Grovo, now part of Cornerstone LMS vs. Kaltura

Grovo is fantastic for bringing a team of people up to speed and for teaching a few things to a large audience. We found Grovo to be lacking when specific training is required or when the training required a certain level of skill. Grovo is fantastic for broad training, less so for specific depth training

Incentivized

Kaltura is an excellent tool IF you have a large library of content. It can be pretty pricey so if you are early in launching an online program you may be better off waiting a few years until you've amassed a large enough catalog to warrant the investment in such a tool. The tool is best purchased by a University or company-wide vs having a single department try to find the budget for it. The unlimited plan pays for itself in most cases if you go this route. Secondly, you must be willing to invest time and resources into on-going training for your faculty and staff, especially for those who wish to create their own media and use the quizzing features.

Incentivized

• Ease to create trainings.
• Ability to insert GIFs and photos to help with visual aids.
• Ability to allow others to create trainings.
• Ability to track trainings (who has done it and who hasn't).
• Ease of tracking all training done.

Incentivized

• Very easy to use interface for uploading videos or capturing a screen recording. There are very few clicks required to get the media up and running. The video conversion process that happens on the back-end is fast and provides videos in device agnostic formats.
• Integrates well with other systems, such as our Moodle LMS. This extends the capabilities of the LMS and also allows us to keep video/multimedia content organized in a central location (the KMC).
• Kaltura can be connected to various processes within your organization. For example, we have a system in place that allows a video lecture in a classroom to be uploaded to Kaltura in a very easy manner.
• User/role management is very important as some people on campus have more privileges to publish content than do others. We have Kaltura connected to our Single Sign-On solution for authentication and we can assign roles to specific people within the Kaltura software.

• Some videos/lessons leave a lot to be desired and could use more detail.
• There's always more room for some more advanced skills.

Incentivized

• As it relates to the LMS integration, we would like to see improved workflow. But that may be just as much a Canvas issue as a Kaltura issue.
• I would like to see the ability to add inline, anchored comments to the video timeline.
• We are seeing issues with compatibility with certain browsers - especially Chrome. The faster Kaltura can move away from Flash the better.
• The capture appliance (CaptureSpace Lite) needs to be reconsidered. It's not intutive enough.

Incentivized

The choice to renew our subscription does not belong to us, though we are able to provide input. We are aware of competitive products who have matured in the past three years, and we are aware now of alternatives to conventional plugin usage (LTI).

When we have had issues with Grovo not working or a problem with report we have always gotten an answer quickly. We have a rep that we speak to often to make sure we are satisfied with the system and is just a quick email away. It nice to know we have support that will get back to you in a quick manner as we rely on this software.

Incentivized

The first line support agents seldom are able to diagnose or troubleshoot any problems that we have. These agents simply open support tickets in their system which are escalated to a foreign level 2 support agent which creates at least a day delay between reporting a problem and getting initial feedback. Any back-and-forth questions add at least another day delay.

Incentivized

The elephant in the room for me, would be TreeHouse. Grovo is very similar to TreeHouse in the fact that they're both programs with lesson tracks, simple and short videos, as well as progress trackers. I would have to say that I enjoyed learning coding on TreeHouse over Grovo, based on the wide variety of native coding languages they have implemented. Grovo, although extremely similar and easy to use as well, doesn't stack up to TreeHouse in my opinion. Grove does, however, beat out Lynda in my humble opinion

Incentivized

Kaltura was the best option given the sheer volume of people we needed to support digitally. Others were better in their own regard, but due to limitations in number of attendees or sessions, Kaltura was the best option

Incentivized

• Zero impact. When we determined they were not a good fit for us, we decided to go another direction. I would certainly try them again however if they addressed my concerns as their service was excellent.

Incentivized

• Managing video content with the KMC has greatly reduced the amount of hours previously needed to manage.
• User issues ie: uploading video, viewing video has been greatly reduced.
• Increased user engagement with using video in LMS courses. We currently have 6,929 videos on our system. Last month , 2/1/14, 17,623 videos were viewed at least 75% of the way through.