Google Classroom vs. iSpring Market (discontinued)

Google Classroom allows teachers to post for daily lessons and assignments. It also allows teachers to be able to communicate with students easily outside of class. Students are able to stay connected and know where to find all information and resources easily in a streamlined manner for all of their classes.

Incentivized

iSpring Market is suited for small organizations with limited staff and limited IT resources. Allowing users to self-register is a huge time-saver for small organizations. SEO, Google Tag Manager and SSO are included and easy to set up. For the most part, the documentation is good and the help desk provides timely customer service. iSpring Market is not the best tool for larger and more sophisticated organization. It's extremely difficult to get global reporting data, it doesn't import data from other systems, and it only exports a limited amount of data for use in other applications such as business intelligence software.

• Student-teacher communication - I love using Classroom for this because my students can always go back and check what was on Classroom by looking through the stream. This way they don't have to go dig through emails to find what they're looking for.
• Posting to multiple classes - I can post the same announcement or assignment to multiple classes at once without having to repeat the process or send separate emails.
• Streamlining grading - when students turn work in on Classroom, it all goes to one place and then when I'm grading I can open their documents directly from Classroom or my Drive folder. This way, I'm not looking through emails and Google Doc shared files for their assignment.

Incentivized

• It is easy to use.
• It works with Stripe.
• The UI is clean and intuitive for customers.

• The content management of the Classroom is not that good. The sub-section for notes, syllabus, or discussion is missing.
• It doesn't have parental control feature.
• It converts the excel output into a normal file. All the formulas and pivots got changed into plain text.

• There are few global reporting features. I can get specific information on a user or a course, but there is no easy way to find users who made an account and didn't enroll in a course. You have to look at every user, or download spreadsheets and search.
• There are very few hooks available to Zapier to transfer data to other services.
• You can't transfer data into the iSpring Market using Zapier, so we can't use our member management system to populate courses.

Testing is particularly important in online learning, and Google Classroom falls far short of other learning management systems in this regard. Security is also a concern: while account control is reasonable for the account used with Google Classroom, the person controlling a particular account is often able to, for example, forward or download proprietary materials.

Simple design and seamless integration with Google tools and drive, but missing some key features. However, since it is limited in overall functions and ability to truly personalize / customize, it is quite user friendly and easy to set up and get going, other than sending out the code to your course or dropping students in via their gmail account. Users of Google Forms and sites will find the layout similar in design.

Incentivized

We have had very little trouble in accessing Google Classroom. Our issues, if any, have risen from our server and not the Google servers.

Incentivized

Since this platform is provided by Google, the technical support is better than any others, and we are not required to bother about the space constraints for adding the contents. If we have a good uninterrupted internet facility we can access Google Classroom without any delay or lag. They have app support in both Android and iPhone.

It was relatively easy to implement due to the simplicity of the platform. Even our more technology challenged teachers found it easy to get started with Google Classroom.

Incentivized

I haven't tested or evaluated another digital classroom website or application. I feel like Google Classroom is convenient for many reasons such as compatibility to Google docs, slides, etc. I also love the ability to link to YouTube and other sites. I don't know if there would be a site that is easier to maneuver.

Incentivized

We picked iSpring Market because of cost, maintenance, and easy of use.

It is very easy to push out this program across our buildings. Teachers are able to use it without much trouble.

Incentivized

• Students are able to continue learning in a remote environment
• Parents have a single, consistent organization structure to make it easy to track assignments and progress for multiple children
• Much better solution than the quickly assembled Zoom-and-gloom of the previous spring when school abruptly went remote with no planning

Incentivized

• We have saved thousands of dollars a year in licensing fees compared with other products we used.
• We have eliminated the need for contractors, to build content for iSpring Market, saving tens of thousands of dollars, because we can publish directly into the system using iSpring Suite.
• We get 80% fewer help desk requests for enrollment and payment compared to the last two products we used.