D2L Brightspace vs. Studio 360 (discontinued)

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

Small to medium companies on a tight budget cannot go wrong. Articulate Studio enables smaller companies to produce compliant professional looking training courses without breaking the bank. Additionally, the product is quite intuitive to learn and use. I myself had never used a product such as this but was able to produce course work with quizzes that impressed senior management.

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.

• Easy learning curve. Just some button clicks for recording narration, syncing animations, and adding annotations.
• They made some fairly recent improvements to how you sync animations and add annotations. With the timeline, you can manually move the timing around. Much better than the earlier task of having to just re-do it from the beginning and hope you get the timing right.
• If you're using Studio in the Articulate 360 subscription, you can easily review the course before it publishes.
• The included Quizmaker program is just great. Simple to use, but you can make a varied mix of questions, and the customization options are great.
• You can add background music in slides, which is pretty great in certain situations.

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's icing on the cake. It provides a lot of usability with its quiz-maker and presenter. The presenter can sometimes feel like an unnecessary add on. If it didn't come apart of a package, I don't think we would have purchased it outright.

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.

There is very little chance that this software wold not be renewed. It has become an integral part of our standard software for elearning development.

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

This is very useable software even for novice eLearning authoring users. People with some PowerPoint experience should be fine with this software and even Excel!

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.

If Articulate, as a company, would require their "community" "support" staff to open tickets on behalf of customers, then I would say that their support would deserve a 10. It's a huge gap between Articulate's management of their support compared to other companies; "support" staff are supposed to open tickets for you if they see the need, but Articulate's "community" "support" staff are prohibited from doing so. Instead, they will tell you that you should open a ticket when it should be their job!! This is just disrespectful of the reality of software support.

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

Several Adobe products combine to do the work of just Articulate Storyline, which is part of Articulate Studio. The comparison is not really one that is easy to make but if you needed to do something with these Adobe products, all of them can be done with just Storyline. The beauty of Articulate Studio is that there are parts of the suite for which there is no match in Adobe such as Review 360 and Content Library 360.

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.

• Prior to using this software, we were using a combination of other software, four in total, to accomplish the same task. Investing in Articulate Studio has saved us an annual cost of +$1,900 just in the software alone. Our ROI is less than 8 months as a result of the savings and time consumption saved by using one software and training on one software only.
• Having a lower impact on computer resources, Articulate Studio allowed us to install it on more users workstations that were not able to support other software. This reduced cost significantly by not requiring "mega computers" to run the software we previously used. Since Articulate Studio runs so smoothly, we can purchase standard workstations and it runs great on them.
• Having new employees join the team and training them on producing training courses has never been easier. They only require 3 days of training in Articulate Studio vs. two weeks we needed previously to train on 3 different software to accomplish the same tasks.

Incentivized