Ellucian’s Colleague Intelligent Learning Platform Boosts Faculty Collaboration with New Course Materials Repository


FAIRFAX, Va. – July 23, 2012 – The newest version of the Colleague Intelligent Learning Platform from Ellucian includes a user-friendly central repository that is designed to make it easier for faculty to store, share, and manage all their course learning materials. At Marietta College in Ohio, the new functionality is providing a shared resources area that is easily accessible to its instructional staff.

Colleague Intelligent Learning Platform provides advanced integration and interoperability between administrative and learning management systems (LMS), making it easier for end users and institutions to seamlessly access data and manage information in real-time from within their administrative and academic systems. Ellucian surveys show that institutions that have leveraged the Colleague Intelligent Learning Platform to integrate Colleague with their LMS have experienced increases in LMS adoption among their users by up to 48 percent, while eliminating time spent on administrative tasks by up to 33 percent and saving faculty hundreds of hours on grading and administration.

The newest version (3.2) of the platform features a Course Materials Manager that is designed to further reduce administrative burdens. Faculty, instructional designers, and academic technologists can easily store, share, and search in one location for all of their learning content—video, custom eBooks, presentations, lecture captures and more—all tagged by metadata such as, categories, peer rankings, and relevant keywords.

Marietta College is using version 3.2 of the Colleague Intelligent Learning Platform to provide integration between its Moodle LMS and Colleague administrative system. “The new functionality extends the benefits of integration that we’ve already gained from the platform,” said Aaron Cowdery, assistant CIO at the college. “We have increased faculty adoption of our LMS by 60 percent and streamlined collaboration on campus. In fact, we’ve seen a growth in team site usage of 380 percent. We also reduced our annual licensing and support costs by 75 percent.”

In the past, the college directed faculty to a Sharepoint site to encourage storage and sharing of resources, but the site was too difficult to use. Instead, faculty resorted to emailing documents to each other, limiting collaboration and creating version control issues. Also, the process to upload materials into their courses was burdensome, requiring several manual steps that were executed from their individual PCs.

Using the Course Materials Manager within the platform, a user, such as a department head, can load documents into the central repository where they are available to all instructional staff. Any course material can be shared between individuals, within a department, or institution-wide. Individuals can then edit and collaborate on the materials in addition to downloading them. Users can search available materials, select relevant content and transmit it directly to their course site. The Course Materials Manager is seamlessly integrated with Moodle’s native file repository framework so that faculty members can automatically load selected materials directly into Moodle. It also enables the storage and sharing of Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) packages that can be loaded and shared across faculty in a particular discipline. In addition, faculty and staff gain peace of mind that their teaching artifacts are securely backed up and always accessible.

“Now we have a shared resources area that is easily accessible to all our instructional staff,” said Linda Z. Roesch, instructional technologist, Worthington Center for Teaching Excellence at the college. “The platform provides an over-arching file system that reaches across all classes that we never had before.”

“One of the biggest challenges and investment of time for any professor is the management of course materials,” said Mark Jones, chief product officer, Ellucian. “The Course Materials Manager reduces this administrative burden significantly and strengthens the potential of the Intelligent Learning Platform to make it easier for faculty to use and adopt LMS functionality.”

About Marietta College
Located in Marietta, Ohio, at the confluence of the Muskingum and Ohio rivers, Marietta College is a four-year liberal arts college. Tracing its roots to the Muskingum Academy begun in 1797, the college was officially chartered in 1835. Today Marietta College serves a body of 1,400 full-time students. The college offers 44 majors and has been listed among Barron’s Best Buys in College Education and Peterson’s Competitive Colleges, and has been recognized as one of the top regional comprehensive colleges by U.S. News & World Report and The Princeton Review, as well as one of the nation’s best by Forbes.com.

Visit Ellucian at www.ellucian.com, follow Ellucian on Twitter (@EllucianInc), and like Ellucian on Facebook (/EllucianInc).

About Ellucian
Ellucian, the new company formed by the combination of Datatel and SunGard Higher Education, helps education institutions thrive in a dynamic world. It delivers a broad portfolio of technology solutions, developed in collaboration with a global education community, and provides strategic guidance to help education institutions of all kinds navigate change, achieve greater transparency, and drive efficiencies. More than 2,300 institutions in 40 countries around the world look to Ellucian for the ideas and insights that will move education forward, helping people everywhere discover their futures through learning. Visit ellucian.com.

For more information contact:
Ellucian
Laura Kvinge
Tel: 801.257.4158
laura.kvinge@ellucian.com

Trademark information: Ellucian and the Ellucian logo and Colleague are trademarks or registered trademarks of Ellucian, Inc. or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Other trade names and trademarks used herein are owned by their respective holders.

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