Brightspace Reviews

I love how user friendly this software is. As a daily user, I can easily navigate the different portals on this software and find all my class's resources quickly. It is very organized, and has great assessible features such as clear text, and high contrasting colours. Grades are easily accessible, and there offer all features necessary to succeed in your course, eg. discussion boards, class list, attendance, course content etc.

The notifications are quite overwhelming, every time any professor makes any adjustment to their course you get a notification that piles up throughout the day. Moreover, the notifications for upcoming assignments are sometimes inconsistent, as assignments not done through the D2L will not show up at all, causing confusion for upcoming work to be done for the student.

Nothing at all.
The LMS has a LONG list of features but nearly all of them are poorly designed and frustrating to use.
I have moved back to old solutions that I used before I was given this piece of software.
Clearly no teachers with any experience were consulted in the design of this.
There was a huge opportunity for D2L when they moved from their old solution to a new Cloud based one. They missed the opportunity

The interface was not intuitive. There were very few clear best practices in the interface. The way that you complete tasks changes depending on which part of the interface you are using.
Non-technical users will become quickly frustrated with the number of steps required to complete even the most basic of tasks.
The interface feels like it was built by different groups of developers and designers who didn't communicate with each other. Every developer had their own idea about how to accomplish a task.
Many default options are counter to what an actual teacher would need in their day-to-day tasks.
Nothing in the interface saves you work.
Every task prolongs how long it takes me to do something.
After months of trying to use this tool I have given up and am now searching for alternative tools that make my life easier not harder.

As a college student, I have used D2L for 3 years. I have taken a handful of all online classes whose only presence was via Brightspace. Brightspace has created a really nice online environment for classes, you can host all your content there, provide quizzes/tests within Brightspace. Theres even a discussion board for talking with other class members or the instructor. I like being able to work at my own pace, which is what an online class provides, and Brightspace provides all the features to host a well developed online class.

Auto-saving responses on tests doesn't work always. This is a relatively new feature though so, I'm sure it will get fixed soon.

I like that Brightspace is easy to use. In previous online courses, we had used another program, which was a hot mess. Brightspace is user-friendly and really easy to find what you're looking for. The useability, however, depends mainly on the professor/teacher/whoever that may set up the course. Currently, everything is laid out in weeks, so each "module" contains what is due that week. Very simple to use, from a student standpoint.

I have noticed that when posting/replying to a discussion board, there are no notifications. And by this I mean there are no "push" notifications, so it's sometimes hard to see if people are responding to my post. Once I log in on a desktop/laptop, I can easily see if people have responded. However, if I'm using the app on my phone, it doesn't necessarily "pop up" and say that someone commented or posted something new. I personally would like a notification when this happens.

This Learning Management System is GOOD but not the best. It is great that D2L and Brightspace have an easy-to-use portal that differentiates between student, instructor, and even TAs. However, the options that come with competitors like CANVAS are far superior...

CANVAS, a competing LMS, provides more external resource use, such as Virtual Office Hours during Conferences, and even grouping students into smaller groups to use MS Office through Collaborations. Brightspace is user friendly for students but more difficult to manage for administrators/teachers.

I use D2L, Moodle, and Blackboard in my multiple jobs. D2L is the most visually attractive of these, and the "drag and drop" functionality of course building makes things much easier than in Blackboard, for example.

When grading, I wish the rubrics appeared in the margin of same tab as the assignment, rather than a separate pop-up window, though this is already an improvement from earlier iterations.

Brightspace is very easy to navigate and customize. It looks very nice and many uses familiar with something like Wordpress will have a pretty easy time. It is also in many ways similar to other popular social media platforms for students, I imagine, they are pretty comfortable with a platforms like this. Managing grades, assignments and embedding external links is very organic. There are some great tutorials too form D2L. It's also similar enough to other platforms that if you are migrating from another system, this shouldn't have too much of a learning curve. I love how easy it is to build a template course and transition various components or modules to a new one.

My only con is purely subjective, but I have had issues with embedded links like videos. I find it very hard to remove items from the Grades section (the gradebook). I constantly have to view a tutorial because it is so roundabout to remove an item from that section.

As an administrator at my previous employer, I appreciated the flexibility to change pretty much anything that I wanted in the system. The ability to change what things were called in the system were very nice. In the most recent version that I had used, Brightspace had taken steps to make some changes on how system settings were handled to update the interface. Previously, the interface of the DOME was one of the most painful parts of the system.

I also appreciated the service desk that Brightspace has built up over the last three years. When I began using Brightspace, items could get lost very easily with the technical teams, but after some difficult issues, Brightspace has turned around a great deal, and updates to tickets were timely and applicable for a while before I stopped using it.

I found that there were little things that Brightspace did not do well. For instance, workflows between different tools were very different based on the time that the original tool was designed. This led to user frustration and an increase of time training users on the common functions of the LMS. I also found that Brightspace tended to minimize small updates or fixes in order to focus on major updates. While major updates are important to survive in the field, sometimes known bugs would remain for years without a fix.

