Instructure is an educational software company based in Sandy, Utah. It is the developer of the Canvas learning management system, which is a comprehensive software package that competes with such systems as Blackboard Learning System, SumTotal and Saba.
N/A
Ellucian Colleague
Score 7.2 out of 10
N/A
Ellucian offers Colleague educational ERP, including a student information system supporting higher education institutions with student admissions and registration, academics, curriculum management, and other aspects of student management.
It is really well suited for school situations like knowing what [assignments] need to be done when, getting feedback, getting points, finding the slides that the teacher used for explaining an [assignment] or theory. I think It would be less suited in business situations because it's [primarily] made to be a [one-way] communication tool for schools. Businesses need more control on individual levels I think[.]
Ellucian Colleague is well suited for student academic information recall, such as advisement details, courses, primary choice, GPAs, and demographic information critical to in-time decision-making for faculty and institutional leadership. Less appropriate scenarios would include our financial management needs, such as accounting, ledgers, and financial transactions. These functions are better suited to other CRMs.
Creativity options for teachers to create a virtual space that still has fun graphics and accessibility options.
Canvas has versatility in viewing options for assignment due dates such as the calendar built in feature as well as the dashboard options to display upcoming and due assignments.
Allowing teachers to create community with each other and collaborate in each-other's space.
Discussion platforms within classrooms for students to communicate with each-other and with their teachers.
Easy messaging portal within each virtual classroom.
Colleague Student allows us to integrate services across the university for students with staff in various departments able to see the information about a student that they need to serve the student well.
Colleague Student makes it easy to see our students current academic record as well as transfer courses (and information) and their past records here at the university. Our old system required a lot of homegrown connection points to be able to see all of this information. It was neither quick nor easy.
Colleague Student makes the registration process for our students much easier. Our old system was clunky and would often prevent students from registering for a class but not provide information for them about why. Colleague Student makes it easy for students to see if they are missing a pre-requisite, have a hold, etc., so they can know how to get their registration back on track.
Develop API's that are vendor agnostic rather than selecting specific vendors (Clearinghouse, ImageNow).
Colleague tends to be to reactionary to the changing needs in higher education rather than developing the future.
Hound clients to pay extra for consulting (consultants are usually bad), rather than helping institutions to use the product. Seems to be the first thing help line personnel jump to rather than working with clients to figure out creative solutions.
The other LMS tools have fallen behind. One reason is they are not able to update their systems, features, toolsets in a timely manner. While other LMS providers release bug fixes and new features several times a year, schools struggle to install and implement them in a timely manner. It is not uncommon for a school to take 6 months to a year to fully install and implement new releases on other LMS platforms. With Canvas, those features are released every 3 weeks, and there is nothing for a school to do other than choose to turn them on once released. This has allowed Instructure to innovate faster, and get new features and tools to customers quicker. Other factors include great pricing, customer support, and the innovative way in which LTI is implemented in the tool.
The functions in Canvas are well integrated and consistent across the application, and mostly intuitive. Overall navigation and setup is streamlined through integrated features and navigation. The feedback we've gotten from our program participants is that it is easy to learn to use. It also integrates well with third party software like Google Docs and Blackboard Collaborate web conferencing software
For decades, Ellucian Colleague has served the University as our primary student record-retention CRM. Its functionality has weathered many recent trends in CRM development and continues to produce the needed results for our constituency and the size of our university. We look forward to continuing to utilize Ellucian Colleague in the future.
I do not personally use Canvas support since we have a central office that helps us. However, our central office always has the answers we need and are always able to solve our issues - so I would assume that get great support from the Canvas team on their end. They also offer great training, which uses materials directly from Canvas
Once you purchase and sign the contract there is nothing to install or hardware to buy. You can almost immediately start using it and have courses up and going within weeks. We signed in December and had pilot courses online ready to go for the start of school in January
Canvas is more secure, has a cleaner design, and has more features. For the features, they have in common canvas still stacks up against [Smart school] by going for the extra mile. Besidfor e that, [the] canvas looks a lot more [professional] than [Smart school]. I didn't make the decision myself to get canvas instead of [Smart school] but I'm happy they did.
I did not use Jenzabar as extensively as Colleague, but they perform similar functions for student information tracking. I think Colleague is more appropriate for use across campus, as its student billing and scheduling options exceed Jenzabar. Jenzabar, however, offers better tools for use exclusively in student affairs. If an organization wants to track all student data, they should consider Colleague.
By keeping student's academic work, financial aid, and accounts receivable information in one location we are able to report without the need for data aggregation.
Colleague's web applications allow the students themselves to perform tasks such as enrollment without assistance from staff members.
Using customized rules that we can set up in Colleague we can trigger events to happen as data is entered. This eliminates the need not only for someone to remember to perform an additional task, but it also saves the time of performing the actual task.
