Rosetta Stone Language Learning Software vs Taskstream-Tk20

• gives you a large amount of learning languages to choose from
• well defined curriculum
• contains a feature where they can also help you pronuciate the words properly to speak the language better

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• 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.

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• My students get furiously angry with the poor quality of voice recognition.
• The target language structures, scope and sequence of the program is not comprehensible. The program does not offer explanations for how to properly create phrases nor does the program accept varieties of an expression (so you have to be word for word rote in order to be granted credit). For example, the program would not accept equivalent phrases like "On Wednesdays I run" and "I run on Wednesdays" which would be OK in typical communication. Additionally, the program was initially deemed desirable because students could learn at their own pace, but I never really saw take away learning as a result of using Rosetta Stone but instead students were able to mimic sounds and click the "hint" button for answers to get through modules.
• Students don't find the curriculum particularly engaging, which may not be as much a reflection on the product but rather how it is being used in it's application at my school.
• It would be nice if it could run in some sort of "lockdown browser" capacity because I find students open various web tabs for music and google translate just to get through the program. They're more worried about completion than the practice toward learning...and the poor speech recognition will pick up utterances that aren't even close to the target phrase while often not accepting genuine attempts at the phrase, so there isn't a lot of fidelity from students to trying to use the program.

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• 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.

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• I do not know what expenses my district has incurred in using this program, but I know that generally user approval is not very high, and for that reason I feel that the use of the program has been very detrimental to our World Language program.

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• 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.

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