D2L Brightspace vs. SilkRoad Learning

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

GreenLight works well with tracking compliance training. During the selection process I would ask pointed questions about support. Our implementation went well (Dave M. did an excellent job) and the technical help is very good, however, it appears they are understaffed.

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.

• GreenLight allows us to deliver training to employees based on the role they serve in the organization (nurses, physicians, clerical staff, etc.).
• GreenLight allows for customized reporting to meet the needs of various stakeholders.
• GreenLight allows us to deliver content to all employees for self-paced learning.

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.

• The words that are used in GreenLight are ridiculous. I know they've said they will update this but it has yet to be done. Words like 'intervention' and 'stem' leave me scratching my head.
• The learning curve is HUGE. They have made strides in this area with an improved support site, but when you're first learning it, it feels like you're trying to climb Mt. Everest. This does speak to all the LMS offers, but I think some things take too many steps to accomplish.
• Training events are not instructor friendly. You can set them up and easily make them available for users to find, but something as small as the instructor being able to click a button and send an email to everyone that signed up should be in there. There's no function for contact.

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 main reason we will renew is because, after this lengthy and expensive process, we have too much invested to change again in the near future.

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

I have a better understanding of the system and so it is easier for me to use. The student side is very easy and simple for anyone to use.

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.

There have been many times when the site was unavailable for a short time. Also, glitches and unexplained ed activity such as sending training notifications out to terminated employees.

Incentivized

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 works well most of the time.

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.

The questions regarding how to implement in the system are answered quickly and efficiently. If there is an issue with the technical side or integrations it takes forever to get results and after much escalating.

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.

some are thorough and others are not. I like that they are available for review.

Incentivized

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

In my opinion, no comparison. GreenLight is a much smoother platform, providing a more stable user experience, with less bugs, less software conflicts, and better support. I have developed and published dozens of eCourses on this platform, and it really shines. In addition, the suite of integrated products from SilkRoad Technologies (Red Carpet, Open Hire, and WingSpan) really impress when combined with the strength of GreenLight.

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 system went down/offline for 5 or 6 days in January. This is the month we have 3400 employees taking annual required training. It had several glitches afterwards that took months to correct.

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.

• seems to have made sure that all out short term contract staff are more on the same level and can access various lists, documents they need from training in a way that fees up admin time.
• 100% of people interacted with it in someway, in the end no one had trouble understanding how it worked
• seemed to help with our duel learning delivery goals but too soon to tell just yet

Incentivized