Blackboard Learn by Anthology vs. NWEA MAP 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

NWEA MAP is a great assessment for 1st grade and up. It directly aligns with the college and career standards. It can predict achievement on the ACT and state assessments. NWEA MAP used with kindergarten is not as aligned. It is very difficult for new kindergarteners to take. Most students guess because the assessment gets very long for them. It is a great assessment for the middle of the year for high achievers and at the end of the year for all students who are entering 1st grade.

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

• NWEA MAP Suite calculates projected growth for individual students based on their grade level and RIT score for each subject.
• Projected growth can be found on many different reports.

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

• NWEA MAP has technical issues during prime testing times (fall, winter, and spring). It is as if the system gets overloaded and cannot handle all of the students logged on at once.
• I would like to be able to see the reports immediately. Currently, you have to wait until the next day for the scores to be available.

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

The customer service is phenomenal! Every time I call, which is not very often, I always get a friendly agent that works hard to solve my problem and does not give up. They look at all angles of the issue and will go above and beyond to help. For example, our students are rostered by connecting NWEA MAP Suite to our SIS, and sometimes there is a glitch. NWEA will call the other software company if necessary, to help get the glitch fixed.

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

NWEA MAP Suite is more directly aligned to our college and career readiness state standards and ACT. The questions are more rigorous than Renaissance Star Assessments. The reports on the NWEA MAP Suite are more detailed and exact in where the data came from.

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

• Allowed us to test students 3x a year to better evaluate if a student is growing or not.
• The data from the MAP assessment may be included as part of the placement review process along with other data points, such as student work samples and other assessment data to help determine if a student is ready for the next grade level.

Incentivized