I just watched a demo on Desire2learn. First comment I must highlight is that only one person comes for the presentation. Espilen also have one person. Blackboard sends an army of sales rep plus someone on a conf call.
D2L has a very interesting feature called the instructional design wizard that walks the user through: creating competencies, assessments, learnig objectives. Remember the blooms taxonomy? The smart move D2L came up with was to create assessment types according to blooms taxonomy/learning objectives. So let’s say you’re looking to assess analytical skills or just plain retention. For each learning objective it will give you the different activities that you can use. Whether it’s through journal, eportolio, just quizzes. This tool is a great move towards instructional quality.
Looks: although d2l is fully flexible in terms of its design the intuitiveness, usability, navegBility impresses much non tech savvy users. Usability-wise I believe d2l is leading the race followed by epsilen.
Mastercopies: I asked the sales rep if we could create mastercopies and just copy them over throughout consecutive semesters. We can do that but also we don’t have to get all that work done since they have a content repository and just link mastercopies to a new course. This would save course developer so much time.
Multimedia: different to other lms, instructors can easily copy and pastecontent from any website to course content – which in webct would case the course shell to have problems. Embed YouTube videos or any other video link. This is different because many other lms would not understand most of video formats and
Internal links: remember when you wanted to link discussions and assignments in your content And you would have to go on tricky ways to figure out each link to put into content screen? Well it looks like in here the internal links problem is solved.
GrAde book: this grade books solves many issues encountered in most lms. There’s a great amount of flexiblitiy. For each grade we can leave comments with links to other areas in the course such as lessons, rubric and so on.
Rubric: there’s a possibility to attach rubric to each activity when grading.
In sum, I think Desire2Learn solves many technical issues and provides a greater flexibility – not to mention the improved usability in comparison to other systems.
