D2L Brightspace

What do you like best about the product?

very user friendly, reliable and accessibility compliant

What do you dislike about the product?

Social isolation is obvious. Limited hands-on experience. You either know it or not.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

no matter what problems there is within D2L Brightspace, there is always the D2L Brightspace Learning Design team to seek help with.

What do you like best about the product?

Versatility, user experience design, adaptability, and strong customer input and communication.

What do you dislike about the product?

Some tools are not in alignment with others.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Reaching vast learners, create space will be a huge solution for my teams.

What do you like best about the product?

What I appreciate most about Brightspace is how well the platform lives up to its name. It creates a clean, welcoming, and visually appealing environment that feels like a true space for learning. The modern design provides an excellent foundation for showcasing an institution's brand while fostering meaningful connections between instructors and learners. I also value the variety of engagement tools available, which make it easy to create interactive learning experiences, encourage collaboration, and support different teaching and learning styles.

What do you dislike about the product?

One area that could be improved is the use of screen space when viewing Brightspace in a desktop browser. The large margins on either side of the page leave a significant amount of unused white space, reducing the available area for course content and creating unnecessary scrolling. Making better use of the full browser width—or providing an option for a wider content layout—would enhance the experience for both instructors designing courses and learners navigating course materials.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Brightspace is modernizing our professional development offerings to engage learners and elevate our brand.

What do you like best about the product?

Ease of use, uploading content made easy, and the integration of Creator+ and H5P is fantastic!

What do you dislike about the product?

Some "nice-to-have's" - ability for groups in setting collaborators in H5P activities as well as an automatic set to share option (both would be a huge timer saver); ability to nest Creator+ elements such as a callouts inside an accordion (we receive a lot of requests for things like this).

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Integrating H5P activities and Creator+ elements allows workflow to be much smoother, eliminating working across multiple platforms to publish content.

What do you like best about the product?

I have been using D2L Brightspace for more than three years in the field since I am a Technopedagogical Designer at my University, the Universidad Alberto Hurtado in Chile, as well as the super administrator of the platform institutionally. Among my duties, I am responsible for creating and configuring online courses for undergraduate and postgraduate programs, managing users and roles, setting up the gradebook, implementing rubrics, generating reports, training teachers, and providing support for online and blended programs at my university. One of the aspects I value most about Brightspace is its intuitive interface, which facilitates both course management and the experience for teachers and students. Tools such as course copying, modular content organization, and assessment configuration save a significant amount of time on tasks that need to be performed repeatedly, considering the number of courses we have at my university. The platform offers extensive integration capabilities with external tools through standards like LTI, allowing us to incorporate video conferencing solutions, interactive content via HP5 that we are exploring, web resources, and other educational applications without complex configuration processes. In terms of performance, the experience has been very positive. We have managed courses with a high number of simultaneous users, and the platform has remained stable even during periods of massive evaluations and high demand; it has never crashed on us. It is stable, which I also value. Another noteworthy aspect is the support and documentation provided by D2L. Both the training resources and technical assistance have been useful for implementing new functionalities and resolving specific advanced administration requirements, and the ASC system has also helped me provide support. Finally, the new AI-based capabilities show interesting potential to support content creation, although I have not fully used them except in trial versions; we are evaluating acquiring them. Last but not least, its cost is much lower than other LMS on the market with the same capabilities, which allows us to stay with them. In general terms, Brightspace has significantly contributed to improving course management, the experience of teachers and students, and the efficiency of processes associated with online education.

What do you dislike about the product?

Something I believe could be improved is the reporting and data visualization through the Data Center. Currently, to obtain useful information, it is necessary to generate multiple reports and manually cross-reference different data sets in Excel format, which is how the data center delivers it to me. This increases the time required for academic tracking tasks, participation analysis, and institutional report generation. It would be valuable to have more consolidated reports and pre-designed visual panels that allow access to relevant information without the need for so many intermediate processes. I also believe that the user experience of the forums could be optimized. In particular, it would be useful to have a more visible and direct option to reply within a specific thread, similar to the experience offered by other modern discussion platforms, meaning a reply button without having to enter the thread itself. This would facilitate the tracking of conversations and improve interaction between teachers and students. Lastly, some navigation elements could be visually modernized. The top navigation bar and the visualization of units and content adequately fulfill their function, but a more modern and intuitive interface could enhance the user experience, especially for those using the platform for the first time or accessing it from mobile devices. None of these aspects prevent the effective use of the platform, but they represent opportunities for improvement that could increase administrative efficiency and the overall experience of teachers and students who ultimately, or at least for us, are the center of the process.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Before implementing Brightspace, the management of online courses relied on multiple separate tools for content, assessments, communication, and student tracking, which created a fragmented experience for both teachers and students. We used Moodle, managed by us, but it was very limited in features.

With Brightspace, we were able to centralize all these processes into a single platform. We currently manage fully online and hybrid courses, integrating content, activities, assessments, rubrics, communication, and learning tracking in one environment. This has significantly reduced the time spent on administrative tasks, allowed us to standardize the quality of courses, and improved the experience for students and teachers.

As an administrator and technopedagogical designer, one of the greatest advantages has been the ability to reuse course structures, copy content between academic periods, and automate evaluation and tracking processes, which represents a considerable time saving in each academic cycle. Additionally, the platform has allowed us to develop more dynamic learning experiences through interactive activities, videos, automated assessments, and tracking tools, without the need to hire external solutions for many of these functions.