College of Southern Nevada Implementing Angel To Run Online Courses

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 12/03/08

The College of Southern Nevada (CSN), a community college in Las Vegas with 41,000 students, has adopted the Angel Learning Management Suite (LMS) to support its online course offerings. In Spring 2008 CSN began evaluating alternatives to WebCT, which it currently runs, and made the decision to adopt Angel in the fall. In January 2009, CSN's 865 sections of online enrollment will be delivered using the Angel LMS.

"Our system for delivering online learning caused our faculty, students, and help desk problems," reported Terry Norris, director of eLearning. "We experienced the same issues for two years, but the provider did not take action to correct the problems, so we assembled an LMS selection committee conducted a thorough evaluation of available systems and moved quickly to select a new system and get it in place."

The experience students will have with the college's new LMS was an important consideration in CSN's evaluation of LMS alternatives. The college's LMS selection committee included faculty and department representatives as well as the student government president. "Students are the heaviest users of the system," said Norris. "We wanted to be sure students would be comfortable using the LMS we chose."

In the final analysis, the ease of use of the Angel system that won CSN faculty approval also won the student vote. "The CSN student government president compared Angel navigation with Facebook, a site that is already part of many students' experience," said Norris. "He also appreciated that the ability to open Angel in his handheld makes learning mobile."

"Not having the issues associated with our previous system will decrease frustration across the board," Norris concluded. "Using Angel will make taking a CSN online class much easier."