CodeMonkey vs. Lalilo by Renaissance vs. Skillsoft Coaching

When CodeMonkey works really well:


Introducing coding: It’s great for beginners because students learn real coding concepts through simple game challenges.


Self-paced learning: Students can move at their own speed, which helps when you have a mix of fast learners and students who need more time.


Building problem-solving skills: The puzzles require students to test ideas, debug mistakes, and try different solutions.
When it’s less appropriate: Limited opportunities for advanced coding: Students who already know a lot of programming may find the early levels too simple.

The students love to work with Lalilo. They love to earn the badges, treasures, and stories. I love that I can look at the reports and see if my students are proficient, or still needing help in specific areas. Lalilo is a great way to reward students for at the end of each week for working hard throughout the week.

They have a large library - make sure you clearly study the library offerings and choose the courses that are best for you as you will never be able to use all of them. Make sure you survey your user base before purchasing the licensing of the library courses so the courses are 'marked' with an employee in mind to keep costs minimized. Only purchase the Books 24x7 if you have a large IT department - otherwise you might want to lease a smaller content portion. Their Leadership Development, Project Management, business series and critical thinking and technical products are exceptional.

Incentivized

• Introducing you to coding in a friendly way.
• Improves efficiency of those teaching coding.
• Lots of tutorials to help as well.

Incentivized

• Lalilo allows each student to be placed at the exactly right level for their skills.
• Lalilo makes learning to read fun by using badges that students earn for each skill.
• Lalilo gives students the ability to request easier or harder lessons based on their current skills.

Incentivized

• Covers a wide-breadth of topics ranging from desktop / office skills to communications skills to leadership development
• Offers knowledge portals (Knowledge Centers) around specific topic areas such as Management Development, Six Sigma, Professional Foundations, Sales, etc - that aggregate content from the large Skillsoft resources and present it in a way that is both meaningful and relevant to the learners. Plus, they have editors update the featured topic each month.
• Include a wide variety of learning media such as eLearning courses, books, book summaries and videos.

Incentivized

• I would like to see CodeMonkey continue to expand its AI units.

• I like the progression that the students go through in order to practice concepts they are struggling with, but I wish they had videos or some way other way for the students to practice other than just asking questions.

• The platform does have room to improve their response time for assistance. Depending on the issue an internal "help team may be required"
• They removed what was called "knowledge centers" which could be summed up as an accumulation of books, courses, exams, practice exams, articles and basically any asset within the platform surrounded by a particular subject. This was a great benefit to some of our customer. It was a one-stop-shop but now you would need to search independently for all of those assets.
• Because the platforms library can be customized its a bit of a struggle to have certain assets changed or modified within Skillsoft. You basically are on their time when it comes to updates or any major changes you as a customer would like to make.

Incentivized

It has been very useful to our students and staff.

Incentivized

I would recommend to renew as this is part of our employee development goals and we make a strong commitment to develop employees' people skills. I think SkillSoft has a very innovative approach to develop people's interpersonal skills other than traditional classroom learning.

Incentivized

Code Monkey is easy to use for both students and teachers. It has a friendly, intuitive interface for everyone. It also offers built-in support, extensive resources, and makes it easy to manage teacher tasks.

Students can easily access through their shared password storage for instantaneous login. I have never had an issue with them getting kicked off or having content that doesn't fit a need.

Incentivized

There are things that could be easier. Having a more customizable carousel that can rotate relevant content in and out on a regular basis would be nice. They could also make some of the video content more engaging. Some of it is pretty dull and people can lose interest pretty fast.

Incentivized

Very responsive, knowledge and helpful. They are always focused on ensuring they are doing the very best to support our success.

Incentivized

Just that it takes a village. It cannot be done alone. Everyone needs to know what you are doing and what their role is in the implementation. Tightly managing the project management schedule and resources is important in ensuring that everything gets done on time, and with quality. Education is KEY

Incentivized

Codemonkey made learning easy and fun. I think it has a leg up on the other software mentioned because it really tries to find a fun way to associate learning a difficult topic with a fun tutorial. The other software options were far more costly than Codemonkey, which makes this an even bigger win.

Incentivized

Lalilo is a helpful program for our struggling readers. It gives an alternative to LLI, SRA, or OG - which are all utilized within our elementary settings

We chose SkillSoft for the overall ease of use for both our users and our administrators and have a great value proposition. We have continued our contracts for the same reasons and the relationship we have built with our Learning Consultant and Account Representative.

Incentivized

• Positive - Allowing our staff to enhance their skills.
• Positive - Definitely a long-term ROI in that we will not have to outsource our coding to 3rd parties.
• Negative - I feel that using it can definitely be limiting with how you learn away from the product.

Incentivized

• For a student who only knew 18 alphabet letters when beginning Lalilo, the student has increased overall performance to recognizing 80% of the "ut" family of words.
• Students in grades 3 and 5 are increasing their reading levels from K and 1 to the end of year 2.

Incentivized

• The ability to have on-demand training saves money in not having to have an in-house trainer.
• Employees can complete training on their own time (even at home), so if they need more time for a training, they can complete it on their own time.

Incentivized