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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Taskstream-Tk20 (discontinued)
Score 6.0 out of 10
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Taskstream-Tk20 is software for higher education institutions, that is now discontinued. It was designed to help users manage institutional effectiveness (accreditation, strategic planning & budgeting, assessment planning, program review, faculty credentialing, reporting & analytics), monitor and improve program quality (student management, clinical & field placements, course evaluations, surveys, ePortfolios), and assess student learning and track progress (outcomes assessment, course-embedded…
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
TS is well suited as an eportfolio system when documents need to be archived for accreditation or long term assessment profiles. It would not be suited for routine classroom assessment or daily integration into a mobile or online platform. It is also not suited for non-technology oriented students, faculty, or staff. The user needs some level of confidence when using TS
Students can be searched via department or program so that I can search for a specific student. I can scroll through all students and find the one I need to evaluate or I can choose the option to "show all work waiting evaluation" and it will bring up student submissions that I have waiting for me.
TaskStream easily links or embeds into online classroom portals. We use BlackBoard now and students have an ePortfolio link that takes them directly to their menu of student instructions etc.
TaskStream actually serves its purpose well of archiving portfolio assignments so they can be referenced for an individual reason or for accreditation or reporting. It accomplishes this important goal for educational institutions.
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.
There is a steep learning curve with TaskStream as the searching and even evaluating process is not intuitive. Although it is visual like a flowchart or grid--which I think is an asset--sometimes I can lock others out of the document or I have choices of "returning to student and deleting all instances of this submission" or "returning to student later" or "returning to student now and not deleting this submission" . . . I am unsure what these different options MEAN to the programmer. What I think they mean has not always proved to be correct. As a result, it creates confusion or frustration in the process.
The way TaskStream is used in the education department, multiple people may evaluate a capstone project in order to verify approval to progress to the next step--or next capstone activity. If a faculty or staff user inappropriately marks a document inside TaskStream, it can undo the submissions and make the process begin all over again. I have had this happen accidentally--a colleague returned a document the wrong way. The student then had to resubmit, two other colleagues had to approve indvidually, and then the 3rd party had to approve it the correct way. So although some aspects or tools/buttons in TS may not be intuitive, making errors in process can be time-consuming and create frustrations as they affect other people's work as well.
TaskStream does not work on a mobile device very efficiently. Because it has pop up windows, I often cannot get it to cooperate on a tablet, ipad, or mobile device. This is problematic when I am travelling and need to attend to a document in TS.
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
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.
TS is the only e-portfolio system I have used for students. I have used Kenobi as a wiki for holding data that was interactive with other faculty members. I found it to be simple but lacking in ability to be robust or host dynamic data. Kenobi does not have the ability to score or complete rubrics in the same fashion--there is a place for rubrics, but it is not as dynamic as TS
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.
Although I am not on the administrative side of my department, it has been and continues to be the e-portfolio management system of choice for Walden University. Walden is now a for-profit school that is trading on the market. With that in mind, they would not invest in a system that was not functioning to its expectations.
If you view TS from a faculty or user perspective, I have colleagues who are frustrated with TS and its not "intuitive" nature, and they have eventually quit working for Walden and TS and the multiple systems we have to use was cited as a reason.
it would be ideal if there was one overall system that could manage all the different data artifacts we have to collect as faculty in higher ed. Due to accreditation and liability standards, we have to maintain faculty quality, classroom quality, student-learning quality and many other aspects of the educational system. TS is ONE of the systems we use. In the perfect world, there would be just one or two that completed the job.
