Ellucian Colleague vs. Gradelink Student Information System

Colleague Student is a great solution for smaller schools. I'm not sure it would work well at a large university (10,000 plus students) -- I'm not sure it has capacity to handle that. It is also well suited for universities where departments communicate well with each other. There is so much cross functionality, that if departments don't communicate well, issues could arise if one department makes changes without notifying or talking with other departments about the change

Incentivized

Gradelink is easy to use and keeps students and parents informed of the student's progress in a class. It is an excellent tool to foster communication between the teacher and the parent. Gradelink is very user-friendly and offers a variety of tools to assist the teacher in grading assignments. The teacher may select between points or percentages as well as provide a narrative for the parent to see what a particular assignment encompassed.

• Colleague offers a single reference point for all student data, which creates consistency and unity across campus and ensures students hear the same information from every source.
• Colleague recently updated its interface to be more accessible to all people. Previously, it was not accessible through any browser aside from Internet Explorer.
• Colleague provide helpful user restrictions that prevent departments from altering or erasing data they do not typically use. For example, I cannot change student billing and accidentally wreak havoc for the cashier's office.

Incentivized

• Ease of use. The interface is very user-friendly, and not intimidating to those who are not IT specialists.
• Data Management. We use Gradelink to keep all our student records current and available.

• Develop API's that are vendor agnostic rather than selecting specific vendors (Clearinghouse, ImageNow).
• Colleague tends to be to reactionary to the changing needs in higher education rather than developing the future.
• Hound clients to pay extra for consulting (consultants are usually bad), rather than helping institutions to use the product. Seems to be the first thing help line personnel jump to rather than working with clients to figure out creative solutions.

Incentivized

• I wish I had a better system for tracking student specific notes (behavioral).
• I wish the admin platform and the teacher platform weren't so different, so I could learn more from teachers (who use Gradelink even more than I do).

There can be some added items such as the ability to add and differentiate assignments.

Ellucian Colleague remains the most cost competitive solution for our organization. Alternative solutions, have had ridiculously high migration costs and ongoing maintenance fees which have not been friendly toward a migration of our existing data. Some the features of the other solutions are very nice to "haves" but the reward has to out-weigh the cost of adoption.

Incentivized

Gradelink SIS has a lot more helpful and useful features for teachers, admin, and staff. First, it has lesson plans and state standards integration which is a great help for teachers. With this feature, teachers don't have to worry about standards being in place for each lesson plan.

Incentivized

• By keeping student's academic work, financial aid, and accounts receivable information in one location we are able to report without the need for data aggregation.
• Colleague's web applications allow the students themselves to perform tasks such as enrollment without assistance from staff members.
• Using customized rules that we can set up in Colleague we can trigger events to happen as data is entered. This eliminates the need not only for someone to remember to perform an additional task, but it also saves the time of performing the actual task.

Incentivized

• Fosters Communication
• Ease of use