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Desire2Learn vs Blackboard (and Moodle)

The university at which I’m teaching uses the D2L (Desire2Learn) Brightspace Learning Management System (LMS).

The Brightspace LMS is a cloud-based, managed service. This means the system is updated and maintained by D2L, sparing the university any on-site hardware costs, including employees. This also means that when the cloud service has problems, so do users around the world. I’m conflicted regarding how good or bad it is to have managed services. In many ways, the large the university, the more it might benefit from maintaining its own servers and support.

So, far, my experiences with D2L are mixed, at best. Frequently, I receive the “spinning wheel” instead of content loading. At times, text fails to appear on screen, such as the menu names for basic functionality. The issues appear to be browser related, with Chrome working well on my personal laptop… but the university systems have only Microsoft Internet Explorer. (That’s right, they don’t have Edge installed and only IT can install new software.) It is possible that D2L’s platform uses Flash or Java, or that it uses HTML5 and CSS that IE doesn’t support.

Blackboard and Moodle work on older hardware. They aren’t pretty. Animations and special effects aren’t why we use a LMS, and wasting overhead on appearance bothers me.

It is easy to locate books on Moodle and there are several on Blackboard. D2L documentation and training videos are acceptable. The documentation has some annoying quirks, making it difficult to navigate between topics. I have located no books on D2L and some mediocre training materials produced by various schools. Popular software receives more support, and clearly D2L is not in the same league as Blackboard or Moodle in terms of community size.

The discussion boards, which I like as teacher, are a pain in D2L. They are pretty, yet confusing for students. Blackboard has a much better discussion model.

D2L seems to care a lot about rubrics and rigid grading models for assessment. Models can be locked or unlocked based on what students have successfully completed. You can create an adaptive course shell, which is great. I wonder, however, how many faculty members have the time and energy to craft an adaptive course shell. The release criteria model is fascinating, but a university would need a support team to help faculty implement the technology.

A full-time instructional technology department could do some impressive things with the D2L release model. A professor using the shell to support a traditional course might find these features getting in the way of a course design.

As a teacher, I want to upload handouts and collect homework. I could use a shared cloud drive for these tasks, without a pretty interface. Data loss in the past has taught me to keep a local gradebook and local copies of all files. I like the convenience of having all materials nicely organized and I like being able to check grades from anywhere. But, I actually do most tasks twice: locally and via the LMS.

As a student, however, I really like LMS platforms. The systems ensure I have proof that a paper was submitted. The systems force instructors to think about organization and content relationships. The professor who cannot locate anything in her office was forced to organize her course shell via a template.

University students and faculty have to deal with learning management systems. There are a half-dozen established LMS platforms, with Blackboard, Canvas, and Moodle being the dominant systems. In my experience, others come and go, with Blackboard buying some competitors over the years. As a student and instructor, I’ve used Blackboard and Moodle platforms extensively. I had used WebCT, which was purchased by Blackboard in 2006. If you read the history of WebCT, you realize the effect of consolidation on the education software market.

None of the systems are perfect. Teachers have their own approaches to creating, organizing, and grading materials. Sometimes, you get lucky and the teacher’s philosophy aligns with the LMS architecture. More often, the LMS imposes (or tries to impose) workflows that the developers and designers preferred.

Microsoft Office 365 for Education offers an alternative to LMS models, as log as you want to embrace the Microsoft ecosystem. Google Apps are also available to schools as an education suite. Apple has some offerings, too, which could be coordinated into a suite, if they had a grand vision for the eduction Software as a Service (SaaS) market.

One of my colleagues has shifted entirely to a Google Drive for handouts and Dropbox for homework submissions. I understand preferring such simplicity to an LMS.

For this first semester with D2L, I’m trying to adapt my organizational habit from Blackboard and Moodle to the D2L approach. Units or Weeks, my two preferred organizational models, don’t smoothly shift into D2L yet. I am creating “Modules” for the weeks and “Sub-Modules” for the details within weeks, such as assignments and readings.

I wish D2L would trade the visual effects for more speed and reliability. I’d like a more condensed design, too. I feel like I’m creating content in Facebook or Medium.

As the semester continues, I’ll share more thoughts.

 

Published inEducationTeachingTechnology