Blackboard Learn by Anthology vs. iSpring Learn

A school with a well-established technology imprint with their students (for example, ours is a BYOB school where every student has their own laptop and must bring it to school every day and where over 99% of our families have reliable broadband at home) is a reasonable scenario for using The arrogance and intransigence of the sales force is quite disconcerting… They are no longer the only game in town and don't yet realize it. Less well-off schools/families may find it a challenge if students must be on campus or at a public library in order to use the technology. Obviously, during the pandemic, this became problematic for some districts.

Incentivized

iSpring Learn supports short, engaging courses ideal for corporate training programs, especially in finance-related industries. It pairs well with bite-sized content for compliance training, product knowledge, or soft skills development. For companies that need an LMS up and running quickly, iSpring Learn offers a simple setup process and an intuitive interface that doesn't require extensive technical knowledge. If a company needs extensive customization for branding or workflows, iSpring Learn may not be as flexible as some alternatives.

Incentivized

• Provides HTML quality course content that is easily retrievable and viewable.
• Provides multiple methods of communication: email, threaded discussions, real-time "live" online discussions, as well as grade portal.
• Allows facilitators multiple methods of grading or providing feedback: threaded discussions, rubric scoring, personal comments, inline viewer, or download/upload attachments.

Incentivized

• Gamification: Available badges, certificates, and user achievements on training completion. Leadership boards available in the user profile increase competitiveness and motivation among users.
• Analytics: Org level, departments wise, groups wise, and user-wise in-depth reports with lots of filters. The learning curve at the user level is one great functionality.
• MS PowerPoint integration with iSpring Learn is a top feature and since most of our users are pretty comfortable with MS PowerPoint, it allows for easy content creation and quizzes.

Incentivized

• Although the current graphic user interface is easy to use, it can be improved with larger fonts, dynamic menus, and attractive graphics.
• The system does not include a module to pay the school fee.
• The roster tab lacks detailed information about students.

Incentivized

• I wish ISpring Learn could interface with my eCommerce website so that users were automatically enrolled when they purchase a course. That would require an API feed.
• I have 516 downloadable documents for the three learning tracks. I wish iSpring Learn had an option for the user to download numerous documents at one time, instead of one at a time. After early users complained, I put a link to a Box account, for each learning track, so the user could download the documents all at one time.

There are several aspects of Desire2Learn that outweigh the benefits of using Blackboard. I find that the Desire2Learn system is a bit more user friendly and looks more up-to-date. However, the decision to renew systems is not up to me because the entire University uses the same system. Regardless, I think I would choose Desire2Learn over Blackboard because of its improved user interface.

In the past I could not encourage my students to take online training. The results and the questions were hard to be given. When I used the iSpring Suite along with iSpring Learn, my dreams came through and most of the time my students are online and take good training with my programme.

Incentivized

It is very usable for both faculty and students. The interface is pretty intuitive and most students can use it without a lot of additional training. Faculty do need some training to effectively use the interface, but they usually get it pretty quickly. We have had to create some additional programming to give faculty a way to delve deeper into the content.

Sometimes, things just aren't intuitive enough. For example, burying the catalog in the settings area makes no sense at all. The same goes for permissions and year reviews. It was a massive oversight that really caused a lot of confusion for all of our managers. It caused distrust in the LMS simply because someone who designed and developed it did not think that an employee review should be private to them, their direct supervisor, or the supervisor above. Instead, ANY manager could read ANY employee review. I have mentioned this several times throughout these questionnaires, and as you can see, I still find it incomprehensible that a company that wants to promote its software as a multifaceted solution could be so blind to something so critical, especially in terms of privacy.

Incentivized

I have to say ALWAYS.

Incentivized

Itʻs a good platform for certain things such as tests. Blackboard may not be the most user friendly but there is always room for improvement in any website, business, etc. When used with other platforms such as Google Classroom, Blackboard can be more effective, but when used by itself I feel it is not as impactful from a student perspective.

Our account rep Katie Connor is fantastic. She is very responsive to our requests. She does not try to over sell. She has setup training sessions for us any time we asked. Finally, she is a very nice person we like working with. She also has been patient with us as we figure out our renewal

Incentivized

We can say that most of my students attend my classes twice a week and that's not enough for someone to learn. I put some training for them to do at home and they really enjoy doing them. The kind of progress they make is really satisfying for them and they are always learning.

Incentivized

As a teacher, I used to spend a lot of time correcting my students' papers. Now with iSpring Learn, my time has been saved and everything is done automatically. All the time I can check my students' progress and I know which exams they have taken or they should take. On the whole, online training has really helped a lot of teachers

Incentivized

Blackboard's Managed Hosting was top-notch in getting us up and running quickly.

Incentivized

When I talked to my colleagues or informed them to search for a programme before iSpring Learn, they were not successful in designing and implementing a programme like this. I am sure they have done a lot to implement it in the best and educational way. That was not that easy as we thought.

Incentivized

Blackboard is the all around better fit for our intuition. It provides the "bells and whistles" we require in having a diverse faculty and flexibility in course delivery. The "bells and whistles" aren't cheap, but we have found that budgeting for this large expense has been more than worth it for us.

Incentivized

iSpring Learn had the best ratio of volume of features, price and ease of use. They were the clear choice after doing trial periods with all of the other platforms I was comparing. I had demos and trialed 15 platforms prior to making my decision.

Incentivized

Really perfect.

Incentivized

• It has answered all my needs for distance learning and met most of the objectives
• The only negative I can think of is not having access to the past course material and not being able to download the lectures
• Another positive is the zoom integration feature

Incentivized

• I feel since we have introduced iSpring to our employees we have retained more employees then before
• Some individuals do complain when they don't receive their email through for the training (this happens frequently) making them not want to use the platform
• Overall this has been a great addition to our resources which is helping to encourage more of a learning culture in our organisation

Incentivized