Cloud-Based Suite Helps Yukon College with All-in-One Package
One advantage to deploying a suite of products from a single vendor, of course, is that everything
works together by design. For Yukon College, there were numerous additional advantages in
choosing a learning management system (LMS) that was part of a suite that included a portal
product and emergency contact system. With one front end in place, students, faculty and staff
could enter the college’s site and access a variety of applications using a single user name and
password. They were also assured of seeing the same interface when taking courses online from
any of the college’s 14 campuses. And finally, the suite’s bundle of software included tools the
college needed right away but didn’t necessarily have the budget for.
Yukon College is located in Canada’s Yukon territory well north of British Columbia and just east
of Alaska—an area of the world where winter days are short and brutally cold. The college was
founded in the early 1980s to serve citizens of the Yukon, and its 14 campuses are spread across
the sprawling territory. Yukon College offers some 300 face-to-face, online, or hybrid courses in
total.
There were several reasons driving the college’s search for a new learning management solution
one year ago, explains Manager of Computing Services Michel Barwell. First, the college wanted
to consolidate on a single platform for its LMS, so that students, especially those in remote
locations, didn’t have to wrestle with a different technology depending on the course instructor’s
whims. “We wanted the student experience to be the same, whether they were in [the main
campus in] White Horse or Watson Lake, as far as how the software looked and felt,” Barwell says.
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