Sacred Heart University (SHU) is highly regarded for combining rigorous study with personal attention to its students—no small feat for one of the largest Catholic universities in New England.
As evidenced by the extensive community service, experiential learning opportunities, athletic programs, and robust student services offered on campus, the focus on the student experience is paramount at Sacred Heart, and nowhere is this truer than in the classroom.
The Challenge
Finding the Best LMS for Faculty and Students
With a lower-than-average faculty-to-student ratio,* nine colleges and schools, and almost 90 different degree programs to choose from, Sacred Heart University has not only been listed as a university with the happiest students but also one of academic excellence as well.
For 20 years, Anthology® Blackboard had been the campus-wide learning management system (LMS) at Sacred Heart. With the release of Ultra, a completely reimagined and updated interface for Blackboard, the university was excited to upgrade over the summer. Features to deepen engagement, empower self-expression, and better support personalized learning made it a no-brainer.
However, a year after courses were migrated from Original to Ultra, Sacred Heart faculty requested a review of alternate LMSs in the market to ensure they were using the best platform for the needs of their students. The LMS needed to be not only easy to use but powerful and flexible and able to support the personalized needs of the student body. To ensure faculty felt confident in the technology they were using, the university agreed to run a pilot of two alternate LMSs: Canvas by Instructure and Brightspace by D2L.
The Solution
Finding the Best LMS
The pilot program began in March of 2022 with a survey of 229 faculty participants who identified their current sentiment toward Blackboard, their needs, prior experience, level of expertise, and more. From there, a list of “need to have” and “nice to have” features for students and faculty was established as a baseline criterion against which the LMSs would be evaluated. This list included ease of use, accessibility, grading functionality, a seamless student experience, reliability, visual appeal, customizability, and more.
In May, a subset of 29 instructors were asked to volunteer to teach one or more of their fall 2022 courses using either Brightspace by D2L or Canvas by Instructure, in addition to Ultra. Each participating instructor underwent a full day of vendor-led training on the LMS, was asked to build or rebuild their course(s) from scratch in the new platform, and delivered the course(s) to students in the fall. Throughout the duration of the course, faculty had access to an internal support team (to prevent vendor bias), written help documentation as provided by vendors, recorded training sessions, and more—all to ensure they were able to deliver the course effectively in the new environment.
Faculty and students were given ample opportunity to provide feedback throughout the pilot, including pre-course, mid-course, and post-course surveys for faculty, post-course surveys for students, and multiple focus groups.
Insights Delivered
SHU Faculty Overwhelmingly Preferred Blackboard over Canvas and Brightspace
At the conclusion of the pilot, the recommendation from faculty was overwhelmingly in favor of continuing to use the Blackboard upgrade, with only 27% of faculty recommending a move to Canvas and 3.5% wishing to move to Brightspace.
Feedback from faculty included:
“[Ultra] is lovely to use and easy to navigate.”
“Blackboard is the most comprehensive.”
“Ultra provides everything that I need in a user-friendly format.”
In addition to Blackboard being the best fit for Sacred Heart based on the identified criterion from the pilot, both faculty and administrators took note of the frequent feature releases and improvements being made within the LMS with every release, with one faculty member commenting, “Ultra gets better and better with each iteration.”
Epilogue
Sacred Heart continues to find value in the ongoing, iterative improvements made to the LMS with every release. An active and highly engaged member of the Anthology Idea Exchange, Sacred Heart University has voted on over 25 ideas that have been implemented in Blackboard in the last 18 months, with dozens more being researched and under consideration for future development.
The responsiveness to ideas in the Idea Exchange is an important differentiator for Anthology. Any company can put something like that together and say they’re collecting feedback from customers—but Anthology can back it up with real numbers and real product releases that reflect the wants and needs of their users. [The Idea Exchange] is a great way for us to partner with our faculty to make sure they’re getting what they need from Blackboard, and that students are having a positive experience with the LMS as well.
Nicole Trudell, Director of Instructional Technology & Support Services, Sacred Heart University
