Brightspace Reviews

Summary: Brightspace has a lot of features for classroom set up. I've been on both ends of it, from an administrative end and as a student. It can be frustrating on both sides due to minor bugs here and there. After years of using it, I've never seen any of these issues actually get better despite all the updates we would get each year. Support is abysmal. If something's wrong with your account, expect a lot of phone tag and days of waiting. Issues aside, when it's working right, it works well and there's so much you can do with it. I don't think I've ever had a class fully utilize everything available. You can really customize your class however you want.

Positive: Brightspace has a lot of options for what you can do with it. There's a dropbox for students to upload assignments, forums, access to email, a calendar you can update with due dates, a gradebook, a place to organize notes/videos for classes, and an announcement section. Classes a teacher is teacher and that a student is attending each semester will be displayed on the main page and are accessible from a dropdown menu. There's also the ability to have online tests done in a locked down browser to minimize cheating and you can connect to Collaborate for live class sessions. Teachers and other administrators can also view their classes from "student view" to see how it will look on the students' end.

Negative: Setting up tests and forum posts can be finicky, and sometimes fail altogether. Once in the system, there shouldn't be any major issues with signing in, but new users is another story. Those just setting up an account can expect to potentially be locked out of Brightspace for days at best or weeks at worse when first being brought into the system. At the start of the semester, classes may not all load and how past semesters are displayed can also be glitch, displaying the wrong time period or hiding current classes. Forum posts sometimes will display for some or none of the students despite the teacher doing everything right on their end, and odd things like changing the deadline by a few days for a post sometimes fix these issues for no apparent reason. Emails are also flakey. Some semesters, it's more reliant than the main school email system, some times it's not. There's never any way of knowing until the semester has already begun.