How the Australian College of Ministries Increased Its Feedback Response Rate to Consistently 70%-80% With Open LMS
The Australian College of Ministries (ACOM) is a leading provider of online theological education and a founding member of the Australian University College of Divinity. The college offers undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in ministry, leadership, and counseling, as well as professional development courses for individuals and church organizations. With a mission to make transformative education accessible to students across Australia and beyond, ACOM blends academic rigor with practical application through its fully online programs.
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The Challenge: A Two-Person Team Managing Hundreds of Learners
Many of ACOM’s programs and courses follow a self-guided, asynchronous approach, with student work assessed by various proctors. Students complete coursework at their own pace and can attend synchronous learning opportunities as needed to improve their understanding of the interpersonal aspects of being a minister.
Approximately 700 individuals interact with ACOM's services each year, including undergraduate and graduate students, proctors, learners in short-term programs, and stakeholders. With a diverse group of users and a small, two-person team of platform administrators, the institution needs an LMS that is easy to navigate while offering the robust features required to meet its long-term goals.
Furthermore, the institution requires a platform with a modern look and feel that keeps learners engaged and accountable as they learn asynchronously. Additionally, ACOM needs a way to generate site-wide reports that uncover essential data to inform future institutional decisions.
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The Solution: A Feature-Rich and Customizable Open-Source LMS
ACOM partners with Moodle™-based Open LMS to deliver its fully online programs. For over a decade, the institution has leveraged key Open LMS features to streamline its operations, enhance oversight, and create a more engaging experience for both students and faculty.
One feature ACOM leverages is Snap, a Moodle™ theme designed by Open LMS that simplifies, humanizes, and enhances digital learning experiences for learners and educators around the globe. The Snap theme includes built-in features that aren’t available in a standard Moodle™ installation, such as centralized dashboards for real-time updates, including:
- Grading notifications
- Forum replies
- Activity deadlines
- Instant message alerts
With these features readily accessible, ACOM streamlines and elevates digital learning experiences for its students while ensuring all LMS users have access to a platform with a modern look and feel.
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Additionally, Open LMS enables ACOM to create custom SQL reports, providing essential insights into course usage and learner habits. ACOM’s administrators can extract detailed site-wide data to ensure consistency and compliance across hundreds of courses. From assignment settings to assessment types, these reports offer in-depth insights into how the LMS is being used and where adjustments may be necessary.
“Being able to write and generate our own SQL reports has made it so much easier for our student engagement managers to do their jobs effectively.”
The Results: Greater Feedback Rates and More Engaging Learning Experiences
With Open LMS, ACOM continues to help learners understand course expectations and achieve successful learning outcomes. The institution relies on Open LMS’s exclusive Personalized Learning Designer (PLD) to keep learners accountable, communicate reminders, and prompt timely feedback and responses, ensuring everyone can succeed.
Affectionately referred to as the “nagging technique” by ACOM’s learning systems manager, PLD sends automatic communications to learners and instructors when triggered by specific, predefined actions users take while interacting with the LMS. For ACOM, this means displaying a pop-up message near the end of a learner’s coursework that reminds them to complete their course feedback. These automatic reminders have helped ACOM achieve a consistent response rate of roughly 70%-80% on its feedback requests. This is significantly greater than the approximately 40% average response rate other member colleges of the Australian University College of Divinity—ACOM’s accrediting body—experienced in 2023. (It’s worth noting that some member institutions with lower response rates engage in face-to-face courses with smaller class sizes, while ACOM’s courses are conducted predominantly online. These differences may have an impact on feedback response rates.)
The PLD tool also helps ACOM’s student engagement managers perform their roles more effectively. These professionals assist learners on their academic journeys, and PLD supports their efforts by automatically notifying them when students don’t interact with their courses. Open LMS and PLD keep these student engagement managers informed and aware of learners who are at risk of falling behind or disengaging altogether. With these tools, ACOM is well-equipped to reach out to students, provide appropriate support, and ensure that every learner can achieve successful academic outcomes.
“Our feedback response rate has been at or about 80%, and that’s a very unusual response rate. I credit PLD with that. I like to call it the ‘nagging technique,’ and it’s been very effective.”
