Blackboard Learn by Anthology vs. CrossKnowledge Learning Suite

A school with a well-established technology imprint with their students (for example, ours is a BYOB school where every student has their own laptop and must bring it to school every day and where over 99% of our families have reliable broadband at home) is a reasonable scenario for using The arrogance and intransigence of the sales force is quite disconcerting… They are no longer the only game in town and don't yet realize it. Less well-off schools/families may find it a challenge if students must be on campus or at a public library in order to use the technology. Obviously, during the pandemic, this became problematic for some districts.

Incentivized

CrossKowledge offers a superb library of learning content and a serviceable learning management system to go with it. If you’re looking for robust reporting or want to minimise the time you spend managing learning administration, you should look elsewhere.

Incentivized

• Blackboard Learn makes submitting assignments electronically simple and provides a variety of built-in Web-based tools like e-portfolios, wikis, and blogs that our students use to create their own content.
• Blackboard Learn is intuitive and easy to navigate from a students perspective
• Blackboard Learn has many integrations available for connecting this LMS to other tools we use at our institution.

Incentivized

• CrossKnowledge provides learning content across a wide array of subjects, and this content is delivered using various delivery methods (interactive e-learning, videos, reading material, activity journals, etc.)
• CrossKnowledge’s learning suite makes it easy to set up and roll out a highly customised learning management system.
• CrossKnowledge offers a mobile app that makes it easy to access both the learning management system as well as their learning content on the go.

Incentivized

• Blackboard Learn has some limitations when it comes to submissions
• It is not that user friendly, I had to spend some time to get a hang of it in the beginning
• I have been struggling a bit with deletion of manually added courses

Incentivized

• As a learning management system, CrossKnowledge’s backend is missing several key features for learning administrators
• It is immensely difficult to set up learning events and managing invitations to learners
• Reporting is extremely limited: you can only see the reports that CrossKnowledge seems necessary; you have very limited customisation options, and many of the basic reporting functions are simply impossible

Incentivized

There are several aspects of Desire2Learn that outweigh the benefits of using Blackboard. I find that the Desire2Learn system is a bit more user friendly and looks more up-to-date. However, the decision to renew systems is not up to me because the entire University uses the same system. Regardless, I think I would choose Desire2Learn over Blackboard because of its improved user interface.

CrossKnowledge’s learning content makes it a no-brainer. Besides, while their LMS isn’t as powerful or robust as we’d have liked, it’s still serviceable and most of our learners aren’t directly affected by it.

Incentivized

It is very usable for both faculty and students. The interface is pretty intuitive and most students can use it without a lot of additional training. Faculty do need some training to effectively use the interface, but they usually get it pretty quickly. We have had to create some additional programming to give faculty a way to delve deeper into the content.

My Blackboard support comes from the university I work with. They are responsive--eventually... but it takes them sometimes a week to respond to a reported issue. For example, I reported 2 issues last week and one was resolved and I was contacted about one still open option today. That is too long for a tech issue. I have not contacted any support offered directly by Blackboard, which may be a completely different experience altogether.

Incentivized

Blackboard's Managed Hosting was top-notch in getting us up and running quickly.

Incentivized

Coursera offers a variety of modules in which a team is able to work on then, but [Blackboard Learn] offers more options to understand how are the team members developing and which tasks have offered a harder challenger for them. [Blackboard Learn] also offers a variety of reports that can be generate by a team lead.

Incentivized

Moodle is a far more powerful and flexible learning management system for learning administrators. Where CrossKnowledge has the edge is in its fabulous learning content library.

Incentivized

• At one of the institutions that I worked for, the ROI was excellent for the number of users we were serving; however, I could not speak to other instances as I was not aware of the overall cost of the contract.

Incentivized

• It’s extremely difficult to evaluate ROI of a tool like CrossKnowledge, but it’s only been a little over a year since we rolled it out across the organisation and we’ve already made it part of our performance management system

Incentivized