Product Review of Aspen™ Student Information System
Aspen SIS is a centralized system for managing learner information. It stores information such as biodata, class timetables, school events, health records, and more. This system eliminates the need for multiple databases and makes it easy for personnel to access learner information. Instructional guides can also be propagated in this system.
What Users Love About the App
“Aspen is a powerful tool that can manage many aspects of a school environment. I like the fact that it can manage a teacher’s personal information in addition to grades. My school doesn’t utilize this aspect of the program, but it would help the school if we did.”
“The ability to customize modules to meet the needs of OUR district is great. Very flexible and adaptable. Constantly adding functionality to make the lives of my 1000 daily users easier and better. I have been a customer for over 12 years; in fact, I am one of the original users from the opening of the X2-Aspen SIS. The Aspen team welcomes user feedback and they are constantly updating and adding tools to solve the needs of a district that can then be used in different ways.”
“I love that you do not have to mark students present, you only have to mark them absent. I also like to keep up with grades, and I can enter them anytime. The SIS we used before could only take grades at the end of the marking period.”
“I found the grading system very user friendly. I was able to submit grades after a very simple tutorial at my school.”
“Attendance works very well when using seating charts for input. Seating charts are easy to update. Grading options are very useful and adaptable to my grading system. I am able to input assignments easily and assign them to other sections without any extra work.”
What Users Dislike About the App
“Aspen’s visual interface is cluttered and hard to navigate. Many features are buried in menus that are hard to access and require long instruction sheets to figure out. The most frustrating part is posting grades at the end of the term—that requires multiple steps for each class, for a process that seems like it should be able to get accomplished with the push of one button. Also, there’s no apparent way to import grades from another source (like an Excel spreadsheet) which was a feature that was in the previous gradebook software that my organization “upgraded” from. That feature was a huge time-saver.”
“The interface (text, drop down menus, etc.) could be bigger. I would also like to see the standards/skills that I am grading in their entirety.”
“The interface feels very outdated. Nothing seems to be integrated. Almost every interaction feels complex and unintuitive. I’m assuming that expanding the features on the next page is expensive because my school has chosen not to do so. No iOS app, and the mobile version of the website is very difficult to use.”
“Inputing data on a smaller device like a tablet or a chromebook is challenging since little of the screen is viewable; the slider bars don’t always show. Also, the program does not interact with our other major student management program: Schoology. If the gradebooks between the two were linked, it would be much more efficient.”
“It’s easy to see this history of documents attached to each client. The tabs allow for easy navigation of this history, but looking up each client requires many, many steps to get there.”
“There are some flukes with the software. It also doesn’t work well with many student learning platforms that are available.”
