Blackboard Inc. is an enterprise learning management systems vendor. Blackboard was founded in 1997 and became a public company in 2004. The company provides education, mobile, communication, and commerce software and related services to clients including education providers, corporations and government organizations. As of December 2010, Blackboard software and services are used by over 9,300 institutions in more than 60 countries. Blackboard Learn is the company's flagship LMS, supporting…
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PeopleSoft Campus Solutions
Score 6.9 out of 10
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Oracle's PeopleSoft Campus Solutions is a student management system option.
I believe that blackboard is more user-friendly than the other modalities I have used and taken online course work in as well. I think it is setup in a logically way, making it easy to navigate.
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.
PeopleSoft Campus Solutions is a fully robust solution for large campuses and University systems. The tools it provides are powerful and scalable. It can handle anything from 1,000 students to over 100,000. The issue because spreading that cost around. Smaller schools will probably need a dedicated functional staff and an information systems staff to handle the chore of managing the system. Although many of the tools allow for automated processing it take a considerable amount of effort to get to that point and the upfront and maintaining costs should be considered.
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.
The Query Manager tool is useful - especially for users who are not comfortable writing SQL queries. Query Manager also allows Security staff to dictate exactly what access to grant to query writers.
Campus Solutions offers several batch-style functions, such as batch transcript requests and batch degree conferral. There is a Population Selection option that allows you to use a query or Excel file to specify the students who are in the batch.
The Communication Generation process allows users to create batch emails or letters that include mail-merge style data for each individual receiving the communication. There is a Microsoft Word plugin that allows you to craft the message that will be sent, and they can be sent on a set schedule or when certain trigger conditions occur.
We don't like that you cannot export student grades and information into an excel spreadsheet or document that allows you to edit when necessary. Other tools do this but for a system us robust as PeopleSoft we are surprised you are not able to do this.
Continuing with the schedule, in order to see how many students are registered in a section one has to click on that section which is another waste of time. Each section has a blue square meaning full and a green circle meaning not full. Why can't the number of students be shown instead, or in addition? And to top it off, the number of students is shown so low that one has to scroll each time to see it.
Occasionally, PeopleSoft will randomly stop work, and you will lose all the information you were working on, so I recommend saving your work frequently. PeopleSoft is also not the most user-friendly student information systems. The new update did improve its aesthetic appeal though.
Relying on Oracle system administrators to do all updates and handle any problems that may occur. Sometimes you feel a little helpless and too reliant on the vendor. It takes a while for our admins to update the software because we have so many custom configurations and custom bolt-ons so they all have to be tested thoroughly to make sure nothing breaks when migrated to production. Because of this, our university is always behind when it comes to system updates.
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.
When you open a service request you will get contacted in short order. They will usually develop a patch or hot fix in a reasonable amount of time. You do usually need to keep the software updated and will want to be on the latest versions.
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.
PeopleSoft Campus Solutions has been the software of choice between Jenzebar and Campus vue as the user interface is easier, students seem to understand their progress and the system better than the other two softwares I have used. I would recommend this as all things student related are in one portal area.
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.
