Pulse is such an amazing app and I wanted to take the time to let everyone know just how great it is! I’m a student at Southern New Hampshire University (which uses Bright Space) studying business with a concentration in entrepreneurship and staying on top of my work while I’m on the go has been made so easy with this app! I always have my phone with me and whenever I need to check in on my assignments whether it’s reviewing grades for previous submissions, rubrics for upcoming essays or even accessing digital books, databases and quizzes, this is the app that has helped me stay on top of everything that I need to get done. My favorite part is that I’ve even been able to take part in all of my discussions with the other students while I’m away from the desk at my home office or the library here in town. No matter what, Pulse has kept me going and it’s gotten even better over the past two years that I’ve had it with me in my pocket with constant updates I don’t even realize are necessary until the changes the developers have made are noticeably helping my system stay optimized each and every term! I’m very appreciative for this app for the fact that I would have otherwise not been able to be as connected and studious as I have been! Thanks to the team that keeps this app alive! Canai H. CEO of Canai Records

I am an instructor, and this app does provide some value in that I can access most of the course content without going through the full login process of my college’s website. However, I do have some complaints. 1) After I “Launch the Course Homepage,” I instinctively tap “Done” in the upper left corner after I have completed a task, intending to return to the previous page. However, this actually fully exits the Course Homepage and returns me to the app, which as an instructor provides almost no value to me. Please move this link or make it much clearer that it fully exits the course homepage. 2) When I am composing an email and have pressed send, the email is sent but the app does not close the email and return to the inbox. Instead, there is just a message saying “Loading…” that never goes away, and my only recourse is to press “Done,” which as I describe in item 1) above, fully exits the course homepage. I have tried reinstalling the app, but it does not correct the issue. I would appreciate your reviewing and addressing these issues to make the Pulse app a better environment in which to access my course shells.

I’m a student at Loyola Marymount University and we use BrightSpace for all of our courses. I was thrilled to hear that there was an app for my phone or iPad that I could use to keep up with my assignments. Now, having used this app for TWO AND A HALF YEARS, I can say that it is a decent app and does most of what it should do, but it’s basically just a portal for Safari in a different app. To view any course announcements or to be able to download any files while on the app, you have to open the course homepage which opens a pop-up safari window. This just makes the app messy, and every time I open the homepage within the app, I just wonder why I don’t use the normal webpage on Safari instead because it’s the same thing. It’d be AMAZING if the app was all in one and didn’t have to open safari to show half of the course’s content and the announcements. Schoology, which I used all throughout high school, does this very well in their mobile apps and their webpage and I would love for the developers to take a look at that and see how far behind their app is in terms of usability and other productivity apps out there in 2020. If your professors make a lot of announcements and require you to check on them daily, just use BrightSpace in a web browser and don’t even bother with this app until it gets updated to be all inclusive.

The D2L app is very bad, the website is also not so great but the app sufferers from a variety of problems. App frequently logs users out and does not retain the institution information, so you need to search for your institution and re-login very frequently. The app is completely missing the ‘messaging’ feature, which many instructors use to communicate instructions and deadlines. Viewing content in the app is sometimes difficult because links, files, and videos live within a web frame and occasionally don’t load at all or easily lose place within the content structure. Finally, navigating course content hierarchies is cumbersome and at times obscure in the app (also a weakness of D2L generally, that the nested hierarchies can become difficult to navigate and easy to miss sections or lose place when navigating). It would be much nicer to use if they adopted a stack exchange, Wikipedia or Reddit style structure that was more flexible and viewable at a glance from a variety of levels, as D2L exists today the hierarchy is often convoluted and difficult to navigate.