Renaissance myON® News, Powered by News-O-Matic vs. Udacity

I think this is a great tool for middle school students, as they are starting to become aware of the world around them and topics that are going on in our country and world. In this digital age, students need to learn the difference between "fake news" and unbiased news reports. The interactive features, as well as letting them read articles based off their interests, is perfect for middle school aged children.

Incentivized

It's suited well to support on developing a project and following a set curriculum to get things and material in order. Also it has the idea of a nano-degree as the mini-certification to focus on working through a program over a course of a few months. It's more of an interactive course and best for having access for a set period of time. It helps to prepare well for exams but less beneficial when it comes to more applications I find, and should not be used to supplant any resource, but to use in conjunction with.

Incentivized

• A variety of article
• 3 different Lexile levels
• English and Spanish

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• Courses are very high quality and updated regularly.
• Instructors and Mentors are available for live tutoring.
• Relevant projects are assigned in order to keep learning material fresh and top of mind.

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• Maybe if they added a local or state feature...

• Quiz questions in some cases could be made clearer. I didn't feel the questions were always phrased in a way that I could easily understand what was being asked.
• Requests for support can sometimes take a very long time to get resolved.
• Cost structure changed from a fixed-price model to a subscription-only model, and prices are significantly increased as such.

Incentivized

They are already very good. But, would be great if Udacity improves the area of standardizing offline projects and exercises so that people could attempt to work offline. Including documentation on how to do it. More practical or real-world projects to choose and work on after course completion. Maybe a community can do it.

Incentivized

Renaissance has always had a great online help section with videos and articles. They also have an online community for users to discuss ways to use their products. They have free webinars available to users as well. Most one-on-one learning sessions are done by our instructional facilitators in our county

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I didn't personally have any issues with the program, but scheduling time to review the final project was easy, and the assistant was pleasant to work with.

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I like myON News more than any other product due to the variety of articles along with providing different Lexile levels. The Comprehension questions are also a great added feature. This is the complete package website, you have everything you need in one site. Students do not have to go to multiple websites to complete the activities.

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I combined my learning from various platforms and did on exclusively reply on any one. However, the free courses in Udacity lacks the comprehensiveness as Coursera.

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• The kids are up to date on events.

• I am already in a great position as a CTO with a great company. I hope to be able to build some new technology with what I am learning, but I haven't applied any of it yet to my own real-world problems. I will though.

Incentivized