Brightspace

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

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.

Brightspace makes it easy to contact students in a class. I like the 'classlist' feature that lists all the students in a class and their university-related contact email. This simplifies either bulk-emailing students (as an instructor) and finding students to study with (as a student). It is also a secure site to centrally access all the information necessary for all my courses.

Brightspace provides multiple places to find the same things. This is confusing, especially when some assignments are loaded in a given course module but not in the 'Assignments' tab, or vice versa. There are multiple levels of redundancy that are not kept consistent throughout the interface, so it is often confusing to locate materials.
Brightspace is also slow to load. Often, when moving between tabs when I am creating a quiz for the students I teach or grading material, the browser loads for 30-45 seconds before transitioning pages. This is frustrating.
After a class is officially 'over', the course pages are greyed out and prevent access (even when a school has not officially ended yet). This happens immediately after the final in a class, which prevents students from going in to do final grade calculations or download any materials. This is frustrating.
Brightspace has had many issues with plugins, such as Kaltura Media Gallery, which disable access or have perpetual loading or glitching. This leaves the software as unreliable.