RedShelf is an eTextbook platform. For Publishers, RedShelf offers a content distribution network and market intelligence; for schools, it offers a digital content platform campus bookstores can use to provide affordable, accessible texts, with reporting and analytics for instructors to track student usage; for students, RedShelf provides an online eReader with collaboration tools to read, highlight, and take notes on eTextbooks.
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Taskstream-Tk20 (discontinued)
Score 6.0 out of 10
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Taskstream-Tk20 is software for higher education institutions, that is now discontinued. It was designed to help users manage institutional effectiveness (accreditation, strategic planning & budgeting, assessment planning, program review, faculty credentialing, reporting & analytics), monitor and improve program quality (student management, clinical & field placements, course evaluations, surveys, ePortfolios), and assess student learning and track progress (outcomes assessment, course-embedded…
RedShelf has been great in a higher ed environment to help connect students to textbook and publisher materials. It has helped make the process of purchasing/accessing those materials so much easier for students. I am at an institution now where we don't have RedShelf, and the faculty and students are regularly frustrated with this process, so I'll be looking to get us a license here soon. RedShelf is particularly useful if instructors are using various different types of materials from different publishers. However, if an institution was only using Cengage Unlimited for example (that is a service where students will just pay for access to that site and all the books/materials for all of their courses would be accessible on there), that would be a time where I would think RedShelf wouldn't provide you with as much benefit. That being said, we may be using RedShelf in a very specific manner, and it may be able to provide us more ability/features that we haven't taken full advantage of.
TS is well suited as an eportfolio system when documents need to be archived for accreditation or long term assessment profiles. It would not be suited for routine classroom assessment or daily integration into a mobile or online platform. It is also not suited for non-technology oriented students, faculty, or staff. The user needs some level of confidence when using TS
Students can be searched via department or program so that I can search for a specific student. I can scroll through all students and find the one I need to evaluate or I can choose the option to "show all work waiting evaluation" and it will bring up student submissions that I have waiting for me.
TaskStream easily links or embeds into online classroom portals. We use BlackBoard now and students have an ePortfolio link that takes them directly to their menu of student instructions etc.
TaskStream actually serves its purpose well of archiving portfolio assignments so they can be referenced for an individual reason or for accreditation or reporting. It accomplishes this important goal for educational institutions.
There is a steep learning curve with TaskStream as the searching and even evaluating process is not intuitive. Although it is visual like a flowchart or grid--which I think is an asset--sometimes I can lock others out of the document or I have choices of "returning to student and deleting all instances of this submission" or "returning to student later" or "returning to student now and not deleting this submission" . . . I am unsure what these different options MEAN to the programmer. What I think they mean has not always proved to be correct. As a result, it creates confusion or frustration in the process.
The way TaskStream is used in the education department, multiple people may evaluate a capstone project in order to verify approval to progress to the next step--or next capstone activity. If a faculty or staff user inappropriately marks a document inside TaskStream, it can undo the submissions and make the process begin all over again. I have had this happen accidentally--a colleague returned a document the wrong way. The student then had to resubmit, two other colleagues had to approve indvidually, and then the 3rd party had to approve it the correct way. So although some aspects or tools/buttons in TS may not be intuitive, making errors in process can be time-consuming and create frustrations as they affect other people's work as well.
TaskStream does not work on a mobile device very efficiently. Because it has pop up windows, I often cannot get it to cooperate on a tablet, ipad, or mobile device. This is problematic when I am travelling and need to attend to a document in TS.
TS is the only e-portfolio system I have used for students. I have used Kenobi as a wiki for holding data that was interactive with other faculty members. I found it to be simple but lacking in ability to be robust or host dynamic data. Kenobi does not have the ability to score or complete rubrics in the same fashion--there is a place for rubrics, but it is not as dynamic as TS
Although I am not on the administrative side of my department, it has been and continues to be the e-portfolio management system of choice for Walden University. Walden is now a for-profit school that is trading on the market. With that in mind, they would not invest in a system that was not functioning to its expectations.
If you view TS from a faculty or user perspective, I have colleagues who are frustrated with TS and its not "intuitive" nature, and they have eventually quit working for Walden and TS and the multiple systems we have to use was cited as a reason.
it would be ideal if there was one overall system that could manage all the different data artifacts we have to collect as faculty in higher ed. Due to accreditation and liability standards, we have to maintain faculty quality, classroom quality, student-learning quality and many other aspects of the educational system. TS is ONE of the systems we use. In the perfect world, there would be just one or two that completed the job.
