Kansas' Johnson County CC Moves to Angel for Blended Course Delivery

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 09/09/08

Johnson County Community College (JCCC) in Overland Park, Kansas has adopted the Angel Learning Management Suite (LMS) to deliver online and blended courses. The largest of Kansas' 19 community colleges, JCCC chose to transition to the Angel LMS from Blackboard following a review of available products. According to a statement from the vendor, the college chose Angel for its stability, ease of use, and feature set.

"Faculty and staff at Johnson County Community College have spent the past two years researching trends in learning management systems and consulting with friends and colleagues at other institutions in a quest to identify an easy to use, uncomplicated, and, most importantly, stable, full-featured system that would support the needs of our online students," said Jonathan Bacon, academic director, Educational Technology Center. "As we began exploring alternative learning management systems, one name was mentioned repeatedly by our faculty (based on personal experience) and the word of mouth recommendations of colleagues at other institutions. That name was Angel Learning. After campus demonstrations by several vendors, hands-on testing in numerous sandbox courses, and energetic discussion by our faculty and technical support staff, our faculty overwhelmingly chose to transition to Angel. We're very excited about the possibilities and the broad functionality we're discovering in Angel. We really think this system is the welcome messenger of a revival of interest in online teaching and learning at JCCC."

According to an article published in the college's community magazine, the 34,000-student school will run the two learning management systems in parallel through the spring of 2010, at which point Blackboard will be discontinued. Angel will be rolled out in a pilot period in spring 2009.

The school was attracted by Angel's ability to interface with Banner, Second Life, and Microsoft SharePoint and its inclusion of tools such as wikis, blogs, journals, access to social bookmarking, and instant messaging.