Thank you @hilary for your contribution! As with any skill and particularly a technology-enhanced learning tool, it does take time, training and practice, especially if we hope that students will use it independently and effectively. Dictionaries like Cambridge, Collins, Oxford and Macmillan have been written using data from large corpora e.g. definition writing, selecting collocations and synonyms, identifying patterns and how they relate to the different meanings of an entry, frequency of meanings (top entry most frequent), register, etc. So, if a corpus is a drop in the ocean of language, a dictionary is a drop in the ocean of the corpus 
So, yeah corpus tools would need more time than learning how to use a dictionary, but I wouldn’t compare them to a thesaurus as it barely includes any useful information about language use in context.
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