Brightspace Reviews

I love how user friendly this software is. As a daily user, I can easily navigate the different portals on this software and find all my class's resources quickly. It is very organized, and has great assessible features such as clear text, and high contrasting colours. Grades are easily accessible, and there offer all features necessary to succeed in your course, eg. discussion boards, class list, attendance, course content etc.

The notifications are quite overwhelming, every time any professor makes any adjustment to their course you get a notification that piles up throughout the day. Moreover, the notifications for upcoming assignments are sometimes inconsistent, as assignments not done through the D2L will not show up at all, causing confusion for upcoming work to be done for the student.

Nothing at all.
The LMS has a LONG list of features but nearly all of them are poorly designed and frustrating to use.
I have moved back to old solutions that I used before I was given this piece of software.
Clearly no teachers with any experience were consulted in the design of this.
There was a huge opportunity for D2L when they moved from their old solution to a new Cloud based one. They missed the opportunity

The interface was not intuitive. There were very few clear best practices in the interface. The way that you complete tasks changes depending on which part of the interface you are using.
Non-technical users will become quickly frustrated with the number of steps required to complete even the most basic of tasks.
The interface feels like it was built by different groups of developers and designers who didn't communicate with each other. Every developer had their own idea about how to accomplish a task.
Many default options are counter to what an actual teacher would need in their day-to-day tasks.
Nothing in the interface saves you work.
Every task prolongs how long it takes me to do something.
After months of trying to use this tool I have given up and am now searching for alternative tools that make my life easier not harder.

As a college student, I have used D2L for 3 years. I have taken a handful of all online classes whose only presence was via Brightspace. Brightspace has created a really nice online environment for classes, you can host all your content there, provide quizzes/tests within Brightspace. Theres even a discussion board for talking with other class members or the instructor. I like being able to work at my own pace, which is what an online class provides, and Brightspace provides all the features to host a well developed online class.

Auto-saving responses on tests doesn't work always. This is a relatively new feature though so, I'm sure it will get fixed soon.

I enjoyed the formatting and how easy to use brightspace was compared to the previous software my university used. It made tracking grades and all of the content my teacher posted so much easier to follow. It also shows how your grades were compared to other students and allows you to track your own performance.

When I was a TA, it was also really easy to post news items, enter grades and insert comments on students' papers.

Easy to understand for all users!

It can be difficult to operate on mobile devices - there are less buttons to navigate the pages but it's not impossible to use.

I like that Brightspace is easy to use. In previous online courses, we had used another program, which was a hot mess. Brightspace is user-friendly and really easy to find what you're looking for. The useability, however, depends mainly on the professor/teacher/whoever that may set up the course. Currently, everything is laid out in weeks, so each "module" contains what is due that week. Very simple to use, from a student standpoint.

I have noticed that when posting/replying to a discussion board, there are no notifications. And by this I mean there are no "push" notifications, so it's sometimes hard to see if people are responding to my post. Once I log in on a desktop/laptop, I can easily see if people have responded. However, if I'm using the app on my phone, it doesn't necessarily "pop up" and say that someone commented or posted something new. I personally would like a notification when this happens.

This Learning Management System is GOOD but not the best. It is great that D2L and Brightspace have an easy-to-use portal that differentiates between student, instructor, and even TAs. However, the options that come with competitors like CANVAS are far superior...

CANVAS, a competing LMS, provides more external resource use, such as Virtual Office Hours during Conferences, and even grouping students into smaller groups to use MS Office through Collaborations. Brightspace is user friendly for students but more difficult to manage for administrators/teachers.

A helpful platform for managing online courses. I especially like the ability for professors to create a checklist for each module.

Some of the email messaging features are a little clunky.

I have loved using D2L for both my undergraduate and graduate studies. It has made submitting and keeping track of my assignments very easy. I love that it keeps everything on one easy to navigate website. I don't know what other options are out there, but I can't imagine anything being more user-friendly for students than this!

I did not realize course access expires when I first started using D2L for my school work. I didn't bother downloading a lot of my class materials to my computer beacuse I assumed it would always be there for me to reference. I looked back a year or two later and saw that my classes had disappeared. I understand why, but I really wish there was a counter or notification before course removal so I could download any content I wanted. This is probably something managable by the school, but it would be great if D2L would notify the students.

Brightspace puts a lot of options at the user's disposal. It is a powerful, robust LMS that can be customized to fit a wide variety of preferences. As an admin and as an instructor, I really appreciated that the system did not lock me in to one way of doing things.

I also really like how much, especially in recent years, the Brightspace development team seeks for input from its users (and provides great forums for sharing ideas for improvements).

Currently, Brightspace does not have a very robust way of setting up communications throughout the course. They use a feature called "intelligent agents" for sending notices to students when they meet certain criteria (for example, sending a particular note to a student when he is inactive in the course or performs particularly well on an assessment). This feature, however, lacks a good deal of "intelligence" and is pretty restricted in what it can do.

