How Southern Oregon University Facilitates Communication, Manages Course Administration, and Improves Academic Accessibility With Open LMS
Southern Oregon University (SOU) is a regional higher learning institution in the U.S. serving around 4,500 students. Founded in 1869 as the Rogue River Valley Educational Society, the university offers 37 areas of study that foster innovation and creativity, helping every student to achieve their academic goals.
The Challenge: Partner With a Flexible, Moodle™-Based Provider Capable of Meeting the University’s Needs
SOU was an early adopter of eLearning technologies and has maintained a learning platform for many years. The institution relies heavily on its LMS to house learning materials and facilitate communication between students and instructors. The LMS is also essential for managing course enrollments and other administrative items.
Rising costs combined with the institution’s evolving needs prompted SOU to search for an alternative LMS. The university had limited internal learning and development (L&D) resources, so it needed an LMS provider that could maintain the software and help the institution address any technology concerns that might arise. SOU chose a Moodle™-based platform to meet this need.
The university then decided it needed to find a new learning platform partner which offered more software flexibility and provided high-quality LMS support and service so it could successfully manage its various courses and academic programs.
“I really do love Moodle™, and I think I’ve got it in my DNA. There's just something about how it facilitates different kinds of interactions that I find just really interesting and fun and challenging. I can think of three or four different ways an instructor could achieve the same thing. There’s a lot of different ways to do it in Moodle™.”
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The Solution: A Highly-Configurable and Accessibility-Minded LMS
SOU chose the former eThink Education (now part of Open LMS) to be its new LMS hosting provider. The LMS’s flexibility, along with support from the Open LMS team, made it easier for the university to assist its instructors with designing and delivering courses and assessments that best met their unique needs.
The institution uses features like “Assignments,” “Quizzes,” “Forums,” and more to manage its courses. The LMS’s “Groups” feature makes it easy for instructors to combine multiple sections of the same course into a single course shell. This allows instructors to upload learning materials once per course, regardless of how many sections they’re teaching. SOU’s instructors rely on the feature often, and they can still easily separate their gradebooks and manage students’ performance when their sections are grouped together.
SOU also leverages accessibility features from Brickfield, one of Open LMS’s many integration partners. These features help faculty identify accessibility issues in their courses so they can improve learning environments for every student. Before partnering with Open LMS, the university didn’t have accessibility integrations beyond a tool that could run usability reports on the campus website. While some instructors were doing their own accessibility assessments for their courses, a standard process or tool across the institution to ensure campus consistency was not in place. With Open LMS, every SOU course can now be automatically reviewed by a Brickfield widget to check for accessibility issues. Brickfield identifies potential problems for learners and provides wizards for fixing common accessibility problems.
“Moodle™-based Open LMS is a really good tool. It works for students intuitively—that's what they tell us, that it’s really easy to use.”
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The Results: More Time Devoted to Ensuring Student Success and Less Administrative Headaches With Custom Reports
Since 2020, SOU and Open LMS have continued to build and maintain a strong relationship to ensure instructors and students have a reliable learning platform. The university leverages Open LMS for nearly all of its academic offerings. Most faculty use the platform in some way for all of their courses, and SOU students have encouraged instructors to use the LMS. SOU students appreciate the LMS, and they like the consistency they experience when their instructors leverage the same tool.
With Open LMS being the world’s largest Moodle™ provider, instructors save time on administrative tasks so they can devote more of their resources to creating meaningful learning experiences. The LMS course grouping tools allow instructors to spend less time uploading course materials, and Brickfield widgets make it easier to find (and fix!) issues that could hinder learning for some students.
The university also uses the LMS as a “home base” to facilitate communication for various activities and announcements. SOU has 285 courses listed in its “Programs and Clubs” category on the LMS. These courses serve as hubs for a variety of use cases, including:
- Creating community for online MBA and MSEd students
- Delivering training to SOU’s Board of Trustees
- Hosting placement exams for the Music Department
- Managing internships for the mental health counseling program
- Serving as an information hub for various innovation communities
- Hosting faculty symposiums
Prior to partnering with Open LMS, the university didn’t have a centralized means of facilitating communication for such a broad array of programs and use cases. Today, SOU can easily manage enrollment for these programs and groups to ensure the relevant information gets to the right people when they need it.
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In addition to providing a course delivery and management platform, Open LMS has created custom reports for SOU to help manage enrollment concerns. For instance, instructors at SOU are able to manually enroll learners in their course sections. They might choose to do this if a waitlisted student needs immediate access to their course. Manually enrolling the student ensures they don’t miss essential information and materials at the start of the term while they wait for an official seat to open. However, this becomes a major problem at the end of the term if students remain waitlisted but keep completing coursework. They would end the term without an official grade because they were never formally enrolled in the course.
SOU has approximately 900 courses during its winter term alone. Such a high volume of courses to sift through made it impossible for the university to verify official registrations against each instructor’s manual course enrollments in a timely manner. Open LMS created a custom report for SOU that lists all manual enrollments in the term’s courses. This helped the university check that students were properly enrolled in every course and could receive the appropriate credits for their efforts. Not only that, but the institution saved hours of administrative time by leveraging the custom report from Open LMS.
SOU and Open LMS continue to work together to empower instructors so they may maximize their time and devote more resources to student success.
“We’ve always felt like true partners with our host. My work is very much relationship-driven, and the relationships that I’ve developed with Open LMS have been very, very important. They’ve helped us find solutions to things, and I see them as really important partners in what we’re doing. Having Open LMS recognize us as a valued client and appreciating what we bring to the table has been really important.”
