This session will recount a College’s two-year journey to select and implement a new Learning Management System (LMS). This project included migrating over 40,000 courses from multiple systems onto a single platform over a 6-month period. Participants will be provided with several resources that they can reuse or adapt.
This presentation explores the journey and shares the lessons learned for the selection process and the transition from multiple learning management systems to a singular cloud-based solution. Although the entire process took 2 years to complete, once the LMS vendor was selected, the implementation of the system was accomplished within a 6-month timeframe.
Algonquin College (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada) relies heavily on its Learning Management System (currently Blackboard Learn™) as a critical system that is used round-the-clock by students (~20,000) and faculty (~2000). It serves as a portal for all digital materials associated with courses and programs of study, fosters a community of learners through its communication and activity/engagement tools, provides a platform to perform assessments, and it allows faculty and management to assess the progress of learners to better serve their learning needs. The Learning Management System (LMS) is a key component of Algonquin’s digital strategy as it is part of a larger network of integrated systems that help manage and automate various business processes.
Algonquin’s commitment to providing digital learning resources to students was reinforced in 2011 by the adoption of a College policy, known as the Learning Management System policy. This policy attempted to set standards for the consistent use of the digital learning environment by faculty, and in doing so, set expectations for students about their digital learning experience at the College.
The LMS, which had been hosted on premise for almost 20 years, was in need of major hardware and software upgrades. Unfortunately, due to several unscheduled outages during the fall 2016 semester, and despite best efforts to mitigate the impact of these problems, stakeholder confidence in the platform’s stability and reliability has been compromised. To complicate matters, there were multiple instances of the same LMS being used throughout the College, including one department that had switched to a different vendor on its own some years earlier. This scenario made it difficult to stay up-to-date on version upgrades, as well as to provide quality and consistent support to the stakeholders. With the main vendor agreement expiring in March 2018, the time was right for Algonquin College to re-evaluate its current learning management system.
In November of 2016, an internal stakeholder steering committee that included faculty and students was created for the purposes of establishing the system’s key deliverables and oversee the Request for Proposals (RFP) process. Drawing on research and best practices in the post-secondary sector, this steering committee spearheaded the activities that led to the creation of the RFP, the evaluation of the RFP responses, the shortlisting of the vendors, the coordination of the stakeholder-led evaluation of the products (e.g., usability testing, sandbox evaluation), which culminated into the final recommendation to the College’s executive committee in the winter of 2018.
The solicitation, evaluation, and ultimately the procurement of a new LMS was governed by the College’s Department of Procurement. As a publicly-funded institution in the province of Ontario, Algonquin was required to follow a strict procurement process led by the procurement team. By adhering to this process, the College aimed to achieve an objective evaluation of learning management system service providers through the mechanism of a multi-layered evaluation matrix that assessed a robust list of both functional and technical requirements. The request for proposals (RFP) was supported by the College Procurement processes, and the scores following the five-stage gating process supported a recommendation for a single vendor.
Once the vendor had been selected, the same steering committee turned its attention to the implementation. With the blessing of the College’s Board of Directors, the decision was made to adopt an aggressive timeline to consolidate all course content from multiple platforms to a single LMS by September 2018.
The 6-month implementation journey included intensive discovery sessions with the vendor, establishing the blueprint of the new system, reviewing existing policies and procedures, mass content migration from multiple systems, training of hundreds of faculty and staff, training thousands of students, revising the user support services, establishing a new governance structure and decision-making process, and archiving non-migrated content.
Participants attending this session will not only have the opportunity to share their own experiences and challenges with the selection and implementation of a new LMS with fellow attendees, but they will also benefit from a number of resources that the presenter will share as takeaways including the surveys used to solicit stakeholder feedback, the functional and technical requirements used in the RFP, and sample training materials.