The system currently is cluttered with icons and tabs. To set up a discussion requires setting it up in one place, setting up the grade item associated with it in another, and actually posting a thread in a third. Each one of these areas in turn have 5-20 options, multiple tabs, etc. When you are trying to get your materials ready, taking an average of 2-4 hours per lesson to navigate Desire2Learn becomes a nightmare.