Instructional Design
October 2020 Addendum: Viewing Brightspace as somewhat of an acquired taste, I can confidently say that Brightspace is now my dominant online learning environment. The learning curve is higher than for Moodle.
After two years of Brightspace use, I conclude that organizations would strongly benefit from intrinsic Brightspace expertise and instructional leadership to assure that teachers, over time, develop and share best practices. Further, it seems that dedicated back-end expertise and support is necessary to leverage the administrative features of Brightspace, e.g., harvest the performance indicators that better help to identify at-risk and unengaged learners.
Some teacher use-cases are a bit clumbsy, as are some of its features though there are some interesting features (e.g., links to the curricula used in different jurisdictions). Vendor-supplied help facilities seem limited – dare I say anemic. Brightspace has the feel of an application driven by IT. In contrast, Moodle has the feel of an application driven by and for teachers. Less continuous innovation is evident in Brightspace when compared to Moodle. Certainly, Moodle’s open-source architecture as well as the large, worldwide and diverse community of developers enables continuous innovation and empowers users. A dream scenario would be to merge the best of Brightspace and Moodle into one coherent platform – call it BrightMoodle or MoodleSpace….
August 2019 Original: Though I use BrightSpace (aka. D2L), I continue to use Moodle as a place to create and share learning resources. Because BrightSpace quiz features are limited, I integrate Moodle quizzes into BrightSpace. Moodle provides a much better set of tools particularly for math questions in an environment where accommodations (e.g., extra time, extra attempts) are easily provided for those with learning challenges and adaptive assessment processes. The latter provides opportunity to do the pre-and post-testing that is a cornerstone of competency-based evaluation and assessment processes while respecting concepts like most recent, most consistent.
Click on the Moodle link in the navigation menu to have a look.