Vista Higher Learning Supersite: A Comprehensive Review

Vista Higher Learning (VHL) is a company that provides language learning materials, primarily through its digital platform, the Supersite. This article aims to provide a comprehensive review of the VHL Supersite, considering its features, benefits, drawbacks, and overall effectiveness as a language learning tool.

Introduction to Vista Higher Learning

Vista Higher Learning (VHL) was founded in 2000 with the mission to elevate the teaching and learning of world languages. The company focuses on providing tools necessary for achieving success. VHL integrates text, technology, and media to offer learners a host of contemporary, authentic materials. VHL is committed to helping you teach languages and literacy with the best digital products and integrations services available. We are proud to have vhlcentral listed as a 1EdTech Certified platform. VHL maintains a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) for its online products, learning through top-notch print and digital solutions.

Supersite Features and Benefits

The Supersite offers a variety of features designed to enhance the language learning experience. These include:

Diverse Practice Activities

The Supersite offers hundreds of program-specific, themed practice activities in various formats to reinforce language skills. Learning a new language takes practice. The Supersite offers diverse, program-specific practice activities for language learning.

Authentic and Cultural Media

The Supersite seamlessly integrates comprehensible, authentic, and cultural media into the curriculum, providing students with a real-world context for language use. Each month we release carefully curated activities based on online news articles and TV news segments from across the target cultures.

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Interactive Grammar Tutorials

Save class time by assigning interactive grammar tutorials that provide students with engaging explanations of grammar concepts and opportunities to practice in the target language.

Communication Tools

The Supersite provides tools to foster a safe digital space for language and culture. To become effective communicators, students need opportunities to speak in low-stakes environments and interact with one another in the classroom and online. Video Virtual Chat activities provide students opportunities to participate in simulated conversations by responding to questions delivered by video recordings of native speakers. Students benefit from non-verbal as well as articulatory cues-essential for production and pronunciation. Partner and Group Chat activities allow students to carry out a conversation in pairs via video or audio. Forums are online discussion boards where students can post text or audio information and respond to their classmates’ posts. It allows students to practice their pronunciation and get instant feedback on how they’re doing.

Instructor Empowerment

Instructors are empowered by the ease-of-use, flexibility, and dependability of the Supersite. A setup wizard lets you customize your course settings, copy previous courses to save time, and create your all-in-one gradebook. You can even add your own content! Now our market-leading platform is easier to integrate with your learning management system (LMS) than ever before! Instructors are at the heart of everything we do, and we kept that in mind when building our assessment builder feature. You can easily combine existing content from any course or module to create a new assessment. You can also edit student-facing titles and write new questions using a variety of assessment templates. Convenient options for grading include spotchecking, student-by-student, and question-by-question approaches. Save time and always know when to check in on students’ progress with analytics embedded in the Supersite.

Customer Service

VHL provides such excellent customer service to me individually and to my colleagues. The company goes above and beyond to serve faculty and help students. Our rep and his team provide the best customer service of any publisher with whom I have ever worked.

Positive Feedback

“The Supersite saves instructors a ton of time and gives students an extremely valuable resource to prepare the class material ahead of time."

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“Our department has been 100% VHL for 9 years. We have seen consistent growth in results and interest at our college.”

“We also like the organization of the Supersite.”

“I am very thankful for the online activities offered by VISTA, as they've remained steady and effective for my course.”

Criticisms and Drawbacks

Despite its features and benefits, the VHL Supersite has received criticism from students, primarily related to the grading system, technical issues, and customer service.

Grading System

The primary issue with this is the grading system, which is extremely discouraging and anxiety inducing. There is zero partial credit, even for a perfectly correct response. It must be word for word, letter for letter, what the program deems the singular correct answer. This even applies to full sentence length responses. It is extremely disheartening when I answer with the entire sentence structured and conjugated correctly but receive a zero because of a single typo. Many times the system marks completely correct responses 100% wrong, just because I left out the subject pronoun when it was completely unnecessary. It is way too easy to end up with a 70 due to minor errors like these despite knowing the content thoroughly.

I'm like 99% sure that this thing grades things with AI, If you make a tiny mistake, you get zero. If you forget one letter it tanks your grade by 25%.

Technical Issues

Vhl is the worst it makes me cry :( is always laggs and is very mean. It kicks me out. To all the people who created the "speech" section, go F u C K yourself🖕. PLEASE fix your microphone because I am almost on the verge of destroying my computer as I know it.

Too complicated to maneuver. I have learned nothing. I just cheat on my assignments every single one. I would rather scrape my knees off glass then do this everyday.

Cost and Refund Policies

If you are a college student ESPECIALLY one using financial aid or barely making ends meet DO NOT ORDER A BOOK FROM VHL! You will most likely not get a physical copy of the book, and you will not be able to sell the book after use or get a refund. You're essentially paying $100.00+ for a CODE to a book that you can only use for one semester and never again. IT IS A COMPLETE SCAM. Take another class because any class that uses the VHL platform is not worth it and completely predatory to students struggling with finances. Even if you aren't struggling with finances this is a SCAM.

