Giving Credit to Your Non-Credit LMS
By Phill Miller
So, we’re starting this back-to-school period...crazy as it is. And all of our clients have been running around trying to figure out what to do. How do we get students enrolled? How do we train faculty members to teach students? But soon enough, it will be here—that moment when the first day of classes are over, and instructional technologists around the world will...I don’t know...sleep? Have an ice cold adult beverage?
But whatever they do to celebrate, it won’t last long because almost all universities are doing so much more than delivering for-credit courses to their students. Most universities are offering non-credit training for corporate clients. This includes professional development courses, certifications, executive programs, and a million other things that don’t fit nicely into their SIS...or LMS. And not to rain on the parade, in a COVID-19 world all of these offerings have to move online, too.
At Open LMS, we’re doing our best to be your ally in this crazy world. It started with waiving user and storage overages during the pandemic, and then we increased storage allocations across the board. From there, we offered our digital transformation program for schools that were moving online despite their tough budget situations. Next, it was free proctoring for the remainder of 2020. Now, we want to provide you with the most flexible LMS, both in the product and in our model, in a new and simplified way for your non-credit courses and programs.
What does this mean?
First, because we are a SaaS version of Moodle™, it means that your courses can be live in production quicker than you think (i.e. hours/days rather than weeks/months).
Second, we’ve built a configuration of Open LMS that is set up for non-credit courses. That means all the non-credit training that historically lived outside of your LMS or SIS, now can have a cozy place of its own for delivery, tracking, and recognition. And because Moodle™ is such a flexible LMS, it can be configured to be just what you need for your non-credit courses.
Third, we have a series of lightweight training courses to teach important concepts for managing programs that exist outside of your primary student systems. These courses cover topics such as: simple ways to enroll users, awarding certificates, and more.
Fourth, Open LMS is completely mobile friendly—in a browser or in an app, and online or offline. This means you can serve learners wherever they are.
Finally, and maybe most important for many of you, we’re not going to break the bank. We’ve come up with special pricing specifically for non-credit courses and users. It’s simple, it’s affordable, and we’ll make the process of getting it up and going easy.
- If you’re an existing Open LMS client and need more capacity, such as an extra site, to handle non-credit courses, we will waive all setup, implementation, and brand match fees for an additional site. We’ll also match your existing price per user for extra users. And if these additional users put you over our next pricing band, we’ll match the new price for all of your users.
- If you’re not an Open LMS client...well, you should be. Regardless, we’re here to help. No matter what LMS you use for your credit programs for students, we want to offer you an affordable, flexible solution for everything else. This includes an affordable price per active user—which is especially useful in shorter, non-credit courses, where users commonly come and go. We’re also adding the basic implementation and setup package for free, including basic branding and configuration.
Ready to give credit for your non-credit programs?
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