> Review Summary: 15desks
"Basic academic based learning management system built with blended learning and self-paced eLearning in mind."
> What the vendor says:
"We created 15desks to make education tools available to all, regardless of size or budget.
Our solutions are intuitive. You'll pick them up and start using them. It won't take weeks to learn, because you may only have weeks to teach. We don't sell you training because you don't need it."
> What Software Shortlist says about
15desks:
At first glance, we didn't think the 15desks learning management system had any "wow" factors, but taking a deeper look there are some unique and useful features.
Key strengths of 15desks include:
The interface for this LMS looks like a system associated with a school or academic institution and that's fine because the system has been developed keeping academia in mind. Using 15desks, you can choose to create courses using a course creation wizard or opting out of the wizard and creating the course on your own. This is a nice feature to have considering most wizards are helpful for new users and time consuming for pro users and lots of software tools force wizards on users if they have one. We liked the ability to choose whether to use the wizard or not.
This is the only learning management system we evaluated that had a Teaching Assistant (TA) and Co-Instructor module. In other learning management systems, with roles based security, you could give certain users access to certain screens or pieces of functionality which resulted in manually creating such modules; but, with 15desks, there is built-in functionality to assign a TA and Co-Instructor with security and roles pre-defined. And, this can be done by the teacher/instructor without intervention from the administrator.
Finally, we liked that the email messaging system allowed teachers and administrators to send messages to groups: "All Administrators," "All Teachers," and "All Students." This is certainly a nice and useful feature to have for email announcements, changes to course, course offerings, etc.
This tool is missing some basic functionality such as the ability to format text, labels, content, etc. as there are no options for bold, underline, font sizes, bullets, etc. This is a pretty standard piece of functionality that comes with all competing solutions. It's useful for students to see information on the screen chunked into bullets and important terms or items bolded or underlined.
Also 15desks provides some functionality that is probably not so useful - like a recent activity history on the home page for instructors and administrators. This might be something TA and Co-Instructors are interested in after the course has been created; but,
when the course is still under construction, a long, useless list is generated on the home page. It takes up space and it's not that usable for the instructor to see a history of every little label added and file uploaded.
15desks is a free tool; however, you have to be affiliated with an academic institution to get a user account.
> Next steps:
To see if 15desks is the right choice for the specific needs of your business, contact Software Shortlist
about our free LMS matching service!
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