Brightspace UX Concerns (Free UX consultation)

I’d like to raise a few UX concerns regarding the current UX of Brightspace LMS

1. Attendance Tracking

While Brightspace offers an attendance feature with symbols or letters like P (Present), A (Absent), L (Late), and E (Excused), it lacks the option to annotate these records with custom notes. Personally, I use Google Sheets, where I can indicate reasons like “Sick,” “Death in the family,” “Retreat,” or “Student athlete”—which helps when students or parents raise questions later.

Also, Google Sheet consolidates everything: attendance, grades, rubrics. I only need to open one tab. Brightspace would require multiple tabs and loading times, which isn’t efficient, especially when handling several classes.

Suggested Solution 1: Allow instructors to add brief custom comments or tags to each attendance record for better context and documentation. A consolidated dashboard view would also greatly help.

Suggested Solution 2: Integrate Google Sheets within BrightSpace. There is also no autosave feature for the attendance. What if I accidentally closed the tab?

2. Grade Exporting Workflow

There are two common workflows we've been shown:

Method 1: Export from Brightspace to Excel
This still requires manual formatting after export. If you have 6–7 subjects that’s a lot of repetitive formatting.

Method 2: Copy-Paste from Gradebook View to Excel
Faster, yes—but the student ID numbers are missing from this view, which is problematic because we need IDs for Registrar submissions. You’d have to get them separately, which defeats the time-saving purpose.

Suggested Solution 1: Either (1) include student ID numbers in the copy-paste gradebook view, or (2) create an export preset that matches the a certain format so we don’t need to reformat manually every time.

Suggested Solution 2: Integrate Google Sheets within Brightspace. BrightSpace LMS does not also have an autosave feature

3. Lack of Sent Email History

When sending announcements or emails from Brightspace, there is no record of sent messages on the sender’s end. We can't confirm if it was sent, when it was sent, or to whom. Even Gmail logs those for transparency and accountability.

Suggested Solution: Add a “Sent Messages” log for instructors, showing at least the subject, timestamp, and recipient list. This would prevent miscommunication and reassure faculty that messages went through.

4. Delayed Pulse Notifications

Students often receive announcements and updates late in their Pulse Mobile—sometimes hours after we post them. In urgent cases, this lag completely defeats the purpose of time-sensitive reminders or feedback.

Suggested Solution: Work with Brightspace/Pulse dev team or IT to ensure real-time or near-real-time push notifications are enabled and optimized, especially for critical updates and announcements.

5. Group Evaluation: Only Submitter Sees Feedback

When I evaluate Dropbox submissions made by a group, only the student who uploaded the file can see my evaluation comments. If that student becomes inactive (e.g., accident, illness), the rest of the group has no access to the feedback.

Request/Solution: Make evaluation feedback visible to all members of the group, not just the file uploader.

Read the Reddit forums and a lot of educational institutions do not like BrightSpace compared to other LMS.

I hope these points will be taken into account in future planning and system improvements. Please consider this post a complimentary UX consultation 😄—but next time, there might be a consultation fee 😉.