I pulled the trigger on Tier 5 and was excited about its potential, especially with SCORM support. However, after only a few hours, it became apparent this was another half-baked dud that had too many bugs and lacked intuitive UX/UI to be used as a serious LMS platform. While I was able to request a refund, here is where things fell apart for me:

1) Even though SCORM progress can be tracked to allow the learner to resume where they left off in the SCORM package, BrainCert cannot "automatically" track SCORM completion which is very disappointing. Their support team confirmed that the learner has to manually mark these as complete which is not a reliable way to ensure true SCORM completion especially since this allows learners to essentially mark it as complete even without even accessing it. For this reason, this is not a true SCORM tracking LMS which was my main reason for investing in it.

2) Sometimes, a SCORM package is slow to load or won't appear unless the learner refreshes their page which is not ideal. The issue is not consistent and not related to SCORM package size as mine was only 25MB.

3) When enrolling specific learners, admins have to manually type their individual email addresses instead of simply selecting the learners' names from a user list. Is there a reason for this approach? It seems very painstaking and somewhat inefficient if you have to track down an email address for a specific user from a separate window or tab and then copy and paste it into the enrollment screen. Normally, an LMS will allow admins to enroll specific learners by selecting their names from a list in order to enroll them rather than having to enter their email addresses.

4) I found BrainCert's admin settings very confusing and not very intuitive especially when it came to setting up a curriculum. For example, the platform uses the term "lectures" instead of "lessons" for their curriculum structure which is a little confusing since not everyone will use lectures or taking heads which is what comes to mind with the term. Most LMS platforms use the terms "module" or "lesson". Another example of poor UX/UI is when setting up chapters and lectures, you have the option to hide the automatic platform's numbering and labeling using toggles. However, these toggles didn't always work as expected and had to be turned off and back on with each new chapter and lecture entry.

5) I found the UX/UI on the student dashboard and course screens to be equally poor. While the design has a great aesthetic quality, it becomes obvious that the layout was not carefully thought out. For example, when a learner first accesses the dashboard, they should immediately be able to see their assigned course content without too much scrolling. However, the majority of their initial view is filled with gamification metrics that take up an unnecessary amount of the screen followed by reporting metrics. While I understand the purpose of this is to motivate users, it is not something that will be the users' main focus each time and can quickly lose its appeal. This means that in order for the user to see which course they are enrolled in when they access the dashboard, it will require more scrolling or they will need to go to the side menu and click on the courses section. From this standpoint, the dashboard is not laid out in a convenient way that directs the learner to their courses without too much effort. Unfortunately, there is no way for the admin to customize the dashboard layout to meet their needs. Another issue is that while you can set the requirements for ensuring the learner goes through course content in sequence, the student's course overview page still allows them to easily circumvent this which is disappointing.

6) Throughout my experience with the platform, I experienced several new bugs every few minutes. Setting up the LMS was where most issues were apparent. Oddly, gamification settings are turned off when you first get set up. There is also nothing prompting you to turn on these settings as an option which I found equally odd considering that this is what draws most people to the platform. This required me to search the support pages for instructions on how to turn this feature on. It required several different screens and toggles to turn on. However, even then, the gamification points screen wouldn't allow me to save changes which required support to get the issue resolved. Another bug where I wasted time was when setting up my payment methods. It wouldn't save my currency selection for some reason until I chose Stripe as a payment method even though I had already selected Paypal. Then once it was saved, I could remove Stripe without an issue. The overall onboarding process could be significantly improved to make it more streamlined and less frustrating.

While I had to submit nearly a dozen tickets for these issues and a few others, I will say that I appreciated the support team's quick response time. Unfortunately, they have confirmed that BrainCert is not designed to automatically track the completion of SCORM packages. This is a significant limitation when compared to other LMS platforms that support SCORM. The lack of BrainCert's SCORM completion tracking, its poor UX/UI, and its large number of bugs were the main reasons I could not justify staying with the platform. While it shows potential, it needs much more time to mature before it's ready for prime time in my opinion.