D2L Brightspace LMS - Review 2022

D2L is non new to online learning. Founded in 1999, D2L (then Desire2Learn) created ane of the very outset learning management systems (LMS). Today, Brightspace remains one of the virtually popular platforms in the educational space, behind but Blackboard, Canvas, and Moodle, according to a recent Edutechnica report. Brightspace stands apart from other platforms in its longstanding delivery to competency-based education and composite learning. While its competitors have fabricated inroads in those areas, D2L has continued to invest in predictive modeling, automation, and analytics, making it one of the most comprehensive LMS platforms available.

Over the past year, the company has thoroughly refreshed Brightspace's interface. While that overhaul is ongoing, the renovated user interface (UI) brings Brightspace into line with Instructure Sail LMS and Blackboard Larn (which just recently underwent its own overhaul), and arguably ahead of Moodle (which lacks the visual finesse of paid competitors). While information technology may lack the marketplace share of Blackboard or Sail, and Moodle's costless price signal, Brightspace deserves careful consideration for both its automated features—particularly Release Weather and Intelligent Agents—and its suites of add-ons.

UX Updates

Amidst a host of other updates, D2L has integrated a new tiled interface throughout Brightspace. Compared with the previous layout—which users can access via a prominent Archetype Homepage button—the new interface is an do in minimalism. Whereas the previous layout bore some resemblance to the modular design of Moodle, Brightspace nests functionality in bill of fare items, and foregrounds courses using large, colorful tile images. On the Instructor side, faculty can even choose to use an Activity feed every bit their course landing page, non dissimilar to the Blackboard's revised Action Stream.

Now that the company's Daylight UI has been integrated throughout Brightspace—when I last reviewed Brightspace information technology was only available in the Dashboard—the LMS is responsive, precluding the demand for defended mobile apps. D2L has likewise worked to simplify the almost common actions. For example, teachers can embed anything in their Google Drive and copy and paste tables from Discussion documents without fretting well-nigh formatting. To promote course accessibility, D2L has as well added an Accessibility Checker to the HTML editor, as well as responsive, accessible content templates.

Getting Started

Instead of requiring faculty to create class containers—a surefire way to ensure faculty don't utilise an LMS—Brightspace allows administrators to automate the process via integration with an institutional SIS, such as Banner past Ellucian, or to create a shell to which an teacher is assigned. The benefit of this approach is that the role of course creation that instructors experience is organized effectually a simple Setup Checklist.

Through that checklist, instructors tin can import existing course packages from various other popular LMS platforms, including Blackboard, Moodle, and Pearson eCollege. To the class syllabus, instructors can add together learning objectives created at a course, program, or organization level using the Competencies tool. (More on Brightspace's approach to competency-based education below.) The Setup Checklist walks instructors through simple deportment, such equally posting a welcome bulletin, to more avant-garde features, such as creating gradebooks and rubrics.

Form Features

Brightspace bundles all the functionality 1 should expect from an educational LMS, besides as a number of other innovations. In addition to a calendar, groups, and discussion boards, D2L includes an integrated email arrangement. While I suspect that few instructors will rely upon that internal system, they tin can likewise access messages outside Brightspace, thanks to integrations with Gmail and Microsoft Function 365.

In that location are subtle, just meaningful, improvements to the evaluation of educatee work made by Brightspace. Instructors can review pupil work, pull up associated rubrics, assign grades, and adhere various forms of feedback—all inside one screen. A small, but welcome, update is the ability to exempt students on grades, and to carry those exemptions forward, ideal for ungraded classwork.

A number of small features in Brightspace brand administering an online form a bit more human. Take the Page button. While the term is somewhat anachronistic (elsewhere in the LMS, in fact, D2L uses the term Instant Message), the ability to transport a bulletin to a student from the Assignment screen might be useful if you were reviewing a student's homework, and yous decided you wanted to ask permission to utilise her response in class. The Page push closes the altitude between instructor and student.

Using the aptly titled Insert Stuff feature, students and instructors akin can pull in materials from a centralized repository, upload local items, or depict from media available on YouTube and Flickr. I can see how an expansive approach to "stuff" might enable richer assessments. If I were teaching the beat out poets, I could post the full-text of "Howl" and add an audio clip of a Ginsberg reading. I could and so ask students to describe how the performance of "Howl" changed the significant of the text using a long-answer response. Thanks to a variety of discipline-specific options, instructors needn't restrict themselves to open-response, multiple-choice, or true or fake assessments. A math instructor could choose from assessments dedicated to arithmetic questions or significant figures. An English teacher could alternately utilise questions designed to arm-twist brusque answers, long answers, or multiple curt answers.

