McGraw-Hill Connect is an e-learning platform offered by McGraw-Hill Education. Features include course and assignment creation, grading, learning aides, e-books, and student portals.
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Renaissance DnA
Score 9.0 out of 10
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A standards-based assessment creation and administration solution providing instant scoring, formative feedback, and interactive reporting.
Content is pretty good, and site is good as standalone tool, but it does not integrate will with any LMS. Grade pass back does not work with Google Classroom or Skyward (unsure about Power School or others) SSO works with Clever, but not Google, so students always have to go through Clever and cannot go directly from Google Classroom to an assignment, even if you posted to Google Classroom through the Connect portal. Problem sets are robust, but difficult to edit and assessments are designed to be web based. Formatting is poor when trying to print assessments that were created online.
Integration with Canvas is seamless and easy to use.
Assignment completion, for students, is straightforward and easy to use.
The SmartBook allows students to read as they are tested with questions and this helps them learn the material easily without having first trying to read, memorize a chapter and then answer questions.
McGraw-Hill Connect could do a better job of staying current and making sure all of its videos and references to real-scenarios are up to date.
It can do a better job of immediate explanation or advice when an answer is incorrect.
It can improve upon its ability to autosave assignments. If an internet connection gets buggy and kicks the user out of the system, sometimes the assignment progress will be lost. This is because to save the assignment, it takes you out of the assignment and doesn't just autosave.
It would be nice if it communicated in real time with our other student database systems. We have to do a nightly update to share information with other systems, and still, some data gets stuck and needs to be "wiped".
The intervention tracking system, OnTrack, is difficult to set up and manage.
Assessment item banks could offer a better variety of items.
The product will do a majority of what they claim. Your experience will vary depending on how much you love or hate the implementation. The tools are there, but there is a learning curve as people get accommodated to how interaction is expected to be conducted (as opposed to more personal means).
Illuminate DnA is a very usable system. A few items to learn and set up can be a bit time-consuming. However, once set up it is easy to use and powerful for a school that staff can master quickly. It has more features then we actually use but I hope we will over time.
Personally, I did not encounter McGraw-Hill support. However, I worked with colleagues who needed support and were able to receive in a timely manner. Overall, McGraw Hill Connect is user-friendly (at least from teacher interface) and easy to navigate, which minimizes the need to reach out for support. The help button is useful and provides plenty of immediate support.
Our issue was never resolved so that we could use the software to produce accurate reports. Their tech department looked into the issue several times and could never figure out why our student was off and then they just closed the case. They confirmed we were performing the correct steps to load the data and they confirmed our data looked accurate. Great, but again why was our student count off?
Much of our lecture material comes from McGraw-Hill, so it was an opportunity to marry the learning material to a collaborative system that can make the experience more portable and potentially more affordable for our students. The workings are managed off-site so we do not need to care for it on a daily basis.
Illuminate DnA offers more flexibility and additional features that our previous Data Director system offered. We were looking for a system that offered an online assessment portal and the ability to create elementary standard-based report cards when we selected the illuminate DnA software. We were impressed with the ability to easily create custom reports and liked the comprehensive student profile page.
Wasted valuable time trying to figure out the "eBook."
Did not receive good value for the money spent.
Did not feel as though the company was interested in keeping me satisfied as a customer, or like their customer service was actually interested in solving any problems.
We tried to get the product to work for our needs for over a year and could not get it to work and therefore it cost us $20,000 with no results and easily over 40+ hours of wasted time.
