MindTap is an eLearning course management solution from Cengage, a digital learning content and technology provider. For educators, it includes pre-made interactive course materials (such as homework assignments, assessments, etc.), analytics around student engagement and performance, and the ability to customize courses. For students, MindTap offers a mobile app to access eBooks, flashcards, quizzes, grades, and due date reminders.
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Coursera
Score 6.9 out of 10
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Coursera is an online catalog of learning content, available to businesses to help them to strengthen critical skills, Develop, retain, and advance critical talent, or use role-based assessments to identify skills gaps and advancement opportunities.
$399
per year per user
Khan Academy
Score 9.9 out of 10
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Khan Academy is a non-profit organization headquartered in Palo Alto that offers free online course content for students.
Khan is better to take shorter learning modules. Coursera is a considerable investment as it is whole college courses. Khan is great to learn certain concepts and refresh learnings or trouble shoot problems. Khan is better for high school students to use to reinforce and …
Khan academy is free, that’s a big plus. Also, it is way less fragmented than Coursera for example. There are a lot of diverse topics I can select from and even if it’s not related to my job, I sometimes look at the history section. One missing feature compared to other …
We started using the application optimally at the beginning as a digital learning and consultation platform. In it we imported all kinds of bibliographic material so that students could access them with the ease of a tap. The application is perfect for those instructors who are not beginners in HTML. In that case, the application very practically allows them to create a complete course in the shortest possible time because it has a state-of-the-art instructional design. It was excellent for unifying all the basic course plans between teachers teaching the same subject, giving the advantage that all courses at the same level would have exactly the same information and nothing would be overlooked
The Coursera platform can be a useful part of your overall learning content portfolio if utilized correctly. It's fantastic for asynchronous courses that don't necessarily need a dedicated faculty member (though I'd highly recommend at least having some discussion moderators/student workers) and for offering MOOCs. The ability for the learners to contribute translations really makes it ideal for the international learning community - I am always amazed to see a course we launched with 2-3 languages to quickly have 10-12 more added. This feature really helps expand the audience reach and Coursera has such a large following already that it can grow seemingly overnight.
Khan Academy is a great supplement for things you already have learned, or as a mid-level course (versus a deep dive or high school/university level course). It is great for a paced learning environment if you want to casually refresh yourself on a subject or learn something new. I don't think this should be a replacement for structured learning, or if you struggle in self-paced learning environments. There have been times I would like to have been able to ask a professional (like an instructor) when struggling with a subtopic, which is possible in a classroom setting.
Interaction: the student learns by doing. For programming courses, this means programming!
Assessments: the courses I'd taken ask students to grade each others work with a rubric. This is hugely effective and permits tests and quizzes to be other than multiple choice.
Creativity and enthusiasm of the instructors. Some of the approaches demonstrated real out-of-the-box thinking by the instructors. For example, the Rice Python course was a self-contained website requiring no installation of IDE on one's computer, and the final project was a working version of Asteroids.
Low cost of entry: most of the course I enrolled in were free, with an optional fee for certifications. This really gives people the freedom to explore learning. It's almost like a Public Library of Learning.
Coursera forces a weekly discipline on the user with lectures and assignments and this really motivates one to put in the effort.
The biggest issue our first-time users have with Mindtap is that ad/pop-up blockers often stop the tool from opening. (Mindtap typically opens in a new window vs inside the LMS) This leads to a lot of initial frustration amongst the students early in the course.
MindTap lacks a really strong set of roles outside of Instructor and Student. There is no Teaching Assistant role or and IT/Course Builder role. Additionally setting up students workers as TAs in one course while they may be a student in another concurrently has been more than a little cumbersome.
The UI is a bit dated and it doesn't implement many responsive web design features, though this can typically be worked around by downloading the free app.
The mobile app experience is not as strong for Instructors as it is for students.
Some of the courses (very few) have some old information (more than 2 years), and in some areas like technology the information has to be very new and updated.
Some professors or people doing videos are not good in front of the camera, they should train their people a little bit more for those things.
It's hard to imagine not renewing it as the professors would not want to go back to the way their courses were previously populated. The only thing that would cause us to change would be in the textbook changed and the new company offered a better tool
I've only had to seek support one time. There was a glitch in one of my lessons and I submitted an email. The glitch was fixed by support within a few days, but I would've liked for it to be faster. However, I don't have a big complaint there because it is a free service.
MindTap is the only learning software I currently use, but in the past I have used Pearson and McGraw Hill learning content. All of these companies are progresses at a similar rate and making great improvements to their educational materials. MindTap, in my opinion has the best customer service support and representatives in the business. Our rep. has been very responsive.
I think Coursera has the best overall interface. I think you will find that different platforms go in different directions, and have different specialities. For the most part the differences are more in the types of courses they offer than one being particularly better than the other, so it comes down to content for me.
I personally found Khan Academy much better suited for adult learning of difficult or larger topics. Not so much for smaller changes that can be communicated via email. But it was more engaging and I found the information easier to digest. Change management can be tough but with the right tools it can be a breeze.
The positive impact is to help students practice statistics to solve business problems.
The negative side is that the pricing might be too high compared to other free options available, even though the free options might not have the same features MindTap has.
The greatest benefit of Coursera is access to quality courses on various subjects that you can either browse or dive in deeply. Customizable, flexible and accessible.
Helps our department to recommend trainees courses on this website and gain important knowledge. Also, the courses are provided by big-name universities which helps students in their careers
