Ellucian Colleague vs. Frontline Special Ed & Interventions

Ellucian Colleague is well suited for student academic information recall, such as advisement details, courses, primary choice, GPAs, and demographic information critical to in-time decision-making for faculty and institutional leadership. Less appropriate scenarios would include our financial management needs, such as accounting, ledgers, and financial transactions. These functions are better suited to other CRMs.

Incentivized

As described above, the RtI data can be reviewed by the special education team in order to see if regular education teachers need to gather more data before referring a student to special education. It is also well suited for using with transferred students from other schools or districts.

Incentivized

• Colleague offers a single reference point for all student data, which creates consistency and unity across campus and ensures students hear the same information from every source.
• Colleague recently updated its interface to be more accessible to all people. Previously, it was not accessible through any browser aside from Internet Explorer.
• Colleague provide helpful user restrictions that prevent departments from altering or erasing data they do not typically use. For example, I cannot change student billing and accidentally wreak havoc for the cashier's office.

Incentivized

• Enrich provides a step by step process helping the special education team to organize all necessary information that includes state and federal compliance laws specifically the legislation of the IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) is entered correctly.
• It is organized to provide the entire special education team with access to see the documentation of services and assessments.
• It also has an ability to organize the process for RtI (Response to Intervention) which identifies the students who qualify for special education services. The special education team has access to see this information to determine if the teachers need to gather more information before referring the student for special education services.

Incentivized

• Develop API's that are vendor agnostic rather than selecting specific vendors (Clearinghouse, ImageNow).
• Colleague tends to be to reactionary to the changing needs in higher education rather than developing the future.
• Hound clients to pay extra for consulting (consultants are usually bad), rather than helping institutions to use the product. Seems to be the first thing help line personnel jump to rather than working with clients to figure out creative solutions.

Incentivized

• There is a tremendous amount of repetition of data entry. For example, you press buttons to describe services i.e. direct or indirect services and how much service time a child will receive. THEN, you have to enter it again with a sentence i.e. " The child will receive (direct or indirect) speech and language (or reading or math) services for a such and such amount of time. " There are other examples of how the provider needs to repeat information that has already been gathered by the program.
• Of course, entering all of the data is very time-consuming.
• Training and access to consultants are needed in order to learn how to use the entire program.

Incentivized

Ellucian Colleague rates highly for its usability and functionality. Ellucian Colleague serves as a comprehensive solution, making it easier for students, faculty, and staff to communicate, find the information, and accomplish multiple tasks. Colleague has provided enhanced visibility into data and improved decision-making to drive strategic institutional outcomes. A colleague has created efficiencies for staff.

Ellucian Colleague offers exceptional value for the money compared to the pricier options in Blackbaud's suite of products. Ellucian Colleague stacks up well against Blackbaud and other CRMs in terms of its value for the money, ease of use, and customer service. Overall, Ellucian Colleague provides greater value for the money.

These other programs (Tranquility and Clarity) were used for the same purposes before the district and state started to use Enrich. The previous programs were harder to use and much more time-consuming. There is no comparison between Enrich and these other programs. I'm sure that other special education providers would agree that Enrich is the best one when compared to the previous 2 programs used for data gathering.

Incentivized

• With Colleague Student, we have been able to be more efficient in our department which has given us the opportunity to take on other projects that are helpful to our students.
• Colleague Student has enabled my department to cut down on our paper consumption which has been a huge budget savings. Our old system was so untrustworthy that we were printing many things to keep in case we couldn't get the information out of the system again. With Colleague Student we do not have to do this. We have stopped printing many things we used to print.
• Colleague Student has also helped us have a better handle on which students are preparing for graduation each semester. This allows us to more accurately print commencement materials, etc.

Incentivized

• Overall, there are more positives than negatives about using this program. Having a program that is used by the entire state has a positive impact because now the special education process is organized in the same manner

Incentivized