D2L Brightspace vs. Blackbaud Education Management Solutions

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

Blackbaud Education Management Solutions is well-suited for schools who are interested in having it as the central piece to their student suite. I've heard that it does integrate with some other Learning Management systems but we've found that having it all in one place has made communication, dependability, and transparency greater. We appreciate that the views are the same for parents, students and teachers so when teachers make up a bulletin board, they know that what the parent is seeing is the same as them.

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.

• Incredibly easy to use interface for the User (parents, applicants, etc.).
• Ease of gathering data - Helpful lists, formulas, and reports.
• Time saver - Especially in the Admission office. Since everything is done digitally from the user through the employee, there is no need to hand-enter data; you just click the button, and everything imports or exports as needed!

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.

• Lists -unable to just create a simple list of say 100 students of varying grade levels. Need to export, then whittle the list down. Super time-consuming. Not possible to run a list and then click the students needed from there.
• Reports - [I feel there is] not enough of a selection of "canned reports" and no ability to create your own reports
• Advanced lists - [in my experience] THE WORST - again creating more work - I spent over 3 hours trying to make an advanced list of all NHS eligible students, that included email addresses for the students AND the parents. Way too difficult and needs to be simplified
• Learning Profile: [I feel] Fields for the person creating a learning profile for a student are too small. It would seem like the developers creating this have literally no idea how complex some accommodations are. Many accommodations come directly from a physician.
• Checklists: Should be in Academics not just Enrollment Management
• Ideas: [I feel it's a] good concept, poor execution. Many of the people who are actively using BB do not have the time needed to submit an idea, know it even exists or have time to search and vote.
• Some aspects of Enrollment management should follow a student into Education Management. For example, [I feel]The Candidate Summary should be viewable once the student is enrolled. Converting a process from all paper to electronic-only works if the information is accessible to all pertinent staff
• [I feel] There are many more - do better!!!

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.

We are just starting and highly invested in our journey and partnership with Blackbaud. We have committed to this system and are finding new ways to incorporate it into our everyday tasks. For example, we now track ACT and SAT scores in the test section for each student. This allows the counselors to easily look up any students test scores in an instant

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

Blackbaud EMS is very usable from my perspective. I am a power user and get lots of valuable functionality. It is, however, a complex system. Sometimes necessarily complex to accommodate flexibility for diverse customer needs. Some complexity seems unnecessary and/or hold-over functionality from earlier versions; nice to see this type being evolved away from over time. It is valuable to receive regular updates to the system along with good release notes of what changed and notices of significant changes in advance.

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.

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.

Always very helpful and informative. They always have an answer or are willing to research it. Also if the system has been down in after hours the emergency support has been helpful. I do use Chat primarily and I find if you ask a very detailed question they get straight to the point and support is very quick.

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.

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

Blackbaud K-12 is very similar. I feel like I would be trading one set of issues for another so it's kind of a wash. We are very much hooked into the Blackbaud website with our Google SSO, SmartTuition, and Schooldoc integrations. It would be difficult for us to transition. That is the main reason I haven't really entertained other web firms.

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.

• 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.

• Integration between SLS and SIS is definitely a time saver for teachers.
• Integration with the 3rd party for conferences is working great for us. A lot of mistakes are avoided with parents not being able to schedule the wrong teachers.
• Attendance and conduct visibility is a great feature.

Incentivized