Students have differing opinions, experience login delays as university moves away from myCourses
8/30/21 by Hamza Khan
This fall, Binghamton University students are learning differently in more ways than one.
Starting the fall 2021 semester, BU transitioned from using myCourses to a new learning management system (LMS), Brightspace. The adjustment took place after two years of pilot testing with faculty and students. The University began training faculty in using Brightspace in spring 2021, and it was an option for professors to use in their courses last summer. Beginning this semester, Brightspace will be used for all courses and organizations at BU.
While Brightspace was lauded by some students for its modern aesthetic, many students experienced login delays with Brightspace and other online University services during the first week of classes. Students expressed mixed opinions about their experiences with Brightspace, with some viewing it as an improvement over myCourses and others feeling it introduced too many complications.
Nicholas Bellino, a junior majoring in English, felt Brightspace, while an improvement in some respects, was limited by its lack of reliability over myCourses.
“Brightspace has a nice interface and all the contents are well labeled, but, as of now, it doesn’t seem to be reliable,” Bellino wrote in an email. “My first week of class, it took approximately 15 to 20 minutes to try to log in to Brightspace. This issue will most likely work out eventually but changing the main website that students use did not seem like a great idea if the servers can’t handle the many students using it daily.”
Similar concerns of loading times were raised by other students, including Suhaib Azam, a junior majoring in biology, who described experiencing similar issues with BU Brain.
According to Mike Flewwelling, vice president of customer success at D2L — the company that created Brightspace — the issue experienced by students was due to a misconfiguration of server resources.
“The service disruption that occurred was caused by a mistake that led to the environment having insufficient web server resources, which did not allow for the system to auto-scale as the user load increased,” Flewwelling wrote in an email. “This misconfiguration has been resolved in order to ensure an experience that is consistent with the 99.9 percent uptime we guarantee to all of our customers.”
Thomas Bravata, a junior majoring in biology, described Brightspace as a clear upgrade over myCourses.
“I thought Blackboard was an adequate [LMS], but it left much to be desired,” Bravata wrote in an email. “I found it difficult to navigate with all of its different tabs, so I’m thankful that the switch was made to Brightspace.”
Thomas Gruszecki, a junior majoring in computer science, described Brightspace as having an initial learning curve for professors, but free from major hindrances.
“So far, several of my professors have complained that Brightspace seems difficult to navigate,” Gruszecki wrote in an email. “Aside from that, I have not seen many issues, and hopefully it stays that way.”
While John Kennedy-Bauza, a junior majoring in accounting, experienced similar issues as other students, he said the problems would likely be temporary.
“Brightspace has been difficult to learn, it feels like most people don’t know how to access important materials for classes or how to really work the program,” Kennedy-Bauza wrote in an email. “That being said, as I have used it a little more I am getting more comfortable with Brightspace.”
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