VHL will not refund the $149.00 text. Granted their policy does state "No refunds, no exceptions" for online texts somewhere in the writeup on it. However, this policy and response takes advantage of 17 year olds and their families who are simply trying to move forward in their education.

I contacted VHL before I chose the length of my subscription. I asked if my college continued using Portales 2.0 IN SECTION 2, SP 102. The sales person said my college does not use VHL the next semester. I bought a 6 month subscription. When I signed up for 102 the teacher said VHL was the text. When I contacted VHL and asked to pay the difference between a 6 month subscription and a 2 year subscription HL reps acknowledged I was provided incorrect information. Still they refused to let me pay the difference and charged the full price. In so doing, I was required to pay $160 extra. I'm a college student! As for the paper text, it doesn't include the questions/conversations required to complete the assignments. Worthless!

User Experience

Portales 2.0 is not user friendly. The speakers go way too fast and there is no way to slow the speed in the assignments. Duolingo includes this option. In an unscientific survey, 100% of my classmates said they HATE VHL Portales 2.0.

All in all, in person learning trumps this in every way. It's nothing unique or special, only multiple choice questions assigned by the teacher with maybe videos, audio, and a calendar with due dates. Every other site on the internet has these, don't pay for this one. VHL was just fine in high school when it was free and all, but now when we have to buy textbooks for college the $#*! is a complete scam. There needs to be better examples for the assignments and they marked answers that were correct wrong. The price for the book should be cheaper.

Among the hundreds of activities, there are probably just a couple that are good. A waste of money and time.

I have too much to say about VHL, so much so that I simply cannot fit it all here. But, let me start with the basics: First of all, it is ridiculously expensive in terms of online college coursework. It is practically a waste of money, especially considering the textbook itself is typically irrelevant, because almost all of the assignments are contained separately, which brings me to my second point. The assignments are perhaps the absolute WORST aspect of VHL. They are tedious, they are long, and they are many. I have around 30+ assignments due per day, usually each containing tedious questions of vocab and grammar conventions. The content itself is easy, it is absorbable and in any other circumstance I would likely enjoy learning Spanish, but VHL makes it a horrible experience. Now to my third point: I have ADHD, I am neurodivergent, and struggle greatly to keep up with "normal" educational standards. What might take a normal student under 2 hours to complete these assignments takes me three to four times longer, extending what should be a maximum of four or five hours of schoolwork per day to around eight or nine, which means I have to dedicate at least a good six or seven hours of my day SOLELY to VHL, not including the other work I have in my class. The sheer amount of coursework and assignments does not help me learn, if anything it is a chore to simply get through.

It is nothing short of baffling how unintuitive the learning 'process' is for this service. The amount of mandatory homework for classes is incredibly tedious and does nothing but frustrate and agonize when they randomly decide to use words they have never gone over in quizzes and exams, forcing you to use google translate if you're lucky enough to not be proctored, or to bite the bullet and hope you can guess correctly using context clues. The activities are ridiculously hard and if you don't understand what you're doing wrong, you either have to look up the answers on quizlet to save your grade, then learn nothing, or you fail the assignment.- It was extremely expensive.- Not geared for helping people learn. The 'interactive' textbook doesn't even pronounce words, or let you copy and paste directly out of the book.- Some of the problems in the book are so advanced. Without help it's almost impossible to learn because they do not provide ANSWERS. Even if you wanted to put in extra hours to study, it's virtually impossible if you're not understanding the problems because there are no answers or explanations to any questions.- Quality: This textbook is not organized in a way that English speakers will easily grasp the grammatical usage in the Spanish language.

Transparency

Don't know if Vista Higher learning vet their teachers, but they hire the likes of Rosanna Keppeler who on October 26th, 2019 in Stafford Virginia (Case # 179GC*-00) was arrested for refusing to take a breathalyzer test. Consequently convicted of a DUI. I'm sure there are many good teachers out there, Why encourage drunk driving. I had a close family member seriously crippled for life from a drunk driver. If this is some kind of forgiveness to this person, why don't they disclose this first. Why should i spend money learning from a fake?

Enrollment Problems

I was excited to enroll in an online class for self-paced learning, the concept worked well in regard to working full time while trying to earn my degree. I was under the impression that I was a strong-willed, emotionally resilient person. There have been a few times where I have been at a breaking point and had to walk away. Right off the bat, this program is unforgiving and incredibly time consuming. It's killed any motivation to truly learn Spanish, which like I said, I was excited to do before! I cannot believe that the college I'm enrolled in would sign off on this course. I purchased my online textbook access for $150, as I was told I needed it to access my class. Low and behold, even then I could not access my class, as they now told me I needed to buy extra supplementary content in order to ACTUALLY gain access to my class. Now instead of getting the initial bundle of both items which would have saved me money, they scammed me into buying both separately in order to maximize profits. Extremely scummy practice, cannot wait to see this company fall to lawsuits.