BrightSpace includes all of the typical features of any LMS. However, D2L has improved the platform over time and has made the system more intuitive and user friendly. I also use CourseDen (the higher ed version of BrightSpace) for my college courses and the features are essentially the same with a few differences. However, the two platforms are enough alike that, once you know one system, learning to use the other one is a cinch. The features allow for very specific customization of assessments, discussions, and other features. I have built my own courses within the LMS, so I am familiar with a majority of the features and capabilities of the LMS.

The most impactful features of BrightSpace are discussion opportunities, auto-grading, and navigation.

The cost of the LMS is the only drawback.

I took most of my master's level courses using this platform. After learning to navigate it, I became very familiar with it, and it was a decent platform for the professors to present material on. I liked how it would show notifications for discussion posts (particularly when someone would reply to something you had written). Also, it would alert you when a professor had submitted a grade for an assignment. These are great features that other learning platforms do not have, and I most definitely miss them when using those platforms.

It was not a very clean way to present material. It was a little cumbersome at times, took a lot of "getting used to," and was missing some features that would have been helpful that I had experienced on other platforms.

Our school needed a lot of flexibility and customization, as well as integration capability. They have a rich API layer that allowed us to create an "uber" system - a next-gen learning system that all appeared to be a single entity even though it was made up of multiple platforms.

The costs for flexibility and data are problematic - it's an issue for all LMS companies but it would be great to see more progressive thinking around our school's data.

-My school uses a lot of the D2L platform, from learning experience online to binder.
-It is really easy to use and very user-friendly.
-I love the images that were used in the online classroom platform for D2L
-The chat-like function in the classroom is also very useful especially

-the locker room is a little bit outdated, I think they should add a function where students are able to type document and edit document while in the locker room in the class platform.
-In the D2L binder where PDFs document can be stored for studying purposes, I like this function but I wish that it would make studying ease by adding note-taking opportunity.

I like that I've been able to do away with collecting paper in most of my courses. I am also able to easily arrange course materials for my students to access. Depending on your course, the original setup can be intense, but it is very easy to copy the course over for a new semester of a different section.

I enjoy being able to post grades and attendance in D2L.

I love that I can grade a quiz by question. Sometimes, I need to only look at one question.

There can be some misleading language such as "locked" on the calendar list next to a discussion assignment. Students see this as meaning that they cannot access the activity. But what it really means is that there is a period of time for which the assignment will be locked. It doesn't necessarily mean that the assignment can't be accessed at that time. I get lots of questions about this.

I still find the grade calculating tool is not as robust as I need it to be.

To be fair to D2L, the LMS has a nice look and feel about it (especially in the student facing view). Hence, students seem reasonably happy with D2L most times. They also seem to be able to navigate around the various tabs with some ease. Students DO have issues with the e-Portfolio feature which is far from intuitive and simply doesn't work at times.

From the course creation standpoint, the software is very unintuitive and inconsistent. It appears that this LMS was created by a team of software engineers that did not commit to a consistent architecture. Hence, methods to accomplish certain tasks vary by where you may be in the LMS. This makes it very challenging and time consuming to use.

The discussion forum functionality is very dysfunctional and quite restricting. Many students have commented on how archaic this feature is and I agree with them.

The help function is virtually useless. One flounders until an answer is "discovered" or one gives up.

Finally, the number of clicks to accomplish the simplest of tasks is mind numbering.

Overall, Brightspace allows educators to design useful online courses that enable students to succeed and achieve a degree from the comfort of their homes if reaching a campus is not a possibility.

Brightspace has attempted to integrate a video feature where a course can be held online through a video platform however this feature is constantly lagging and still needs much work before it will function well.

The ease of use. Some of it may be how my university has set it up for the faculty, but I can jump right into a classroom and figure out what to do next. Grading is easy.

I think the Discussion area could be set up a little more user friendly. For instance, It's a little hard to see what discussions have been responded to and where I need to put my focus in responding back to students.

Nice look to the web pages as expected from any product.
There are many ways for students to view course content.

The workflow to setup the class and create activities and assignments is completely illogical. Managing the grades gets worse.
Dropbox folders, assignments are optionally associated with gradebook items. Gradebook items don't show up as graded until a dropbox evaluation is 'published'. Dropbox drill-down is cumbersome for the instructor in order to confirm or re-evaluate grades for individual students.
Constant slow total page-refresh any time simple changes are made. Save buttons stay highlighted even if no changes have been made.
There is zero help except to send the frustrated instructor to a community page, with no contact available.

I like that platform in that it has so much available from one login. Grading, student contact, administering assessments, and pretty much everything that one might possibly need all in one spot.

Because of the amount of things it does, at times switching from one thing to another can be a bit clunky. That is merely a minor inconvenience, however.