A big part of what Southwestern Community College (SWCC) does is online “distance learning.” These are online courses the college offers — taught by both its own faculty and faculty from the six other Iowa community colleges that are partners in the Iowa Community College Online Consortium (ICCOC).
In fact, online learning is so much a part of what SWCC does that its online Fall 2017 enrollment was 801 students. That’s why the college’s recent overhaul of its online course platform was such a big deal; and administrators at SWCC were nervous about the transformation.
“This last year has been a massive scramble for us to find a different platform to host our online coursework,” said SWCC Director of Distance Education Doug Green during the college’s Dec. 12 board of trustees meeting. “And then to get all of that shifted over, too, to me, even saying that makes my skin crawl. And I can’t even believe that we made it through it.”
The software platform required by the ICCOC to support its online classes includes features for everything required in delivering to the student a fully-featured online classroom.
Aside from the basics like online message boards and video players, the ICCOC’s new software platform includes software dedicated to detecting plagiarism, managing online exam sessions and online tutoring. The cost of these services is spread out over all the ICCOC’s partner schools.
“And I’m not really sure we could even afford this if it was just us (just SWCC),” said Greene. “This is really the ‘Cadillac’ of online programming.”
SWCC migrated from its previous software service, Pearson eCollege, just over this past year. Pearson eCollege was officially retired by the Denver-based software company causing the ICCOC to look for alternatives.
Salt Lake City-based software company Canvas was the software service that the ICCOC settled on. SWCC has completed one online semester with the new platform.
“We went with Canvas,” said Greene. “It’s the fastest growing platform in the country, and it has great teaching and learning tools.”
According to Greene, in Canvas’ young tenure with the ICCOC the results have been promising so far.
“I was nervous with switching over to Canvas that it might hurt our grades,” said Greene. “But here’s our numbers through October — these were the first folks to make it through on a Canvas platform: 91 percent finished at a C or higher, 98 percent a D or higher and 96 percent students were retained. So they were not dropping out — they were finishing to a grade. And that’s what separates us from those for-profit schools (like Kaplan University or University of Phoenix).”
Greene said Canvas has an excellent mobile app, and he hopes it will be the college’s platform of the future.
“I think this first semester has gone very well,” said Greene. “I am very pleased — and I was very nervous. But I like the way the classes look.”