Refund Issues

I purchased what I thought was a hardcover textbook & workbook. I made a mistake and purchased only the digital text & workbook. I received the workbook and contacted them to return the digital book or pay the difference for the hardcover text. They said their systems do not allow for partial refunds of any kind. I don't know any online purchase I have ever made where I have to return ALL the items to get the correct item. Now I have to incur the shipping costs to return the physical workbook and get refunded just to purchase it all over again. I will be making that purchase somewhere else and I'll even be willing to pay more. Ridiculous. They don't 0 stars, but you have to select at least 1 to submit the review.

The teach gave us wrong info on which book to buy (we bought the 'Prime' version, needed 'Supersite'). VHL wouldn't let us return one and buy the other. In fact, we had purchased the more expensive version, and instead of just giving us access to the Supersite version and keeping the difference, we had to completely eat the more expensive, and buy the less expensive version. The customer service person was nice, but utterly unhelpful. I have recommended the school find a different vendor for this product, and will continue to advocate against this company if they can't fix this type of thing.

Comparison with Other Language Learning Platforms

One reviewer compared VHL's Sentieri with commercial online providers such as Duolingo, busuu, Babbel, and Fluent Forever. The reviewer concluded that VHL’s supersite wins hands down in both technology and content.

Comprehensible Input

VHL’s elementary Italian program Sentieri offers learners a bevy of authentic listening input. Sentieri features Fotoromanzo, a mini soap opera, which consists of 24 dramatic episodes. Sentieri follows the tradition of using a soap opera to provide comprehensible input.

Teaching of Culture

In Unit 6, the author introduces a host of different cultural topics related to health and the daily routine. Sentieri’s Unit 6 alone offers more discussion of cultural topics than the learner will see in all the lessons featured in all the commercial online providers combined. Commercial online providers act as if culture plays no role in language acquisition and communication.

Learning Platforms

VHL’s Sentieri offers a variety of activities for students to practice language and culture. Le Coppie (Couples) strengthens reading comprehension and vocabulary building skills by having students match a series of descriptions with the appropriate word. Scegliere. (Select). Choose the part of the body used in the following statement. Scegliere isn’t just another multiple-choice format; it requires students to understand input and make the correct semantic answer. Logico o illogico. Logical or illogical is an offshoot of true or false. It is an excellent reading or listening comprehension check and it forces students to think semantically in order to answer an item correctly. Trova l’intruso is a good lower-level comprehension activity for vocabulary building that is not used in any of the online systems. It asks the learner to pick out the word or phrase that doesn’t fit with the other three in the group.

Potential Improvements

Conversely, VHL could benefit from adopting some of the strengths of some commercial online providers. First, I personally like Duolingo’s language community where it pits one language learner against another in competition for points, lingots, crowns, and other prizes. Duolingo’s competition pushes students to study language through intrinsic motivation, to outshine the competition. VHL should consider a points system that would pit students against each other from around the country. Second, I love Babbel’s instrument to teach writing. VHL has to depend on its language instructors to correct students’ free writing. Babbel proposes dozens of cool writing assignments even though it doesn’t have instructors to grade them. Instead, Babbel uses a collection of sample sentences for students to use as a guide syntactically and semantically for its writing assignment. Third, Transparent Language’s Four Square is a fun activity to enhance vocabulary acquisition. Each box with a word(s) flips one after the other to reveal the word or phrase and then flips back to a blank card. You choose the card that matches the prompt. It requires close attention to get each item correct. Fourth, Transparent Language offers a series of “tests” that can serve as final exams. Their final exam component could help VHL users to prepare for the actual final exam anytime during the quarter or semester.

Student Resources

The Course dashboard allows you to access the assignments, class bulletins, content, calendar, grades, and communication tools for your instructor’s course. Assignments display all items that your instructor assigns from all areas of the Supersite in chronological order by the due date. Current assignments: Displays all activities that have been assigned by your instructor. Upcoming assignments: Display all activities assigned by your instructor for the next upcoming date. An estimate of the total time needed to complete the assignment set. Note: Time is only an estimation. The class bulletin organizes course notifications and announcements that require your review. Items in the class bulletin are organized chronologically, from the most recently posted item to the oldest. Notifications display system-generated alerts for specific assignments. *Note: After viewing a notification, it will be moved to the previously reviewed notifications page.

BBB Rating

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Customer Reviews and Ratings

Vista Higher Learning has a rating of 1.3 stars from 105 reviews, indicating that most customers are generally dissatisfied with their purchases. Reviewers dissatisfied with Vista Higher Learning most frequently mention access code, customer service and foreign language. Vista Higher Learning ranks 180th among Language Learning sites. We monitor reviews for authenticity.

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