Blackbaud Award Management is a solution that aims to transform institutions' student awards programs and revolutionize donor stewardship practices. Built for higher education institutions of all types and sizes, this cloud-based solution is designed to serve as a catalyst to improve student access to awards and scholarship funds, create impactful stewardship practices, and enhance cross-functional visibility throughout the scholarship process.
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MindTap
Score 9.0 out of 10
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MindTap is an eLearning course management solution from Cengage, a digital learning content and technology provider. For educators, it includes pre-made interactive course materials (such as homework assignments, assessments, etc.), analytics around student engagement and performance, and the ability to customize courses. For students, MindTap offers a mobile app to access eBooks, flashcards, quizzes, grades, and due date reminders.
Blackbaud Award Management is best suited for institutions that have many awards to track. From awarding amounts, student recipients, stewardship, reporting, etc this software is really helpful. If you are an organization with only a few awards, this software may not make sense and you may have a better tracking mechanism but for those, such as Universities, this software is very helpful.
We started using the application optimally at the beginning as a digital learning and consultation platform. In it we imported all kinds of bibliographic material so that students could access them with the ease of a tap. The application is perfect for those instructors who are not beginners in HTML. In that case, the application very practically allows them to create a complete course in the shortest possible time because it has a state-of-the-art instructional design. It was excellent for unifying all the basic course plans between teachers teaching the same subject, giving the advantage that all courses at the same level would have exactly the same information and nothing would be overlooked
Reporting - pulling reports in AcademicWorks is so simple and quick. Whether I am putting together a report of applicants for a donor, or the pulling the applicants from a specific school or major, I can do it by the click of a button.
Support - if I ever have questions or need help problem solving, the support desk is readily available.
Flexibility - we can customize pretty much every aspect of how the user experiences AcademicWorks
The main advantage of MindTap application is that you can add digital textbooks as a support complement, apart from that they have accessibility tools that integrate between reading voice in high volume and a tool to take notes quickly in case of making a note.
MindTap allows us to synchronize with applications such as Blackboard to import content into an LMS. We can import and export from grades or preset activities for students. It also has the option to copy and paste content from one semester to another.
The application has an extension for cell phones, students can access any material such as flash cards wherever they are. It has been completely useful as it shows grades digitally while other institutions only use printed books.
The application integrates an LTI section where all the information and planning of activities, exams and grades can be imported into the same learning system, unifying the entire course in a single window per course.
As for the exams and evaluations given to our students, the application also allows us to create self-evaluation questionnaires to determine how effective your instructors are, and they can also create customizable exams for each student.
The application has a section where we can assign an internal technical support staff so that both teachers and students can contact each other to solve any problems that may arise.
They took away some of the variety of assignments and I wish they would add them back.
Course settings could be more streamlined. Sometimes it’s tedious to make simple changes to the course.
MindTap will not work unless students turn off pop up blockers, and this is a challenge that blocks an easy start with the software. If this could be worked out, it would give students a better experience at setup.
While the price is a bit high, the software provides everything we need to effectively award and track scholarships and awards within our institution. The ease of use allows for everyday users and occasional users to both be able to access the information they need without wasting time or resources
It's hard to imagine not renewing it as the professors would not want to go back to the way their courses were previously populated. The only thing that would cause us to change would be in the textbook changed and the new company offered a better tool
I lean on our centralized Foundation for support related to Blackbaud Award Management. However, any time I've had a question they couldn't answer, they were able to get the support quickly and efficiently. I give an 8, versus a 9 or 10, because our centralized office has had some requests in for changes to the system that have not been made. Some parts of the system are not working for our purposes, and we've asked for some changes that should be doable. However, the time it takes to get universal changes made is quite long
Before Blackbaud Award Management, our university was not using any centralized scholarship award platform. Each College or unit was responsible for allocating their own awards, and our Foundation (who manages the funds) had one person who would double-check each award to the fund restrictions before approving the scholarship. This long process caused a lot of colleges to skip awarding their scholarships altogether, because of the amount of work it took to identify students and go through the distribution process. However, after being audited, the university felt a centralized system was very necessary to negate these issues. Before this system, my college created an application in Qualtrics for students to complete. Once complete, we spent roughly 4-6 weeks compiling all student record data for every applicant and then matching qualified applicants to individual scholarships internally. From there, our reviewers received an excel spreadsheet with the data of all students and an excel spreadsheet with the funds available (including fund restrictions) so they could make their decisions. The entire process typically took around 3-4 months between applications, data gathering, decision making, and award notification
MindTap is one of the better/best publisher integrations. The textbook platform alone is exceptionally presented. Most publisher integrations suffer from clunky interfaces or force faculty/students to click through to using their proprietary tools after signing in. MindTap offers the illusion of seamless integration by providing deep links to content, which allows faculty to customize their courses. Only one or two publishers do this, and it really makes a difference when faculty have this kind of flexibility.
There are many factors that go into an ROI and it is hard to determine the impact that the AcademicWorks System alone has had. However, I can say that the scholarship committee reviewers that used to help evaluate students using our previous system much prefer the ease of doing the reviews in the AcademicWorks System. This is good because at times some of the committee reviewers have transitioned to become scholarship donors.
The positive impact is to help students practice statistics to solve business problems.
The negative side is that the pricing might be too high compared to other free options available, even though the free options might not have the same features MindTap has.
