LMS | News

Ellucian Colleague Intelligent Learning Platform Adds Repository Feature

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 07/30/12

Ellucian has introduced Colleague Intelligent Learning Platform 3.2. The platform, originally introduced in 2010 by Datatel, brings together course management, grading, student information management, and collaboration tools.

Ellucian is the name given to the entity formed when Sungard Higher Education and Datatel became one company in 2011.

Version 3.2 now includes Course Materials Manager, a central repository that lets faculty store, share, and manage course learning materials, including videos, e-books, presentations, lecture capture recordings, and other forms of media. Those learning objects can be tagged by category, peer ranking, and keywords to make them "findable" by other instructors.

Marietta College in Ohio said the new functionality is providing a shared resources area accessible by its instructors as well as other threads of 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 Assistant CIO Aaron Cowdery. "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."

Previously, the college had tried Microsoft SharePoint to encourage the central storing and sharing of materials, but, according to the college, the implementation was difficult to use. So faculty resorted to emailing documents to each other, limiting collaboration and creating version control issues.

With the new version of the platform users can load documents into the central repository to make them available to all instructional staff. Users can edit and collaborate on the materials, search and download them, and select relevant content and transmit it directly to course sites.

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