Auzmor Learn vs. D2L Brightspace

Overall Auzmor Learn works well handling the basic Learning Management Systems needs for OSHA general industry (1910) where employees are in an office, business or industry setting and stay or return to their workplace frequently. Most us a desktop computer to do their training. In the construction industry 90% of employees are in the field nearly 100% of the time. As a specialty contractor that falls under the OSHA standard (1926) Auzmor has listened to my concerns and challenges and has begun to address them by customizing features.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Assessments can now easily be uploaded in bulk using a CSV template.
• Successful assessment submission(s) from a learner will trigger a notification to their respective manager/instructor/admin who assigned the training to them.
• We can create a lesson through video formats, documents, embedding links, YouTube & Vimeo.
• It can create and track our live training both classroom and online.
• The course is publicly accessible with public weblink.

Incentivized

• The grade book is very customizable. There is a learning curve, as there always is if something is flexible, but there are a lot of good options available for grading, displaying grades, and calculation of grades.
• Adding course content of many types can easily be done using drag & drop or copy-paste. It is easy to retain stored content from semester to semester. Updating an item takes three clicks. It is easy to organize and reorganize content and allows sub-sections. It records whether individual students have opened material and how much time they spent using an item.
• I like the flexibility of organizing the dropbox for student submissions. Deadlines in the dropbox or discussions automatically appear in the course calendar.
• I like the range of quiz question options, in particular, the "multi-select" question type.

• There was some missing functionality that was raised to the Auzmor team, which they are very receptive of that feedback and work with you on providing a solution, work around or addressing it in a future release.
• Being able to attach certain file types for training exercises was not supported.
• There was some limitations on resizing some images and text boxes during course content creation.
• Some of the whitelabeling and cutomization of the UI has some limitations.

Incentivized

• The use of rubrics in the discussion area and the quizzes area could use some TLC. The rubrics actually have to be added to the grade book item for them to be functional. In the Discussion area the instructor is unable to grade them discussions and publish them to the grades area. In quizzes, students are not able to see the rubric at all. If the rubric functioned in these two tools like they do in the dropbox they would be a very useful tool.
• The discussion area could benefit from a few different enhancements. There is currently no way to grade group restricted discussions without having to manually enter the grades in the grade book or setup a different grade item for each group and then someone restrict those grade book items to individual groups. It is not an easy process one way or the other. The discussion area would also benefit from the ability to add categories so that Forums could be grouped by a certain category (i.e. Units)
• D2L needs to invest some time and resources to develop/redevelop blogging, journaling, and wiki in the LMS.

From a functionality standpoint the software continues to meet the requirements we had set for the LMS we chose to implement. The addition of new features has increased the likelihood we will continue to use Auzmor Learn. As long as the usability of the software meets the needs of our learners we would not have a reason to look at other options

Incentivized

Our faculty and students are satisfied with D2L, find its features to be mostly intuitive, and it is sufficient for our needs. After version 10.4, D2L will be going to a continuous incremental release model, which will allow them to innovate more frequently. The introduction of version 10 has been a tremendous improvement over prior versions. D2L has integrated well with our ERP (Peoplesoft) and it has become a core part of our technology suite.

The platform is simple to use. I can have a new employee come to orientation with no computer skills and get that person up and running on Auzmor within minutes. On the admin side, Auzmor is intuitive and easy to use.

Incentivized

For me, someone who is reasonably technologically proficient, it was a bear to learn, but once I did it was relatively intuitive. However, for most of the professors I work with who are not comfortable with technology, I can see how they would be overwhelmed by D2L and then, as a result, just refuse to use it--which is what is happening to a certain degree

Incentivized

Both students and instructor enjoy the 24-hoiur access. After, all isn't that the point of online learning. As an instructor located in an Eastern time zone state it is great to connect with students located in a Pacific time zone state. I have gotten comments about the early hours I am in the course room grading assignments . . . 4:00 a.m. PST; 7:00 a.m. EST So, it's sleep time for my students and "first cup of coffee" time for me.

Easy to navigate; little to no delay from one section of the course room to another; actually fun to use after overcoming the learning curve.

Excellent customer support. They work with you to set up the courses, tell you industry best practices, and a good way for structuring courses. Whatever additional features are needed, can be discussed at length with the Auzmor Learn team and they are very open to solve and add these to their product backlog for future updates.

Incentivized

I have had excellent support from Desire2Learn. Any ticket that I submit is acknowledged immediately and the correction is usually almost as quick. We use this for thousands of classes and it is pretty well liked by both faculty and students. We have been using it for almost 4 years now and most of our instructors have become pretty proficient with it.

Did not participate in the in-person training due to distance; training was completed online

The training provided online did not, necessarily, fit the version of the system that I was using. Screens were somewhat different and not all options were readily available. This could have been due to customization on the part of my institution however, I rather believe it was due to version changes and training materials not yet being updated.

The D2L implementation team listened to our concerns and built a system based upon our needs. We wanted to keep them after the initial implementation.

There are a lot of LMS options out there and it was quite daunting trying to see how everyone compared and differentiated themselves. While they all may have been able to provide the LMS functionality we would eventually need, Auzmor stood out in the conversations we had based on functionality, pricing and support. It was not just an LMS product, but a partnership we were getting to make sure we would have everything we would initially need and also for where we wanted our training to be for years to come.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

During my first semester working with Desire2Learn the integrated learning management system was more down than up. This meant reconfiguring assignment due dates, frustration for both the instructor, students, and help desk staff. After an upgrade, Desire2Learn has been reliable.

• Auzmor Learnr has helped us continue our compliance training with ease.
• Through Auzmor Learn's available trainings, we have been able to create learning paths to help us further develop our Management Teams.
• Being able to manage the trainings with such ease has saved so much time.

Incentivized

• I cannot speak to whether this system is less expensive than the more fully featured Blackboard, but employees are far less efficient, frustrated, and require frequent calls to the help center to set up fairly simple course templates.
• I have been asked to consider teaching courses which will be completely online at my current institution. I have done such online courses several times at other universities, but I have decided Desire2Learn is too frustrating and cumbersome to do so. I am now exploring using Google Drive to teach a course online. Otherwise, I will not teach online until required or I find an alternate system.