Brightspace

Pros

Technological advances in modern platforms seek, in one way or another, to redefine the concept of human learning. That is why platforms like Brightspace seek not only to manage all the most important aspects of educational management, ranging from the earliest ages to the most advanced students of high school, changing with them and adapting to their cognitive and emotional needs, accompanying them, but without imposing rhythms. And this is possible because Brightspace seeks to personalize learning, focusing them, in a very short time, effectively and in a very simple way. The versatility of the platform makes it absolutely compatible with the wide range of smart devices.
The process of teaching is not limited to the simple act of speaking or explaining in the classroom, this process must be thought, planned, developed, executed and, more importantly, evaluated. Brightspace all those tasks, using their useful tools. As a direct consequence, we can observe a significant improvement in classroom work, which will be noticed, due to the amount of activities that users will begin to share, which will involve parents and tutors, who will be able to manage feedback processes in real time. with personal messages.

Cons

Platforms such as Brightspace must have control or ability to configure pop-up windows, as well as other tools that must adapt to the changing requirements of users. The platform must be more managed so that it can reach more places and be more recommended.

Pros

I've used a lot of similar products for educational reasons like Sakai, Blackboard, WebCT, Canvas and so on and one of the pros for me that Brightspace offers is that it's very clean looking compared to some of the above. I personally find it very organic and easy to use, but I've also been using similar programs since college. Still, I feel like the tutorials on Brightspacde and the layout of it is very clean and well organized that even someone very new to this software could work with it. Some of the things I really love is the ability to customize my individual courses with colors, banners and so on, and embedding videos and images is much easier --especially when creating several courses and linking a pre-made quiz or re-uploading a video. I concurrently used this alongside Sakai since I teach at two different colleges and another feature that I'm very pleased with is the ease of connecting TurnItIn

Cons

There's very few items I dislike, and they may just reflect me and my colleagues. Some of the cons are as follows: I have a lot of issues with the grade book that comes with this software. This seems to be an issue I share with my colleagues as well. Some of the grade book issues range from students not being able to view grades, even after I make them visible to them and the site showing a percentage or point instead of a letter grade, even when I click the option for that. I've also had issues with making internal links to site material. For me, I'll be able to view my links, but my students are often unable to. For instance, you can create announcements that are sent out to your collaborators and in that you can put links or embedd videos and images. When I put hyperlinks to external resources, it'll work fine --same with embedding videos. However, when I link an internal link to something like course material or a lesson, it'll give my students an error, yet the student can still log into the assignment or module by going through the tabs on our course's Brightspace. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. It's not a make or break aspect either. For the most part, much of this software works great.

Pros

I've used Brightspace (D2L) for the past 3 years as part of teaching responsibilities at a University I work for. I find the integration of video and multimedia assignment types and rubrics to be well integrated and relatively user friendly.

Cons

Integration with external apps such as Bongo can be somewhat disjointed, but this has gotten better in the last year. Transcription of video has also improved.

Pros

I like the ability for there to be an online classroom and I like that it records the lectures. I like how the online classroom allows for screensharing and chatting also. I also like the look of the software; it doesn't look dated.

Cons

At this point, I have used several types of software like Brightspace as I have been in higher education for almost 7 years now as an undergraduate student and now, a graduate student. I think out of all those other software that I have used, Brightspace is the least intuitive to navigate. On the outset, I think the website looks clean and modern and it feels like a website that would be easy to navigate. But when you actually do start navigating the website, you find out how hard it is to find simple commands. For example, to simply program and then score a quiz online is much harder than it needs to be. Menus for basic things like how to see the students' grades were hard to find and I had to ultimately turn to google to figure out how to grade the quiz. I am new to this software, so maybe it just takes some getting used to, but so far, as a new user, I am finding that Brightspace is not intuitive or easy to navigate.

Pros

Has addressed many prior user problems experienced with D2L
Well-ordered, clean user interface
Easy to design different courses, quizzes, and tests with minimal investment of time.
Excellent grading features that calculate percentages easily.
Can easily switch from teacher view to student view to check the layout and identify problems before finalizing content.

Cons

Some of the menus are not intuitive. ie) I had trouble figuring out how to include deadline dates for assignments after which the software would no longer accept submissions.
UI interface is too spread out- it doesn't make efficient use of space on small screen tablets.