Jenzabar now offers SONIS, a student information system (SIS) oriented around the needs of smaller higher education institutions. Jenzabar supports the former SONISWEB product since its acquisition of original developer RJM Systems in 2015.
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Thought Industries
Score 8.5 out of 10
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The Thought Industries platform enables enterprise organizations to create,
manage, distribute, monetize, and analyze their end-to-end customer education and external training initiatives. The solution addresses the
unique needs of customer education, and aims to make it easy to handle complex learning
operations at scale to empower growth. Its administrative capabilities include native tools and thirdparty integrations, businesses boost learner engagement, operationalize
processes, and…
We often had students who came and took a class or completed a program, left, and then came back for something else at a later time. It was nice to be able to have someone in Jenzabar SONIS with multiple statuses. They could be in as a Student for the current class while still being in as an Alumni for the program they had graduated from. Most of our programs are set up so the students within that program are all taking the same courses at the same time. The bulk registration feature made it easy to enroll one student and then use that student's enrollment to quickly enroll all of the others in the program. That was a huge time saver. We had letters and emails that we wanted to send out at specific times in the application process. The Activity tool in Jenzabar SONIS made it easy for us to have some things that were automatically added to a person's record and others that we could add as needed. We could then run timed letters or emails and get our communication sent out. We had some challenges with Jenzabar SONIS because we have a number of certificate programs that are only one semester in length. We often had students who would complete one certificate (program) in the fall and then complete another one in the spring. Many of the reports pulled data only for the active enrollment so we had to go back and manually pull the data for the enrollment from the other semester if we needed something for the full school year.
Thought Industries is perfect if you are trying to scale your customer education business for a growing customer base. It is more expensive than their competitors, but the price is worth it based on the product and experience. Thought Industries is likely great for smaller customers, although we are an enterprise-level customer. If you are not offering multiple modalities for your training program, Thought Industries (or any LMS for that matter) might not be the best investment.
SONIS sorts my advisees by class and then by name. This is NOT useful. There should be an option for sorting by name only. I advise almost fifty students. It wastes my time looking for them in the sophomore listing, then the junior listing......
When registration of a student for semester courses is complete, there should be an option to print out only the courses scheduled, NOT the entire page which shows available courses at the bottom.
Cannot pull a report for a course(s) to show who has not started the course
Cannot reset gamification or run specific gamification campaigns
Although SCORM compliant, SCORM courses often break or do not show as complete on the learner side even when the module is marked as complete on the back end
The customer support and customer success teams are really great. BUT, it is their product team that sends them into a super high rating. The product team has worked with me on several occasions to try to solve the business challenges that I have.
We changed databases in 2011 because the company we were with was going to quit supporting our software. We evaluated a number of different SISs available at the time and felt Jenzabar SONIS provided the best tools for our school. Most of the others were either geared more for adult education, individual course offerings or for schools that primarily had degree-seeking students. We needed something that could address both needs.We felt Jenzabar SONIS did that best of the ones we reviewed.
Thought Industries is better on the financial side and as far as ease of use. It is more affordable than Docebo and is more aligned to an external customer use case. Docebo and Tovuti seemed to be more for internal training. Tovuti was less expensive, but it was a little harder to use although it had more quiz features.
