The University of the Free State (UFS) is one of the oldest higher education institutions in South Africa. With three diverse campuses in Bloemfontein and Qwa-Qwa, the university serves 40,000 students across seven faculties.
UFS has a long history with learning management systems and for the last decade has used Blackboard® Learn as its LMS on all campuses. “Back in 2012, the UFS committed to a blended learning and teaching strategy,” recalled Tiana van der Merwe, deputy director of the university’s Centre for Teaching and Learning. “We needed a stable online learning platform that was used extensively in a higher education environment, internationally and nationally, and we opted for Blackboard [Learn].”
Between 2012 and 2016, the Blackboard Learn LMS was hosted locally, but UFS had big plans, and in 2017 opted to make the change to a SaaS route, migrating to Anthology’s cloud-based LMS. Van der Merwe further explained: “By 2017, adoption of the Blackboard [Learn] LMS within the institution was just of such a magnitude - and we knew we wanted to scale this to an even larger extent - we decided to go to the cloud. Since we’ve gone down the SaaS route, we had the infrastructure and stability to support learning and teaching initiatives within faculties.”