Edsby vs. eFront Learning

Edsby is well-suited for day-to-day communication with students, either in the classroom, or at home. It makes planning course progression easier because of the built in day-by-day calendar for the semester. It is transferable, so the work one does in one semester can be copied over to the next, and modified as needed. Students can see the Lesson Plan which is projected onto the SmartBoard, but the font is quite small so they cannot read it from where they are sitting, so I use SmartNotes which has a larger font and then, if needed, attach that note to the Edsby day lesson planner.

You must have an IT staff with knowledge of PHP in order to install and maintain the system. This is not a plug and play solution by any means. If you have that staff, this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. It's a very robust system. Once we solved initial bugs caused by our own errors during installation, the support desk requests have dropped to almost zero, with nearly 2,000 users online every day. That's a good, solid program.

Incentivized

• Edsby is extremely easy to learn and use.
• Students love the "social media" feel to Edsby.

• courses management
• quizes management
• variety of addons

Incentivized

• Edsby shows the last time a user logged on. Unfortunately, if someone doesn't log out you have no way of knowing if someone has seen a recent post or is really using Edsby to its potential.

• Merging this software may be difficult and cumbersome at times
• Reporting features can be worked on for better and easier usability
• Not very easy to organize files/folders in the system

Incentivized

I'm not sure what else is out there that has the ability to do what our organization needs. We've come across things we didn't like about it, but due to costs of switching and possibly lack of other options, we'd probably renew with eFront. Also, we've invested a lot of time in the software and it seems to be satisfactory at this point.

Incentivized

Everything is easy to use and well as being overly user-friendly to your average student.

For most situations, it is extremely easy to learn and use. There are ergonomic issues that seem a bit tedious, but overall, we are seeing a very high success rate with new registrants. They are learning the material and earning their certificates at a rapid pace. This is a good program once it is properly installed by a knowledgeable systems architect.

Incentivized

Two disadvantages: 1. Many staffers who respond don't know how to solve the problem using the User Interface - they want to work from the back end, to which I have no access. 2. The support staff are in Europe and I am in California, so there is an overnight delay in getting a response.

Incentivized

I'm not the most technical person, so some of the training didn't make sense to me. It wasn't a complete training - it was more topical. The people working at EFront were happy to answer my questions later when I resorted to learning it by doing. This was very valuable to me.

Incentivized

It's important to have a robust course catalog before launching. Courses should be QC'ed to be sure there are no errors or other problems. Don't let engineers write quiz questions! Remember that well-formed quiz questions are not designed to trick or fool the user - they are used to reinforce learning through repetition of important concepts. The "grade" isn't as important as the assurance the information has stuck.

Incentivized

EDSBY was piloted at the school last semester, and I found it made my job easier, which is a boon since time is fleeting and I could get more done with less effort with Edsby. After the pilot the entire school district was signed up to use Edsby. I like it very much. I did use a blog on First Class which was extremely difficult to learn, and a blog on WordPress which was easier to learn how to use but not interactive like Edsby is. To my mind, Edsby is far superior to the former.

Unfortunately I have not had the chance to try other products, however I would think eFront would stack up fairly well against competitors and it provides all the necessary tools to stay compliant and excel at having efficient KICs.

Incentivized

• For the most part, teachers, parents and students love the system. It provides easy access to the information that they need when they need it.

• We decided not to continue the trial because it will be either very expensive or impossible to modify the system to our requirements

Incentivized