Active-Class has a transparent pricing policy. It features a separate page with two subscription options:

Teacher Standard which is our free subscription

Teacher Premium with the cost between £5 and £20 per month plus VAT, depending on the number of students, which provides further functionality

Plus, both subscriptions offer you a 2-month free, fully functional access to the platform, allowing you to experience the system and its features in its entirety. For further information please refer to our pricing page.

Blackboard does not offer a pricing plan as they calculate the price based on the number of students, meaning it doesn’t have an open pricing policy.
Blackboard Learn charge disproportionally more than other LMS platforms given that they do not offer substantially more features. This may be because it is geared towards more high-complexity institutions, thus for many institutions this may not be the cost-effective choice.

Active-Class has a simple, user-friendly interface with a single menu featuring three icons for Classes, Modules and Activities. Active-Class is designed to offer simplicity and accessibility, with an essentially functional, interactive, and intuitive user interface. This ensures that you have complete and convenient access to all of the system’s features and being a fully optimised cloud-based platform ensures a smooth running platform at all times.

The system is geared towards institutions with moderate to complex training needs, often meaning that it can feel inflexible. Furthermore, the interface is overcrowded and unintuitive. This busy, yet boring and uninspired, interface can make adapting to the platform challenging and incredibly daunting.

Many users report issues around the utilisation of the sidebar and the fact that it is often overcrowded and displayed in different orders. Despite some customisability, it can create a confusing experience for users.

Active-Class has a dedicated support team that offers you diligent help to solve all your issues, regardless of their scale and the fact that you’re a student or a teacher. Furthermore, there is a wide variety of methods through which you can receive such support. There are written instructions, help pages and FAQs, instructional videos, as well as a ‘submit a request’ page where you can send any issues you have experienced. Moreover, Active-Class offers a live chat support function, offering real-time assistance to your everyday running of Active-Class.

Ongoing reports around issues, such as the lack of rich content editing, would suggest that such requests have gone ignored in recent updates. Furthermore, for smaller issues for which you quick advice is preferable, there is no ‘instant live chat’ format. Instead, the support is run via a ticket-based system meaning you may have to wait elongated periods for a response.

Active-Class has placed great focus on assignment and assessment creation and administration – with an activity creator and rich text editor. These make the process exceptionally intuitive and easy for both teachers and students. This enables teachers to design the questions that they want to include in their assessments, not limited by lack of functionality as with other platforms. Active-Class also offers an abundance of resources and videos, along with comprehensive FAQs for more information.

Blackboard experiences a lot of issues around the content formatting features, either where the features they do have are reported as being buggy, or simple features like adding images or http links are just not available. Other features that are missing include a rich content editor, meaning the teacher’s activities are either simplistic or if the text is imported it can encounter difficulties.