I also feel that much of Brightspace is not particularly intuitive or streamlined. I'd like to see them improve on ease of use (without sacrificing power). A good example of this is the quiz feature where finding the exact page you need to get to in order to edit questions and grade values is a bit like a scavenger hunt.

The most impactful features of BrightSpace are discussion opportunities, auto-grading, and navigation.

The cost of the LMS is the only drawback.

Brightspace is flawless. It makes seeing your grades, assignments, class resources, discussion forums, and online lectures accessible from anywhere. It is compatible with every device (laptop, desktop, phones). Brightspace help services are clearly stated and always available. Great customer service skills as well.

Brightspace is not the easiest when teachers do not know how to properly use it. A simple video how to guide for each feature would enhance all aspects of Brightspace.

I took most of my master's level courses using this platform. After learning to navigate it, I became very familiar with it, and it was a decent platform for the professors to present material on. I liked how it would show notifications for discussion posts (particularly when someone would reply to something you had written). Also, it would alert you when a professor had submitted a grade for an assignment. These are great features that other learning platforms do not have, and I most definitely miss them when using those platforms.

It was not a very clean way to present material. It was a little cumbersome at times, took a lot of "getting used to," and was missing some features that would have been helpful that I had experienced on other platforms.

Our school needed a lot of flexibility and customization, as well as integration capability. They have a rich API layer that allowed us to create an "uber" system - a next-gen learning system that all appeared to be a single entity even though it was made up of multiple platforms.

The costs for flexibility and data are problematic - it's an issue for all LMS companies but it would be great to see more progressive thinking around our school's data.

-My school uses a lot of the D2L platform, from learning experience online to binder.
-It is really easy to use and very user-friendly.
-I love the images that were used in the online classroom platform for D2L
-The chat-like function in the classroom is also very useful especially

-the locker room is a little bit outdated, I think they should add a function where students are able to type document and edit document while in the locker room in the class platform.
-In the D2L binder where PDFs document can be stored for studying purposes, I like this function but I wish that it would make studying ease by adding note-taking opportunity.

It has improved some things, like being able to cut and paste into discussions.

1. The layout is not clear to students. Many have problems locating things in the Content because they don't understand the structure.

2.When I log in as a student and go to discussions, even when I have "grid view" and "threaded" selected, I don't really see a thread structure, just a list of messages. Since I teach literature, discussion is essential to the course, but this makes it almost impossible to use really well.

3. When I'm logged in as myself and switch to "student" view, I don't see what the students see. I have to log out and log in as a different user to see that.

4.The grading and attendance features are not flexible and don't allow me to keep the kinds of records I need.

5. The email is much too limited.

6. When I add a new topic to a module, I can't reorder the list of topics, but have to move the new one up one topic at a time. This takes a very long time.

The customer support team is excellent, providing very helpful advice and bug fixes almost at a whim! Whenever we've had a problem, Brightspace were they almost instantly to lend a hand.
There are a huge list of features on offer, allowing for a wide variety of lessons and exercises be taught.
The session in-activity is incredibly useful, we use this in shared-classrooms where its not guaranteed that the user will log-out when finished.

Not very easy to use, buttons and tools seem to be hidden away either within a menu or a seemingly random location.
Communicating with attendees via Brightspace is a pain, there isn't an easy way to send out bulk emails to students. There is some automated process here, but just sending out a basic text email to all students on a course would be very useful.

The everything in one place aspect of it. This means fewer different logins and software platforms to keep up with, which means more focus on things that matter.

Occasionally there is maintenance that prevents logins, but it is usually announced in plenty of time to make arrangements for alternatives. And they do try to make it happen during off-peak hours.

The ease of use. Some of it may be how my university has set it up for the faculty, but I can jump right into a classroom and figure out what to do next. Grading is easy.

I think the Discussion area could be set up a little more user friendly. For instance, It's a little hard to see what discussions have been responded to and where I need to put my focus in responding back to students.

Nice look to the web pages as expected from any product.
There are many ways for students to view course content.

The workflow to setup the class and create activities and assignments is completely illogical. Managing the grades gets worse.
Dropbox folders, assignments are optionally associated with gradebook items. Gradebook items don't show up as graded until a dropbox evaluation is 'published'. Dropbox drill-down is cumbersome for the instructor in order to confirm or re-evaluate grades for individual students.
Constant slow total page-refresh any time simple changes are made. Save buttons stay highlighted even if no changes have been made.
There is zero help except to send the frustrated instructor to a community page, with no contact available.

Perhaps it is because we switched from Merlin's Blackboard Learning platform (which was terrible), but Brightspace has a much cleaner interface. The simplifying of certain aspects is also a plus, not to mention the ease of changing pages as a teacher instead of having to go into the actual coding.

Brightspace is new to me, so I am still sorting out some of the glitches and variations on the Blackboard Learn platform that we used to use.