Marshman Foundation: Saving Thousands, Streamlining Onboarding, and Addressing Accessibility and UX Issues By Switching to Open LMS
Based in Adelaide and operating throughout South Australia state and beyond, the Marshman Foundation develops evidence-based personal leadership programs for delivery to disadvantaged, disengaged, and at-risk young people. Marshman Foundation courses are aimed at 10- to 16-year-olds from a range of backgrounds facing a variety of challenges—they may be from a lower-income area, or they could be considered at risk of dropping out of school or entering the youth justice system. The Marshman Foundation’s programs deliver tangible, measurable mental health-focused outcomes, building confidence, self-image, and communication skills, while helping students set personal goals.
The Background: The Marshman Foundation’s Mission
Though young people are the primary learners, the foundation’s programs and learning environment are primarily used by trainers and school teachers. These instructors mainly access and deliver the course content in person and onscreen in their classrooms. Courses typically run for 10 to 18 weeks (the former for younger students for one hour per week, the latter for older students with six hours of content per week).
The foundation also has a smaller number of learners who directly access self-paced content—they may be homeschooled on a temporary or permanent basis, having disengaged with the school system for various reasons. Indeed, the programs are often deployed in this way to help students transition back into the school system. These instructors and learners alike require—and deserve—an intuitive and easy-to-use learning management system.
The Challenge: Significant Accessibility Issues and an Inflexible Legacy LMS Provider
In 2022, the Marshman Foundation reached the end of the road with its previous learning management system provider due to an accumulating set of issues.
A decision was forced when an Atlassian-authored accessibility audit found a large number of significant issues with the legacy platform. For example, it was found that tabbing behavior (frequently used for content navigation by assistive devices) didn’t work as expected. The previous platform’s default theme also had contrast issues that made content difficult for some users to read, and text-to-speech systems would read out a large amount of unnecessary text to users of such devices.
Naturally, the foundation wished to address these issues and further its cultural goals, focused as it is on widening participation in education. However, its legacy provider could only offer a long and costly process to correct the issues. It was felt that the foundation had neither the time nor the finances to continue on this route.
Over the years, the five-person foundation team had become frustrated with the provider’s pay-as-you-go service model: the hosting fees were clear, but the support, updates, and maintenance were add-ons. This led to a highly problematic situation where fees were a surprise every time, and budgets exceptionally difficult to forecast. Worst of all, whenever the Marshman team found an issue, it would spend time finding workarounds, self-troubleshooting, or simply persevering rather than accessing this costly support.
Furthermore, user feedback on the legacy system regularly highlighted poor overall usability. The team was delivering hour-long training sessions to help onboard people with the system, and still having to provide additional support to users who couldn’t find their way around the platform. It was time to switch to a better solution.
“It was important to us that whatever interface we had was engaging, it also had to be accessible, and the technology itself really has to be reliable. I was a school teacher in another life and know from experience that there's nothing worse than being in front of a room full of students and the tech doesn't work.”
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The Solution: How Open LMS and the Snap Theme Provided a Simple and Appropriately Affordable Way Forward
Marshman Foundation General Manager Rebecca Andary has worked both in the learning technology industry and in the classroom itself, so she’s familiar with the software options out there and the challenges instructors and students face. She didn’t hesitate to contact Open LMS to discuss her options and was very happy with Open LMS’s pitch.
“Open LMS was incredibly competitive, and I knew that the service and support would be what we needed as well. We're a very small organization, so we need support on tap. Having had experience with multiple different learning management systems and vendors previously, I can't fault Open LMS's support, their product, and the service that we receive.”
The foundation’s old LMS was Moodle™-based, so Open LMS offered a degree of continuity with the old system, allowing for a relatively simple “lift and shift” of resources from old to new. Though both platforms are Moodle™-based, Open LMS’s implementation has several features that directly address Marshman Foundation’s accessibility and usability needs. Primary among these is Open LMS’s Snap theme, which immediately addressed many of the significant accessibility issues from the foundation’s earlier audit.
With everything quickly up and working within Open LMS’s implementation of Moodle™, the foundation was able to concentrate on making the remaining accessibility-minded content changes. Snap, combined with Open LMS’s available course formats and plugins, has helped the Marshman Foundation create visually optimal learning content without the need for specialist in-house learning design skills. This is not only better for student engagement, but has helped the team to rely less on third parties for content packages and updates.
The foundation has also experienced much smoother teacher and trainer onboarding by switching to Open LMS. It now finds itself spending less time training these groups on how to use the system—with Open LMS’s overall more intuitive navigation, themes, and environment seen as the reason. In fact, in direct contrast to the legacy system, many users are able to find their way around as soon as they have their login credentials.
The foundation pays Open LMS a competitive, seat-based fee per year for up to 1,000 users. The price includes two major upgrades, maintenance, and year-round support—ensuring that the foundation is in a much better position regarding access to the latest Moodle™ and Open LMS-exclusive features, and is never afraid to seek support if and when it’s needed.
“Very rarely do we need to put in support requests, which is great. When I put a request in the other day, Open LMS went above and beyond to try and help me solve the issue that we were having. It ended up being a feature request, but they gave me alternative options in the meantime. I never feel like I'm a nuisance.”
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The Results: Thousands Saved and Time Freed Up for Courses Fully Accessible to and Appreciated By All
Switching to Open LMS and the Snap theme almost immediately addressed all 27 significant issues identified in the Marshman Foundation’s accessibility audit, something that was going to cost thousands to fix with its old provider. This was accompanied by an overall increase in positive feedback from teachers, trainers, and students: all user groups feel that Open LMS is significantly easier to use than the previous platform and that courses are more engaging.
The improvement in ease of use is evidenced by the reduced onboarding time required with Open LMS. The foundation previously allowed around an hour to onboard new teachers and trainers with its legacy platform: it now allocates around 10 minutes, and sometimes finds that no onboarding time is needed at all. With around 200 users to onboard in a typical year, this means a time saving of around 160-200 hours per year.
Other than this welcome boost to training satisfaction, the foundation also benefits from fairer, more predictable pricing that better aligns with the nature of its operations.
“It was really important that I didn't have any surprises when it came to budgeting. I now know how much we're going to spend on our learning management system every year. And we're not running the risk of being on an old, outdated version of Moodle™ simply because we couldn't afford the upgrade. From a client satisfaction perspective, their students are happier and it's more engaging for them. And my clients, the teachers and trainers we work directly with, love the system as well. I'm thrilled with Open LMS.”
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