Hult Business Students Get Involved in LMS Change
- By Mike Hohenbrink
- 08/16/12
Hult International Business School has selected a new LMS for use by 2,500 students at five campuses across the school.
Instructure’s Canvas platform will replace the Moodle LMS for students in Boston, London, San Francisco, Dubai, and Shanghai following a pilot program involving 21 courses. The school plans to complete the move to the cloud-based platform before the start of the fall 2012 semester.
"We wanted academic consistency across cohorts, degree programs and campuses, which fueled our commitment to moving all courses to Canvas at the same time," said Mukul Kumar, chief academic officer at Hult, in a prepared statement. "Hult's Interactive Teaching approach creates an integrated experience that enables our faculty to complement active in-classroom training with digital resources. The adaptable Canvas platform allows us to incorporate best-in-class digital resources and address multiple learning styles."
Hult included its students in the review process. Students in the school’s Technology Management course acted as consultants, evaluating the two products then providing recommendations to the school’s administration as business clients. The students collected data, both qualitative and quantitative including a student survey showing over 90 percent of students preferring adoption of the new platform.
Among the factors that helped cement the choice was the platform’s mobile-friendly functionality. Hult provides its students with iPads and Canvas's cloud-based platform dovetails with this Web-based mobility.
"We developed specific iPad applications for faculty to grade assignments and for students to engage in their courses," said Brian Whitmer, co-founder and vice-president of product management at Instructure. "We also created Canvas to be optimized for the mobile web, so it works on all mobile devices natively in the browser."
More information on Hult International Business School is available at www.hult.edu, and more information on the Canvas learning platform can be found at www.instructure.com/canvas.