Item: Ellucian Banner
Rating: 7
Author: Amanda Carpenter

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It's used across the whole organization, as far as I know, administratively for sure. It's being used to keep records of students, their information, their class registration, their grades, their GPAs, etc. It is also used to schedule class times and rooms each semester. It's one place that you can go to to get information on a particular student or on a particular class.

Pros and Cons

I think it's great to use if you are tracking grades for certain classes, especially if you'd like to see how students do, comparing midterm to final grades. If you have the permissions, you can see both.
It's also good to track students individually. You can look up a certain semester, and see how they did in that particular time frame, but you can also see their cumulative gpa, or even look up their entire course history.

It can be cumbersome. It's definitely improved, but it can be slow as you have to fill in only some information and then wait for the rest to populate before you can do anything else.
I think the acronyms for different functions are not intuitive or easy to remember.

Return on Investment

It's been great for the college to keep track of students and courses.
It's also been a great help for scheduling classes.
It could improve by not being quite as slow.

Alternatives Considered

I have not used any other product like Banner before, and this has been the only software that we have used here at the college since I started 8 years ago.

Other Software Used

Zoom, Google Drive

Likelihood to Recommend

It's great for tracking students and classes. You can see a student's entire course history, if you'd like, or you can look in by each semester and see how they did. At the same time, you can also view their cumulative GPA to keep that in mind. If you'd like more background on the student you can also look up some of their information: age, address, phone number, email, etc. So you can also use it to contact students, if need be.

Usability

You definitely have to learn it before it becomes easy to use. It's better than it was, but it's still not entirely intuitive. You can't just look at it and play around to figure out how it works.

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Like to use Well integrated Consistent Feel confident using	Unnecessarily complex Cumbersome Lots to learn

Banner: Great for Student Tracking

Overall Satisfaction with Banner Student