Finally, instructors can apply Awards and Certificates to recognize pupil accomplishments. Awards are basically badges that instructors can assign when students achieve a certain competency. They can assign certificates upon the successful completion of a class. For their part, students can add both Awards and Certificates to their ePortfolios.

Brightspace ePortfolio

The Brightspace ePortfolio is commendably customizable—though perhaps too much so—for students. Students can store, organize, reverberate upon, and share all sorts of items related to learning. Those items might reflections, presentations, learning objectives, and collections of "artifacts"—documents, images, audio, video, presentation, coursework, awards, and certificates.

While I appreciate ePortfolio's granular controls, I suspect they might exist overkill for my students. For case, Brightspace lets students create sharing groups through which they can manage the access permissions of users and groups of users. In concept, sharing groups could foster productive collaboration, such equally writing groups. In practice, even so, I suspect that once students begin to think virtually collaborators in terms of roles or permissions, they won't want to utilise the portfolio as the vehicle for that customs. In embracing a more familiar Facebook-way interface, Yard-12 upstarts, such equally Edmodo and Schoology, offer a model for making tools students want to use for collaboration.

Nevertheless, D2L's ePortfolio is valuable. While so much of the work that students practise in an LMS resides at that institution, the ePortfolio is portable. Afterwards they graduate, students retain access to that record of learning.

Competency-Based Education

Brightspace stands autonomously from other LMS platforms in its full-throated implementation of competency-based education (CBE). In contrast to traditional online courses, CBE courses lets students demonstrate prior competencies in the form of skills (from their ePortfolio) or CV items (existent-world experience that the instructor can evaluate and acknowledge).

Generally, CBE courses rely upon some kind of pretest, what D2L calls the Prior Learning Assessment Module. That pre-examination isn't an all-or-cypher proposition. Should a pupil excel in certain areas and struggle in others, she will simply be required to consummate the sections in which she hasn't demonstrated competency.

Central to D2L'south approach to CBE is a feature chosen Release Weather condition, which allows an teacher to create a learning path through a course.

Release Atmospheric condition

With Release Conditions, instructors tin suppress items until students see conditions. For example, I might choose to hide topic two in a lesson until my students take viewed topic one. Or perhaps I don't desire my students taking a quiz until they view the related content. Release conditions tin can be assigned to most content available in a class, including checklists, discussion forums, surveys, and graded items.

I found using Release Conditions fairly straightforward. Subsequently y'all set a Condition type, such every bit Award Earned, Condition Details populate contextually, showing a list of relevant Class Certificates or Competencies Accomplished. You can also reuse the conditions you lot create, acquaintance more than i condition with a given item, and even specify whether a educatee must achieve whatever or all relevant weather condition.

Finding Release Conditions is much less straightforward. I found that the easiest way to configure them across my syllabus was to select the Bulk Edit push button. From in that location, I had to squint to find the text "Add together dates and restrictions" from which I could and then create or scan conditions. Release Weather condition are a valuable feature, and D2L ought to make them more easily attainable.

Intelligent Agents

D2L also buries Intelligent Agents, another innovative characteristic. To admission them, you have to wade into the ellipsis menu item, and coil through dozens of items until yous attain the Communication subhead.

Instructors tin can create various Intelligent Agents that automatically search for behavioral patterns and take a form of activity. Think of it every bit IFTTT for online learning. For example, I created one Agent that would ship an email to the pupil if she didn't sign into the grade later iii days. For some other Agent, I paired a release status ("Receives less than or equal to 60.00 percent on the quiz") with an electronic mail to both the educatee and her academic advisor.

If I were pedagogy a small course, I probably wouldn't need Intelligent Agents or Release Weather. In the instance of large courses, however, I could encounter how coupling Intelligent Agents and Release Conditions could support the early interventions that lower attrition rates.

Over the past year, D2L has continued to refine Intelligent Agents. For example, educators can trigger Intelligent Agents based on a lack of activeness, such as a student not turning in an assignment. D2L execs explained that their customers find this "not" logic most valuable because information technology helps educators automate detection at-risk patterns they might otherwise need to monitor manually.

