If you’ve ever spent an afternoon rebuilding last year’s Moodle course, fixing formatting that mysteriously changed, or searching through settings to find one checkbox, you’re not alone.
Across UK higher education, educators consistently say the biggest barrier to delivering great digital learning isn’t creativity; it’s the time their Learning Management System (LMS) demands.
The platform has changed its job
For a growing share of programmes, the LMS itself is where the teaching actually happens. The UCISA 2024 Digital Education Survey found that 40% of departments at responding UK institutions now run fully online courses, with blended delivery the default across the sector, rather than the exception.
A platform that’s carrying that much of the learning experience has outgrown its old description. So the question for academic leaders today isn’t about whether it runs – that should be considered a given. It’s about what kind of teaching it makes possible.
The cost hidden behind familiarity
If your faculty are comfortable with the current platform, that’s obviously a good sign. But it can also hide just how much work goes into developing a good course.
Often you’ll find the most engaging material has been built using workarounds, and when the next cohort comes round, it has to be rebuilt from scratch. This requires huge amounts of time and effort to achieve.
The same UCISA survey found that the amount of time it takes staff to develop digital education is seen across the sector as the single biggest barrier to progress.
Less time managing, more time teaching
Learning a new LMS can feel daunting, especially when you’ve invested years mastering Moodle. Familiarity is its own kind of efficiency, and giving it up is a real cost.
But educators who’ve made the move consistently say the same thing: they were productive again far sooner than expected. Building content, giving feedback, managing assessments and reusing courses simply took fewer steps. The goal was never to learn another system. It was to spend less time managing one.
Our research team have been using Brightspace data the last two or three academic years to run our level four retention programme, which has already saved about over a million pounds, in terms of retained fees — and a lot of that is based on Brightspace data.Mary Cornelius Educational Development and Innovation Manager, University of Suffolk
For Suffolk, less time spent managing the platform freed up their research team to spend those saved hours where they really mattered. For most educators the change is smaller and more immediate: one less afternoon lost rebuilding a course, a setting found in one click instead of ten. But it adds up to the same thing — more time teaching, less time managing the platform you teach on.
All of this comes back to one idea. A platform that gives more than it takes changes what your teams can do with their time.
Your teams already teach well. A fair bit of the time, they pull it off by working around the platform to get there – rebuilding courses manually each term, formatting content for different devices, checking accessibility after the fact.
The institutions making the most progress have stopped accepting that friction. Their staff build courses visually, reuse templates across programmes, and drag content into place rather than navigating layers of menus. Accessibility is checked as they go, not bolted on at the end. Assessments flow from creation to marking without jumping between systems. And when new content is needed, AI-assisted tools help them get a first draft down faster.
Brightspace has transformed our approach to education. Its sleek, modern interface combined with powerful editing tools enables us to create high-quality, consistent courses that automatically adapt to any device.Danny Ball Digital Learning Manager, LIBF, part of Walbrook Institute London
The result isn’t a radically different way of teaching. It’s the same good teaching, with far less of the admin that used to surround it. When the platform stops getting in the way, the hours that used to vanish into setup come back to the stuff that matters most.
See it from an educator’s point of view. Explore a live Brightspace course environment and find out how it feels to build and teach in it compared to what you’re used to. You might just be surprised.
Explore the Brightspace sandbox | See how Brightspace compares to Moodle
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