Opinion: Brightspace Is Poorly Designed
Brightspace is supposed to be an efficient way to keep track of your classes, but Google Classroom just does it all better.
(Illustration by Susan Behrends Valenzuela via Washington Square News)
by Anuj Jain
This story was originally published on New York University’s Washington Square News.
Last year, NYU announced it was going to transition from NYU Classes to Brightspace, a platform developed by software company Desire2Learn. The FAS Office of Educational Technology announced the transition for the fall 2021 semester, claiming that the new platform would have better discussion boards, an easier grading mechanism, and more multimedia integration.
But from a student’s perspective, Brightspace just isn’t cutting it.
Open up Brightspace on any given day and you will find a confusing, cluttered dashboard with a list of your classes that takes up less than half the screen. It also has an awkward structure where it lists only two classes per row. The other half of the screen contains announcements and calendars, which in theory is a great addition, except that none of my professors seem to know how to correctly utilize these tools. It’s clunky and inefficient.
Appearance aside, Brightspace does not function well. The dashboard doesn’t categorize the upcoming assignments by class, but lists them on the side in a jumbled to-do list.
Read the rest of the story at Washington Square News.