D2L Brightspace vs. TalentLMS

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

TalentLMS is user-friendly enough for someone new to LMS management can get a site up and running in a relatively quick manner. It is rather intuitive to operate. My needs have been a rather small scale of 400 learners and TalentLMS more than meets the need to produce a professional-looking and operational website to send customers and staff. The point here is that although I do not know how well it can be up-scaled, it certainly delivers for small to medium organizations to need to get content online

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.

• Content creation tool for training lessons.
• Managing and organizing users
• Provides comprehensive library of pre-made courses.
• Very easy to use, out of the box.

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.

• It should be easier to re-send someone their initial course assignment email notification. The notification engine is a little non-intuitive.
• I was trying to add a user to our account the other day (not a user - an internal employee that I wanted to give access to our system) and I had trouble finding it

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 ease of use, the robustness of the offering, and familiarity. It does everything we need and probably more. We likley don't utilize all the functionality it has as it does what we want it to without having to dig that deep into its tools. Their course library also has saved us some time in terms of saving time from creating some basic courses.

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

The system is intuitive. It does not have a lot of features that are hidden behind secret menus or elsewhere. There are often multiple ways to get to the same place through different menus without having to go back to the home or root menu. It makes things pretty easy. Additionally, if there is something I can't figure out, there is documentation available to help with that.

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.

I have never run into an issue with downtime in 5 plus years.

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.

It loads fast. Screen transitions are quick. Nothing seems to ever lag.

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.

The search feature alone is outstanding. When we needed technical assistance, it was provided with ease and clarity. Any representative we have worked with has been professional, knowledgeable, and good to work with, even if we were in different time zones or areas of the world.

Incentivized

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.

Implementation was relatively easy. When we set up a second branch, we needed a little help. But the support area is well-detailed. My clients had no experience with an LMS and their digital skills were limited. We had a long way to go. Nevertheless, it was relatively easy. It was rather quick!

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

Out of the box, Talent is easier to use than Learn Dash, which can be quite convoluted to set up, as it requires the integration and configuration of multiple plugins. As a result, we spent a lot less time getting things set up in Talent than LearnDash. Talent was also much less expensive than Litmos.

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.

The product can create as similar or unique experiences for different branches as you want for training purposes

• 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.

• We have dental practices across the United states; the TalentLMS platform helps us train out staff with one process. Standardization across 107 practice to track all of regulatory and compliance training needs.
• Over the course of the last four years we have recruited internal faculty to help develop content and they find the TalentLMS platform very easy to author material.
• Creating content ourselves saves a tremendous amount of money each year

Incentivized