Marg Brightspace

Nothing. I have been using and some times Beta-testing software for nearly 35 years as a university researcher, extension educator, a county employee and now as a teacher and this program is neither compact nor user friendly. It is just plain - clunky.

As a teacher, making assignments and quizzes, using and finding information is equivalent to the Labyrinth where the Minotaur was hidden.

If you had completed focus groups with end users - you would find that that the LMS is clunky at best and at worst, unworkable. Our teachers, including myself are spend more time trying to force things into this LMS than actually teaching our students. I spend between 2-6 hrs. depending on the day, vainly attempting to import assignments, make quizzes and move brightspace grades to our chosen grading system "skyward". It is obvious to me that your program is inelegant with the number of steps required to complete any required action.

Importing other LMS course content, such as Edmentum, requires too many steps (up to 27) and because users are assigned a random learner number (which we could not associate with a student name) we were forced to abandon this idea and force students to use both brightspace and Edmentum software (so much for one-stop shopping).

In the Grades Section, the column width is not compressible (Think: Exel or Google Sheets), column width is based upon the title length of the assignment without an obvious method of text wrapping. There is neither a separate grade for each attempt made in a multi-attempt quiz nor a completion date of each quiz next to the quiz score/submission tab. It would be useful to be able to view each attempt, from the Grades section and to easily determine when it was completed and which answers were correct. Instead I stumbled up this option today while in the quiz summary. This should not be trial-by-fire! Additionally, under Class Tools, the quiz tab in the quiz section has different edits available than the quiz tab under the course admin tab (WHY?).

The view as Learner tab does not come even close to providing a student's view. I cannot even take a quiz or look at the format that the learners see.

Because brightspace is not intuitive, our teachers have to make videos for our virtual students, so that they can understand where to find assignments and assessments - a total time suck. I feel like we are Beta-testing an un-trialed product and after 7-weeks of using this D2L, I am furious that this is the "Best Program Available.'" This LMS has made a bad situation - worse, it is my opinion our school was Shanghaied!

Don'T

Brightspace is making more problems than it solves. It is a hassle to make, edit and score assignments and quizzes, impossible to edit quiz questions and answers after the fact and just plain wearisome to use. I am spending more time now creating and grading written assignments than I ever did using paper and pencil.

This software is cumbersome, complicated, unintuitive, frustrating, unreliable, and just a pain to use. Faculty user acceptance is very low and few are able to get it to work for them without needing expert advice.