Technician Training School To Overhaul LMS

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 09/13/11

A technician school with 11 campuses will be moving onto a new learning management system starting in 2012. Universal Technical Institute (UTI), which trains professional automotive, diesel, collision repair, motorcycle, and marine technicians, has chosen Pearson LearningStudio and Equella, Pearson's digital resource repository. The institute, which has its headquarters in the Phoenix area, has about 18,000 students.

The LMS implementation will begin in early 2012 at the institute's Dallas/Fort Worth campus and then expand to the remaining locations. UTI's program blends hands-on training in class with instructor-led classroom time and interactive online lessons.

LearningStudio follows a software-as-a-service model and integrates features for course administration, a grade-book, syllabus, e-mail, document sharing and group collaboration, real-time user interaction, chat, a dropbox, and a journal, among other functions. The Web-based application also integrates enterprise reporting to monitor and analyze student performance; "Exam Guard" for secure online testing; and eCourse Evaluation, which allows for creation of surveys and course evaluations. The Equella repository allows members of an institution to store, manage, and share digital learning objects.

"The delivery of our dynamic curriculum, which includes a blend of intensive hands on, classroom, and interactive online learning environments required a comprehensive, robust learning management system with the scale, analytics, and reliability to support our training model," said Tom Riggs, senior vice president of operations at UTI. "By partnering with Pearson, we can ensure that our students have the resources they need to fully engage in this unique training environment."

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

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