How San Beda College Alabang Saved Educators Time and Improved the User Experience With Open LMS
Founded in 1972, San Beda College Alabang is a leading Catholic education institution in the south of metro Manila, Philippines. Originally established as a preschool, the institution now offers programs for every stage of learning, from primary through postgraduate education. This includes the San Beda College School of Law, one of the top law schools in the country. In addition to offering education programs for every learner, the institution has served as the headquarters for the national bar exams of the Philippines in 2023 and 2024. The national bar exams are one of the country’s most rigorous professional licensing assessments, and the institution also serves as a local testing center for examinees in the south of Metro Manila.
The Challenge: Implement an Intuitive Tool Compatible With In-Person and Online Learning Environments
San Beda College Alabang serves around 2,400 higher education students. These courses are taught face-to-face throughout the academic year. Typically the only exception to this is when San Beda College Alabang operates as an official testing center for the national bar exam. The law assessment is administered by the Supreme Court of the Philippines, and testing locations like San Beda College Alabang must adhere to strict regulations to maintain the integrity of the exam.
The bar exam takes each examinee three days to complete and is administered in person over the course of eight days. It takes three weeks for San Beda College Alabang to ensure its campus is ready to accommodate examinees and administer the assessment. During this time, the institution’s students cannot attend in-person classes since many of the learning spaces are occupied by the law examinees who cannot be disturbed during the exam. San Beda College Alabang’s students instead continue their learning programs completely online so their studies aren’t disrupted.
The institution needed a learning management system to primarily house its course content, but the system also needed to be capable of handling completely remote learning. San Beda College Alabang has had an LMS platform since 2014, but its faculty repeatedly reported that the system wasn’t user-friendly. Professors were met with visible HTML codes within the interface that they couldn’t easily navigate without coding or IT knowledge. This led to frustration and hindered teachers’ ability to focus on enhancing student learning. The school decided it needed a new LMS provider that could offer a better user experience and meet its teachers’ needs.
The Solution: A User-Friendly, Cost-Effective LMS That Can Also Help Institutions Easily Pivot to Accommodate Changing Needs
After evaluating many vendors, San Beda College Alabang chose Open LMS as its LMS provider in 2017. The intuitive user interface was easy for teachers to navigate, and the open-source platform’s affordable pricing options made Open LMS the perfect choice for the learning institution.
San Beda College Alabang made the Open LMS platform available to all of its educators as a central hub for storing learning activities and assessments. Initially, the school didn’t require its teachers to use the LMS, since learning activities happened almost entirely in face-to-face environments. That changed, however, in April 2020 after the Philippine Commission on Higher Education (CHED) required all higher education institutions in the country to adopt an LMS. This legislation was implemented to ensure learning institutions could continue providing services for students and minimize disruptions to their education during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
With the help of Open LMS, San Beda College Alabang’s teachers were able to quickly transition their instructional materials and lessons from in-person to remote environments with minimal disruption to their learning programs.
“We chose Open LMS because it was easy to navigate. Our dean during that time, Dr. Chito San Mateo, described Open LMS as very user friendly and said, ‘It's just like using Facebook.’”
The Results: More Productive Teachers, Satisfied Learners, and a Continued Partnership
By 2022, San Beda College Alabang’s programs had reverted to face-to-face learning environments, and its teachers had become significantly more comfortable navigating the LMS. Although courses were no longer being taught exclusively online, teachers were leveraging Open LMS to save time and enhance their curricula. San Beda College Alabang doesn’t officially track how much time its educators spend creating and revising their courses, but feedback from its professors confirms that using Open LMS has helped them increase their productivity because they no longer need to create courses from scratch each semester.
The educators appreciate the simplicity of Open LMS’s platform and its compatibility with other systems. Open LMS can effortlessly import and export data from a variety of sources, making it easier for San Beda College Alabang’s teachers to streamline their processes. The professors now create and import their digital materials into the LMS the first time they teach a course. They’re then able to reuse their content again and again, adapting it as needed for their future classes. This saves teachers time in the long run and enables them to dedicate more resources to improving their teaching strategies and building relationships with learners.
San Beda College Alabang also reports that its students have more academic confidence as a result of using Open LMS. The platform gives learners a single, consistent portal for submitting assignments and accessing additional resources, regardless of which courses they’re taking. The LMS’s virtual gradebooks help to ensure learners know where they stand academically at all times so they can make adjustments to their performance when necessary.
With the help of Open LMS, San Beda College Alabang can conduct its courses both in-person and virtually while causing little to no interruptions to its learners’ progress. The institution also leverages Open LMS’s native reporting tools to track which courses experience the most engagement each month, as well as which professors are most active on the platform. This data is used to demonstrate that the school is maintaining compliance with the CHED’s LMS memorandum, and it’s also required when San Beda College Alabang applies for reaccreditation.
For the last seven years, the students and teachers at San Beda College Alabang have benefited from Open LMS’s intuitive, easy-to-navigate learning platform. The institution plans to continue its partnership with Open LMS and leverage the many features and tools available to help its users succeed.
“With Open LMS, we had continuity of our operations and our education process. We were able to provide online and flexible learning to our most important stakeholders: our students. I think during that time [the COVID-19 pandemic], the LMS was really our power. And now, Open LMS is still the core tool that our institution has, particularly for our higher education students.”
