What do you know about CollegeBrain CMS

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Permalink Reply by JB Freeman on May 7, 2008 at 2:04am

Hi Lee Anne,

I starting using CollegeBrain this term to help teach my class. Originally this was supposed to be a "pilot" test, since my curriculum had already been established this term, and I only discovered their website in mid-april: (http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/site-of-the-week/site/?i=53553;_hbg...)

However the service messages were so friendly, I felt important. I frankly don't know how I would begin to set up Moodle or Blackboard for myself. I don't intend to spend money on such things, and from my understanding you need to run Moodle from your own server!? I am a teacher who dabbles in technology, not a guru looking to host a service. CollegeBrain has an intuitive interface, and they respond quickly to my questions. That's all I need. Most importantly, articles like this (http://www.stateline.org/live/ViewPage.action?siteNodeId=136&la...) boil my blood. Sometimes I feel that our only hope is for more companies to start publishing free and open source tools to help educators solve problems.

The CollegeBrain folks have been so good to me, I would recommend them to any sensible educator looking to move into the web 2.0 world. People have the misconception that open source solutions such as Moodle are "free". This couldn't be farther from the truth. The school still spends money every year hosting Moodle on their servers (the hardware is not free folks), the support comes from the school's IT staff (they get paid a salary dont they?) or from private support contractors (yes, they charge $). At least you're not paying a license fee to Blackboard, but you are still spending a ton of money. The Moodle interface is much nicer that BlackBoard, and Moodle seems to have more features then all of them. But CollegeBrain is (1) personal, (2) easiest to use, and (3) free, the magic word!

JBF

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Permalink Reply by Lee Anne Morris on May 7, 2008 at 7:34am

That is quite a glowing advertisement.

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Permalink Reply by Johanna D. Movassat, Ph.D. on May 7, 2008 at 5:26pm

Yes, I am a user of this absolutely marvelous service! I teach four courses at SJSU and have approximately 240 students. I am a new user of this CMS, after having tried to use the university-purchased system with little success. The advantages of CollegeBrain are the following: (1) It's free!! For both students and faculty. (2) It's user-friendly. Easy to set up. I only had to follow the instructions in setting up the Gradebook. The rest just came by clicking on the prompts. (3) The tech support is incredible! My students comment on how friendly and quick to respond they are when they have problems. In setting up my powerpoint presentations for the students to view, I needed some help. They were right there with quick responses to my emailed questions. (4) They are constantly improving, listening to suggestions and willing to try them! What CMS is that flexible! I can't even get the university techs here to listen to me.

So after years of working around the mammoth, costly CMS the state system has paid for, it is just a delight to use CollegeBrain. They do all the work for me, all of my course handouts, presentations, exam reviews, extra readings, charts, graphs, etc., etc., are there for the students to have access to from any computer wherever they are, AND all my grading is automatic. I set up the Gradebook and it's all there - immediate access for the students, and immediate access for me to change/update grades.

What can I say but that I love it! Thank you, CollegeBrain and all the wonderful people there!

Johanna D. Movassat, Ph.D.
San Jose State University

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