Ellucian Banner vs. Frontline Special Ed & Interventions

As a SIS, Banner Pages is the full meal deal. There are multiple modules that integrate out of the box. Because Banner is all I've ever used as a SIS, I can't contrast it with another program. I can say, it gets the job done for us. I will also say that a tremendous amount of time goes into strategizing how to get new functions to work for us and there always seems to be some catch that requires even more work. In general, the university has been hesitant to build too many modifications into Banner because they take a lot of time to maintain. Inevitably, a new update (of which there are MANY for Banner) will break stuff that isn't "vanilla." This is unfortunate because we've had some great ideas for how to make Banner better for us, but also understandable. If you're looking for a highly modular system, this isn't it. Banner has lots of components, but the components work the way they work and that's that. Also, don't expect very quick responses to bugs or glitches. If the bug is major, yes, it will be addressed. But, little function issues seem to be regularly overlooked.

Incentivized

As described above, the RtI data can be reviewed by the special education team in order to see if regular education teachers need to gather more data before referring a student to special education. It is also well suited for using with transferred students from other schools or districts.

Incentivized

• I think it's great to use if you are tracking grades for certain classes, especially if you'd like to see how students do, comparing midterm to final grades. If you have the permissions, you can see both.
• It's also good to track students individually. You can look up a certain semester, and see how they did in that particular time frame, but you can also see their cumulative gpa, or even look up their entire course history.

Incentivized

• Enrich provides a step by step process helping the special education team to organize all necessary information that includes state and federal compliance laws specifically the legislation of the IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) is entered correctly.
• It is organized to provide the entire special education team with access to see the documentation of services and assessments.
• It also has an ability to organize the process for RtI (Response to Intervention) which identifies the students who qualify for special education services. The special education team has access to see this information to determine if the teachers need to gather more information before referring the student for special education services.

Incentivized

• One thing I miss from the previous version of Ellucian Banner, is the control + page down. I struggle with alt + page down.
• I love the Ellucian Banner favorites; however, it is a little difficult to navigate.
• I can honestly only think of 2 things that could be improved. I use Ellucian Banner daily.

Incentivized

• There is a tremendous amount of repetition of data entry. For example, you press buttons to describe services i.e. direct or indirect services and how much service time a child will receive. THEN, you have to enter it again with a sentence i.e. " The child will receive (direct or indirect) speech and language (or reading or math) services for a such and such amount of time. " There are other examples of how the provider needs to repeat information that has already been gathered by the program.
• Of course, entering all of the data is very time-consuming.
• Training and access to consultants are needed in order to learn how to use the entire program.

Incentivized

We have no reason not to renew with Ellucian - we are in deep with the ecosystem, and have Ellucian providing us with information technology support. If anything, should the opportunity arise, we'd probably consider adding a different ellucian tools into the suite of applications we already have on board.

Incentivized

You definitely have to learn it before it becomes easy to use. It's better than it was, but it's still not entirely intuitive. You can't just look at it and play around to figure out how it works

Incentivized

It's pretty much up all the time.

Incentivized

Has gotten much better due to new hardware.

Incentivized

Our department generally does not contact the support center for Banner but the IT department does. That being said, in the seven years that I have been here, I have not once needed to contact the support center; we have had no glitches on Banner's side that needed to be addressed.

Incentivized

very satisfied, along with the IT staff and ellucian support the upgrades do very well and have minimum down time.

Incentivized

PeopleSoft was more user-friendly. It also provided the ability to save and bookmark queries. PeopleSoft will allow users to use common names to search for queries. Overall, it seemed much more current than Banner. PeopleSoft provided enrollment data for specific sections which allowed one to spot trends of enrollment in a given class.

Incentivized

These other programs (Tranquility and Clarity) were used for the same purposes before the district and state started to use Enrich. The previous programs were harder to use and much more time-consuming. There is no comparison between Enrich and these other programs. I'm sure that other special education providers would agree that Enrich is the best one when compared to the previous 2 programs used for data gathering.

Incentivized

being able to scale with hardware was easy and not cumbersome. We were allowed to user virtual machines which made things very scalable.

Incentivized

• There is positive ROI on the product overall. It had reduced or allowed us to focus our staff members on something which is very use and it does the job in the background.
• The application has supported in a lot of ways in saving resources and utilizing them in very productive & efficient manner

Incentivized

• Overall, there are more positives than negatives about using this program. Having a program that is used by the entire state has a positive impact because now the special education process is organized in the same manner

Incentivized