Blackboard Learn by Anthology vs. Thought Industries

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

Thought Industries is perfect if you are trying to scale your customer education business for a growing customer base. It is more expensive than their competitors, but the price is worth it based on the product and experience. Thought Industries is likely great for smaller customers, although we are an enterprise-level customer. If you are not offering multiple modalities for your training program, Thought Industries (or any LMS for that matter) might not be the best investment.

Incentivized

• Blackboard Learn makes submitting assignments electronically simple and provides a variety of built-in Web-based tools like e-portfolios, wikis, and blogs that our students use to create their own content.
• Blackboard Learn is intuitive and easy to navigate from a students perspective
• Blackboard Learn has many integrations available for connecting this LMS to other tools we use at our institution.

Incentivized

• Built in eCommerce pages and purchasing options.
• Data to drive real-time decision making.
• Customization options.
• Team to work with our needs and custom scope.

Incentivized

• Blackboard Learn has some limitations when it comes to submissions
• It is not that user friendly, I had to spend some time to get a hang of it in the beginning
• I have been struggling a bit with deletion of manually added courses

Incentivized

• Lacks the ability to make courses required
• Cannot pull a report for a course(s) to show who has not started the course
• Cannot reset gamification or run specific gamification campaigns
• Although SCORM compliant, SCORM courses often break or do not show as complete on the learner side even when the module is marked as complete on the back end

Incentivized

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.

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.

My Blackboard support comes from the university I work with. They are responsive--eventually... but it takes them sometimes a week to respond to a reported issue. For example, I reported 2 issues last week and one was resolved and I was contacted about one still open option today. That is too long for a tech issue. I have not contacted any support offered directly by Blackboard, which may be a completely different experience altogether.

Incentivized

The customer support and customer success teams are really great. BUT, it is their product team that sends them into a super high rating. The product team has worked with me on several occasions to try to solve the business challenges that I have.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Coursera offers a variety of modules in which a team is able to work on then, but [Blackboard Learn] offers more options to understand how are the team members developing and which tasks have offered a harder challenger for them. [Blackboard Learn] also offers a variety of reports that can be generate by a team lead.

Incentivized

Thought Industries is better on the financial side and as far as ease of use. It is more affordable than Docebo and is more aligned to an external customer use case. Docebo and Tovuti seemed to be more for internal training. Tovuti was less expensive, but it was a little harder to use although it had more quiz features.

Incentivized

• At one of the institutions that I worked for, the ROI was excellent for the number of users we were serving; however, I could not speak to other instances as I was not aware of the overall cost of the contract.

Incentivized

• Multiple Months with $20,000 in eCommerce Sales.
• Site Up Time and Engagement has remained steady for all 4 years.
• Course authoring is faster and more efficient.

Incentivized