Over the past several years, Morehead State Universitys online course adoption (both hybrid and fully online) has grown considerably. In fact, nearly every course has an online component and purely online courses grew from 17 percent to 28 percent during the last five years.

With the success of its online program, coupled with a limited budget, Morehead had to consider the most appropriate learning management system (LMS) for the university. The overall goal was to find a solution that would help faculty create interactive and engaging learning environments while remaining cost-effective.

Choosing a system

When Morehead started the evaluation process, it was using Blackboard Learn 7.3. The university considered either upgrading to Blackboard Learn 9.1 or adopting open source alternative Moodle.

The overall goal was to find a solution that would help faculty create interactive and engaging learning environments while remaining cost-effective. Morehead spoke with other institutions and faculty about their experiences using both solutions. Feedback highlighted the overall simplicity of the updated Learn 9.1 interface, the inclusion of SafeAssign (the plagiarism detection solution), as well as the ease of the upgrade.

Making the upgrade

Based on prior experience, university developers were dreading the typical upgrade headacheand the onslaught of helpdesk calls, faculty concerns about learning a new system, and unanticipated bugs. The upgrade experience to Learn 9.1, however, proved both smooth and well-received. Support from the Blackboard Managed Hosting team kept the university on schedule, meeting the launch date. Also, by participating in the Cohort Program, the Morehead team gained upgrade strategies and additional resources.

When Morehead considers the upgrade experience, it concluded that that Learn 9.1 saves faculty a great deal of time, students find the user interface intuitive, and the product does exactly what it is supposed to do. The dreaded upgrade was a huge success. Other advantages with the upgrade:

  • helpdesk call volume is at about one-third the typical rate for the back to school time of year
  • students are satisfied with cutting-edge features such as mash-ups, blogs, and wikis
  • faculty members have actually stopped administrators on the sidewalk to talk in-detail about the Learn 9.1 features they really like.

Im thrilled to say that Morehead University is extremely happy with our decision to upgrade to Learn 9.1.