Vista Higher LearningReviews 105

VHL has horrible connection problems and makes every homework assignment into a test, essentially testing students every day on subjects they learned about for at most an hour.

This website is ridiculous. I don't know why my school for every language class I've taken so far wants to use outside websites that don't work properly for a crap ton of money that comes with a textbook that you don't even get a physical copy of unless you pay an absorbent amount of money for. I'm now extremely behind of my assignments because the website didn't keep records of any of them.

It always freezes. I have to constantly reload the page. Sometimes my web page will just shut down entirely and it'll say it's not responding. LIKE I'm just trying to do my work and it's so frustrating that I have to spend 20 minutes to get the page to work. LIKE IF IT'S GONNA BE EXPENSIVE CAN IT JUST WORK PROPERlY PLS. I have work due at 11:59 and I cant even get the thing to work. And I know its not my computer because it's new...

When purchasing a textbook through VHL, not only must you pay extra for the physical textbook to arrive bound (instead of loose-leaf!), but your access to the electronic textbook only lasts for 24 months. Despite the cost exceeding $250.00, you can only extend access once those 24 months are over, for the low price of another $200.00.

The fact that they charge for the book arriving assembled, and that you are only leasing access to the E-textbook is egregious. Horrible company to be forced to deal with

The experience is awful and the instructions are rarely clear enough. They contradict themselves which makes learning other languages difficult. Consistency would matter, but there is none.

AVOID AT ALL COSTS
They will happily take hundreds from your bank account then tell you that you need to buy another code to access what you have just purchased. They are predatory and make sure they do all that they can to scam students for every cent they have. This company needs to be investigated by the state of California and fined for every student they have ripped off.

Accidentally purchased the wrong version for my class. (why there are two versions for the same thing is beyond me.) No way to get my $150 back even though I noticed it within 5 minutes. Seems to be just a good way for them to make money. So far the program has been terrible as well. Why teachers use this money stealing program is beyond me. If you can avoid it, but unfortunately like in my situation my class requires it so they go $300 from me.

Some early lessons are helpful but students can enable easily accessible settings to cheat through lessons and get 100% without learning any Spanish and for the students that try to complete it honestly it is challenging even for a native Spanish speaker. On parts meant to test for pronunciation, the speech recognizing program is very sensitive so in a loud classroom where most students are attempting to pronounce words, it does not recognize the words so most students don't try to do it legit and enable a ¨manual mode¨ where you are expected to grade yourself but most students just tell the program they got it all right. So TLDR horrible very hard lessons that mostly act as tests where it is easy to cheat on most questions. Personly would recommend Duolingo.

I immediately regretted the Spanish course I bought for college, it looked like a really bad way to learn, straight off the bat (you don't get a preview). So I asked for a refund and they said I couldn't get one even though I clearly hadn't used it and I was asking a couple of days after purchasing.

Don't buy this product, there are far easier ways to learn languages from far more decent companies. For instance, I went to my Babbel account that I had been learning French on for a year and changed the language to Spanish (out of lots of language options) and immediately I got the Spanish course right from the beginning, fantastic! For the same money Babbel give you so much more. Go with them, not these con artists.

So excited to pay my dues to take this class then to be presented with a paywall that prevents you from taking the class without buying the book. Would really love to see this practice get outlawed from praying on broke college students by putting them between a rock (dropping the class) and a hard place (biting the bullet and giving these people 200 bucks) Thanks :)

There were not enough textbooks so I was given a waiver for 2 weeks. My Prof had assigned over 400 assignments so I got to work. I submitted 424 assignments but my Prof could only see 12 assignments which were submitted during the 2 week waiver, all assignments after the conversion I could see but she could not. I contacted customer service. They could only see the 12 assignments. I sent them screen shots. They could not find the rest of my work. They could not see every time I signed on. I asked if it was possible that I had 2 accounts. They said no, but hey would open a ticket and work on it. The next day all my submissions were gone. I reentered 75 assignments. I kept emailing the engineering department who my ticket had been escalated to. They were absolutely useless. I logged in on a different computer (my dad's) and the screen was different. On my computer the last submission was the day before, on my dads computer the last submission was months ago. I took screen shots with both computers showing same day and time and sent to VHL engineering. They had no answer. My prof still could not see my submissions, she went as far to tell me my screen shots were fake, there couldn't possibly be a mistake with VHL. No one figured it out. VHL would not call me, all communication was via email, very frustrating. I paid $175 for total aggravation and a C-, this was Spa101, I could have had an A, instead my GPA got crushed. There are MANY problems with this system, try and avoid. I would have dropped the class if I had known. This was a horrific experience!

Do not order product from this company! Refused to give a refund even though I called as soon as I ordered virtual book by mistake and never used access code. Customer service worked from home and said there is nothing they can do because there is no supervisor there!

DO NOT TAKE ANY COURSE THAT USES VHL. If you're interested in learning a language do yourself a huge favor that will also save you a lot of money; sign up for Duolingo Plus. It's an infinitely better program that does a wonderful job of teaching languages to new learners. It's also significantly cheaper, it can be as cheap as free if you don't mind watching ads after every lesson.

