Blackboard Learn by Anthology vs. Thought Industries

A school with a well-established technology imprint with their students (for example, ours is a BYOB school where every student has their own laptop and must bring it to school every day and where over 99% of our families have reliable broadband at home) is a reasonable scenario for using The arrogance and intransigence of the sales force is quite disconcerting… They are no longer the only game in town and don't yet realize it. Less well-off schools/families may find it a challenge if students must be on campus or at a public library in order to use the technology. Obviously, during the pandemic, this became problematic for some districts.

Incentivized

Currently, there are a lot of good things about the platform. Thought Industries I believe can do B2B, B2C, and Internal Training really well. The Panorama allows for segmentation of users and cohorts also provides great flexibility for whatever education business you are providing. It is more modern and sleek than a good amount of traditional LMSs that are used for K-12 or Higher Ed. Mobile and the lack of Phone or Chat Support is where they can greatly improve as other improvements are made based on user feedback and prioritized accordingly.

Incentivized

• Provides HTML quality course content that is easily retrievable and viewable.
• Provides multiple methods of communication: email, threaded discussions, real-time "live" online discussions, as well as grade portal.
• Allows facilitators multiple methods of grading or providing feedback: threaded discussions, rubric scoring, personal comments, inline viewer, or download/upload attachments.

Incentivized

• Ecommerce: The eCommerce options on Thought Industries are far better than any other LMS. You can sell subscriptions, one-time products, and even physical products.
• Note-taking: The ability for users to take notes and journal is a key feature as a lot of our customers are teachers and they are learning the Bible and may want to go back and integrate their notes in other lessons.
• The ability to handle video and audio is exceptional, especially how the video files can be stored in Wistia.
• The panorama feature is helpful as we have many products that we white label and now, we can create courses for those customers as well.

Incentivized

• Although the current graphic user interface is easy to use, it can be improved with larger fonts, dynamic menus, and attractive graphics.
• The system does not include a module to pay the school fee.
• The roster tab lacks detailed information about students.

Incentivized

• More integrations with data warehouses and data lakes (out of the box)

Incentivized

There are several aspects of Desire2Learn that outweigh the benefits of using Blackboard. I find that the Desire2Learn system is a bit more user friendly and looks more up-to-date. However, the decision to renew systems is not up to me because the entire University uses the same system. Regardless, I think I would choose Desire2Learn over Blackboard because of its improved user interface.

It is very usable for both faculty and students. The interface is pretty intuitive and most students can use it without a lot of additional training. Faculty do need some training to effectively use the interface, but they usually get it pretty quickly. We have had to create some additional programming to give faculty a way to delve deeper into the content.

Itʻs a good platform for certain things such as tests. Blackboard may not be the most user friendly but there is always room for improvement in any website, business, etc. When used with other platforms such as Google Classroom, Blackboard can be more effective, but when used by itself I feel it is not as impactful from a student perspective.

Our onboarding was awesome. Attentive, responsive, knowledgeable and very helpful in us getting our initial internal portal up and running. Support is typically pretty responsive to issues as they arise, although slow to correct an issue/problem unless it effects the overall function of the system

Incentivized

Blackboard's Managed Hosting was top-notch in getting us up and running quickly.

Incentivized

Blackboard is the all around better fit for our intuition. It provides the "bells and whistles" we require in having a diverse faculty and flexibility in course delivery. The "bells and whistles" aren't cheap, but we have found that budgeting for this large expense has been more than worth it for us.

Incentivized

We selected Thought Industries over these three competitors, even though Thought Industries was more expensive. Their partnership in scaling was better and their integrations were stronger.

Incentivized

• It has answered all my needs for distance learning and met most of the objectives
• The only negative I can think of is not having access to the past course material and not being able to download the lectures
• Another positive is the zoom integration feature

Incentivized

• Increased employee training

Incentivized