Blackboard Learn by Anthology vs. Frontline Professional Growth

A school with a well-established technology imprint with their students (for example, ours is a BYOB school where every student has their own laptop and must bring it to school every day and where over 99% of our families have reliable broadband at home) is a reasonable scenario for using The arrogance and intransigence of the sales force is quite disconcerting… They are no longer the only game in town and don't yet realize it. Less well-off schools/families may find it a challenge if students must be on campus or at a public library in order to use the technology. Obviously, during the pandemic, this became problematic for some districts.

Incentivized

Frontline Professional Growth allows a teacher/educational specialist to organize and keep track of all the parts of their yearly evaluation (observations, SGOs, documentation log, Professional Development Plan), and Professional Development Workshops. Our district has been able to adjust the use of Frontline Professional Growth to fit our Professional Development goals as well as our evaluation systems. Frontline Professional Growth also has a Forms section so we have all of our request forms in a paperless environment. Overall, the system does a good job of helping the teacher and supervisor/administration manage the evaluation and professional development requirements for our State.

Incentivized

• Provides HTML quality course content that is easily retrievable and viewable.
• Provides multiple methods of communication: email, threaded discussions, real-time "live" online discussions, as well as grade portal.
• Allows facilitators multiple methods of grading or providing feedback: threaded discussions, rubric scoring, personal comments, inline viewer, or download/upload attachments.

Incentivized

• Provides professional learning opportunities to employees.
• Easy to track and navigate users.
• Professional development that is easy to access and convenient.

Incentivized

• Although the current graphic user interface is easy to use, it can be improved with larger fonts, dynamic menus, and attractive graphics.
• The system does not include a module to pay the school fee.
• The roster tab lacks detailed information about students.

Incentivized

• The configuration and startup of Frontline Professional Growth is time-consuming. I wish this was easier to get going.
• Creating forms is difficult and the form editor is hard to navigate and use. You cannot create a form yourself. That has to be created and entered into your system by Frontline, which takes more time, especially if it is an easy form you want to create.
• There needs to be a better way to save forms you are completing and being able to go right back to them at a later date. I have had teachers lose what they were doing when saving a draft and then have to start all over.
• Notifications on forms at individual levels only go out once a day, sometime around 2am. This should be instantaneous, notifying individuals as the form comes in.

Incentivized

There are several aspects of Desire2Learn that outweigh the benefits of using Blackboard. I find that the Desire2Learn system is a bit more user friendly and looks more up-to-date. However, the decision to renew systems is not up to me because the entire University uses the same system. Regardless, I think I would choose Desire2Learn over Blackboard because of its improved user interface.

It is very usable for both faculty and students. The interface is pretty intuitive and most students can use it without a lot of additional training. Faculty do need some training to effectively use the interface, but they usually get it pretty quickly. We have had to create some additional programming to give faculty a way to delve deeper into the content.

Itʻs a good platform for certain things such as tests. Blackboard may not be the most user friendly but there is always room for improvement in any website, business, etc. When used with other platforms such as Google Classroom, Blackboard can be more effective, but when used by itself I feel it is not as impactful from a student perspective.

Overall, Frontline Professional Growth manages observations, SGOs, documentation logs, and Professional Development Plans. In addition to these evaluation pieces, it allows our district to manage our Professional Development Workshops (in-house), Professional Development requests (for out-of-district), and many online request forms. The only real negative is that some of the menus are a bit cumbersome, and it takes several steps to get around the system.

Incentivized

Blackboard's Managed Hosting was top-notch in getting us up and running quickly.

Incentivized

Blackboard is the all around better fit for our intuition. It provides the "bells and whistles" we require in having a diverse faculty and flexibility in course delivery. The "bells and whistles" aren't cheap, but we have found that budgeting for this large expense has been more than worth it for us.

Incentivized

Frontline Professional Growth isn't an LMS. This is something more used on the back end to manage and track staff information regarding professional learning, workshops, and hours. This does a good job in a number of areas, but does have a learning curve and does take a good amount of time to get up and running. There are features that I wish were easier to use.

Incentivized

• It has answered all my needs for distance learning and met most of the objectives
• The only negative I can think of is not having access to the past course material and not being able to download the lectures
• Another positive is the zoom integration feature

Incentivized

• Reduce lost paperwork.
• More efficient salary upgrades.

Incentivized