Roles and Progress Tracking

Brightspace supports more granular roles than most competitors. For example, an administrator can designate educational activity administration who are also students. Those roles are of import because they determine what a user tin and cannot see. Just about every data element in the LMS is wrapped in rules and permissions.

From the Class Progress dashboard, instructors tin besides access an overview of student progress with regards to content, learning objectives, logins, and grades. Hovering over educatee photos provides an overview of awards, plus the ability to e-mail or instant message the students.

Opening a student profile allows instructors to tunnel into student participation, to see exactly how many times the student has logged into the LMS, how long they've spent inside the LMS, which quizzes they've taken, and what assignments they've completed—all of which is critical for early interventions.

Add-On Packages

Similar to Instructure Canvas and Blackboard, both of which I have commended for offering suites of online learning tools, D2L sells a host of add together-ons that expand Brightspace's capabilities.

When I last reviewed Brightspace, I titled this section "Add-Ons Ad Nauseam" on account of the sheer number and complexity of those add together-ons. To its credit, D2L has streamlined its offerings into 3 packages: Brightspace Core, which includes everything an institution needs for online learning, including a learning object repository, virtual classrooms and video assignments, and ePortfolios; Engagement Plus, which bundles the platform's course catalog and multimedia tools, namely Brightspace Capture; and Performance Plus, which features the visitor's predictive and performance analytics, including Brightspace Insights, LeaP, and the Student Success System.

I suspect that many universities will be well-served with the Cadre package, which bundles many features associated with a flagship educational LMS: an online learning environment, consignment grader, virtual environment, and video assessments. The biggest change since I last reviewed Brightspace is that the platform at present features a richer centralized content library (Brightspace Learning Repository), from which instructors tin now pull images and more than.

Engagement Plus, meanwhile, caters to universities developing rich multimedia courses. This package features one of my favorite add together-ons, Capture, which enables institutions to schedule and record lectures and even broadcast live events. Notably, the software indexes keywords from videos, captioning, and on-screen text, all of which it makes searchable. I could run into how Capture might be especially useful for instructors interested in composite learning or flipped classrooms. Imagine if your establishment hosted a multiday conference, replete with panels outside the scope of your class. With Capture, instructors could search across those recordings and flag relevant talks, which they could embed in a course via the Insert Stuff module.

Performance Plus bundles three valuable add-ons: Leap, Insights, and the Educatee Success System. Equally an adaptive learning tool, the Bound add-on module is well-suited to prior knowledge assessments, cocky-study, and test-prep. Jump automatically generates questions and automatically recommend readings and study materials for any questions a educatee gets wrong. Meanwhile, Insights analytics offers admins a trove of reporting tools and information, consummate with class-specific and programme-wide data visualizations. (I have included one such visualization in this review'south slideshow.) Finally, despite its glib championship, the Student Success Arrangement employs sophisticated predictive modeling technology to conceptualize which students will drop out or underperform in a class based on like courses and previous offerings of a class. This early-intervention organization enables an instructor or admin to focus on a particular educatee and to anticipate how she'll do in a class, week by week. Should the system surface detail behavioral patterns, information technology can even recommend interventions via Intelligent Agents.

D2L offers other products and services—likewise many to discuss in the limited space available. Perhaps most relevant to universities dipping a toe into online learning, D2L offers courseware services, through which institutions can customize course design. I previewed 1 such class, Leadership 101, which I included in this review's slideshow.

More than an LMS

"We're more than an LMS," D2L CEO and president John Baker once said to EdSurge. "I dislike that term because it only covers a pocket-sized segment of what nosotros do." To telephone call Brightspace an LMS does, indeed, experience incomplete. When information technology comes to analytics, predictive modeling, and courseware services, Brightspace is much an online learning hub than an LMS.

The cost of that hub isn't immediately clear. Similar to Instructure Canvas and Blackboard Acquire, Brightspace doesn't publicize its pricing, which information technology determines based upon institutional need. The consolidation of add-ons into iii main packages ought to bring welcome clarity to administrators.

In terms of features, Brightspace compares very favorably to Blackboard, Instructure Canvas, and Moodle. Editors' Choice picks Canvas and Moodle retain a slight edge on account of the standout third-party integrations of the former, and the free, open-source, plug-in–based design of the latter. However, D2L Brightspace is evolving apace—considerably since my concluding review, even. Today, it presents a mature platform equipped a wide assortment of tools and services for online learning and a compelling culling to most dominant educational LMS, Blackboard Learn. All-time of all, educators and administrators can effort it for 30 days before they commit.

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