Campus LMS Adoption

Goal

Course materials lived everywhere: individual course websites, handouts and Word documents, an open-source learning management system, a discussion board application, and a shared drive. The campus Innovation Center built and ran the tools, with students working alongside its developers through the Teaching and Learning Co-op, an experiential learning program. The goal was one platform.

Audience

Faculty across a campus of about 30,000 students, and the students in their courses.

Process

A campus evaluation and request for proposals, run jointly by the Director of Instructional Technology and the Director of Training, and sponsored by the vice president of administrative services and the vice president of academic affairs. Five options were weighed: joining the district’s existing Blackboard instance, joining another college’s system built on SharePoint, Desire2Learn, Moodle, or building a campus system on open source. The district instance met the requirements within the budget and staff available, so the campus joined rather than built. A pilot with early adopters came first, supported by a single point of contact helpdesk, workshops, shared course design standards, and a fully online course, written and taught for the rollout, that prepared instructors to design and teach online.

Technology

• Blackboard, on the district’s shared instance.

Outcomes

Completed. Other faculty joined once they saw it working in a colleague’s course, and nearly every faculty member was eventually on it.