VHL is a dumpster fire of a website. The book my course is using (Promenades) is another VHL product and it's almost completely useless. The fact that teachers/professors use this program is downright ridiculous, they clearly have not used the product themselves. The book doesn't bother thoroughly explaining anything because half of the pages are exercises that are already on the website. The website doesn't give the student proper instructions and will mark an answer incorrect because it wants the student to use a specific word... a word that VHL has not taught them yet.

As another reviewer stated, a lot of the questions are subjective and could have a ton of different answers. For example, one of the questions on an exam was a picture of a person with a cake. What was the answer? The French equivalent of "this person is lucky"... WHAT? I'm not sure why they didn't go with the more obvious "this person is hungry" or "this person is eating" but no, apparently having a cake means you're lucky.

To make matters worse, the website is full of bugs. A classmate finished a particularly difficult exam and when they hit the "submit" button the entire exam vanished. Poof, gone into thin air. All of that work for nothing. They ended up failing the exam and dropping the course because they didn't want their GPA impacted. The rest of us that are left in the class now take screen captures or videos of our exams as we do them in case the website decides to crash on us as well. So far our record is five crashes on our last exam.

Our class started the term with 35 students. We have a month left in our term and we're down to 17. Everyone I talked to that dropped said the same thing; they dropped because VHL is a steaming pile of garbage and no matter what they did, their answers were never accepted as correct.

Avoid. Avoid as if it were the bubonic plague.

This is my first college class and this is a terrible introduction. Even my NATIVE SPANISH SPEAKING mother can't figure this site out. I was completely confused on all my assignments and make-shift "lectures" my professor taught. I have a terrible grade in this class because of this hell site. Honestly just drop the class if you learn they are using this program

I'm a student and my teacher uses it for homework and tests, it can be harsh but it helps me learn. I find it annoying though that it takes off so much credit when it's even a day late though

I was very disappointed in this product. My language teacher had said he liked this program. As a distance learner the text with the online is not very supportive for learning. I had used another program with another language and I found that very easy to learn from. Vista has very little audio that coincides directly with the lessons. You have to go to audio lab which does not coincide with the text. There are no explanations in the book, just "homework" without much direction. Yes we are supposed to read the text which I do, but I have no idea if I am saying the words correctly.

My Spanish teacher originally used this at the start of the school year, but it was really stressful and we were all really confused, so she moved away from the book and has been doing her own teaching style now, and it's going good. Recently though, she tried to get us back into the book, and it was a disaster. The questions had vocab that WAS NOT IN THE VOCAB BOXES. And a long time ago, early in the school year, she had us do the website and watch a video and answer questions, and it was really confusing because the people were speaking in past, present, and future tense, even though in Spanish I we're only learning present tense. Honestly, I think this program is terrible because it literally seems to think that you already know Spanish, even though most of the students being forced to use it are COMPLETLY NEW to Spanish. And as a Mexican myself, I just think it's really crappy and bad, and I would much rather use Duolingo or even Babbel than this garbage.

This is the worst online learning tool I have ever used. I am disappointed that Penn State uses such a scam of a text book for leaning. First of all, I spent over $160 on the book. That is already a red flag because most of my other online learning tools were only $30 or so. The actual book itself is useless. It does not explain any of the content well. You will definitely need someone who knows the language you are learning if you want to pass any class that uses anything from VHL Central. Then the activities are even worse. With the book not explaining things thoroughly, the activities become near impossible to do. Plus, adding extra spaces or missing a period will cause you to lose points on assignments. Anything where you have to type an answer can have more than one solution, however the book only accepts one answer. Even native speakers who have helped me with my assignments have had problems with the book. THEY SPEAK THE LANGUAGE. Avoid any class that uses books from this place.

I had to change my class schedule meaning I no longer needed the book. Thanks to this great company I am out $165. Thanks Vista :)

This review is about the Spanish course (Protagonistas) hosted by VHL. In my university, VHL course is required for passing the SPANLANG course, which seems to be the way this company conducts business – its primary sales channel is to incentivize instructors to corral students into buying their mediocre and overpriced material.

Unfortunately, the issues from student perspective do not stop there as VHL is deeply incompetent in their core business. For example, the Protagonistas course is available with or without add-on material, and neither their site nor our instructor could explain what the add-on is. The website offers a trial period, so I started a trial with add-on. Then it became obvious the add-on is not needed. So I went ahead and bought a license without the add-on, and registered the license in my trial. So far so good. Imagine my dismay when after a week the company cut-off access to website. VHL support told me that my purchased license did not match my account course (trial), and they could not downgrade hence no way for me to get access to what I already paid for, unless I buy the add-on!

This was already a loss of money, but it was far from the end of troubles. VHL hosts video and audio material on their website, and media players periodically stop working rendering interactive exercises useless. As this is not enough, after my class ended in school, VLH also restricted access to website material by introducing annoying popups and ceasing progress indicators. I have opened a support case on this and got an answer that "you can still access material" (with popups) and therefore it is "good enough". WTF? Seriously wish this company to burn in hell.