@jbannister , the school for which I used to teach had Smarthinking, so I can provide you some perspective from a teacher/student point of view. Generally speaking, students who used it and needed it appreciated the service. I tested it out myself and was pleased with the responsiveness of the service. The LTI integrates seamlessly into a Canvas course; once the LTI is activated, a teacher can drop the link into any module, students could click on the link, and be automatically logged into Smarthinking through SSO.
The big problem I ran into was the manner in which the school allocated hours--although to be fair, I'm not sure how one could reasonably go about it. The skill levels of the students in my writing-intensive classes ranged widely; some never needed to use Smarthinking, whereas some needed to use it for every single assignment. As @brent_shaw mentioned above, schools purchase a pool of hours from Smarthinking, and my school opted to allow each online student 5 hours per semester. For students who needed it badly, 5 hours was not enough--but many many students didn't use it at all, so there were definitely unused hours in the pool. I had to contact the school's admin for Smarthinking to grant overrides for those students who needed it the most, and often by the time he had added the hours, the student had moved on.
I mention this because if you're thinking about using Smarthinking you might want to think about how you would implement a nimble and fair allocation system that doesn't include the kinds of moving parts that are often away from their desks or don't read their emails on the weekend.
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