Blackboard Learn by Anthology vs. Instructure Mastery

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

I love that MasteryConnect already has hundreds of standards built-in, like the ACT readiness and socioemotional learning standards my after-school program uses. I think MasteryConnect would be harder to implement for an educational institution using learning standards not already in MasteryConnect. Also, MasteryConnect does not function as a grade book for someone looking for that kind of solution.

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

• Learning standards are already included in the software.
• Allows educators to track students who are near-mastery and at-mastery
• Color-coding system is easy to understand.

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

• I don't like that we have to make separate trackers for each sub-strand of math on the ACT.
• Sometimes it is difficult to find the assessments I am trying to score within trackers.
• I wish I had more support on how to use the data in MasteryConnect.

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.

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

On-boarding was fine and sufficient, but we haven't really heard from MasteryConnect since then. I haven't reached out to them, either, though.

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

MasteryConnect is a more affordable option for our medium-sized nonprofit. MasteryConnect fits our needs without being "too much" software. Illuminate and PowerSchool are more built for large school systems while we are a standalone organization with only about 250 students.

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

• MasteryConnect has allowed our organization to track student learning data weekly for the first time.
• We spend less than 10 minutes per week inputting student achievement data.
• We are able to more quickly decide which skills to reteach because of MasteryConnect.

Incentivized