Web-based Course Management System

Overview

Houghton College is a Christian liberal arts college of 1,300 students located in western New York. Ranked by U.S. News as one of the top national liberal arts colleges, twelve years straight, Houghton has been the recipient of America's 100 Most Wired Colleges and one of eleven institutions to receive Pioneer Awards at the fourth annual Conference on Ubiquitous Computing. In its strategic approach to integrate technology with pedagogy to drive better learning, Houghton College evaluated various mainstream course management systems such as Blackboard and WebCT but quickly realized that a high-priced, out-of-the-box solution that required the college to adopt its teaching culture to software as opposed to the other way would be highly disadvantageous. Houghton partnered with Lance Technologies to develop a course management system based on its exact requirements and maintain the system based on perpetual focus group studies and student/teacher feedback.

Problem

Houghton College has always been strategically-minded and learning focused in the evaluation of education technology. The institution carefully evaluates the merit of any emerging technology trends on its campus and decides on solutions that are unequivocally good returns on investment.

With a highly rated computing infrastructure in place, Houghton faculty were adept at utilizing technology in preparing class work. Similarly, a majority of students at Houghton already performed a large quantity of tasks online such as preparing FAFSA applications, paying bills online, and collaborating with friends and family. Houghton College was at a point where unfamiliarity with computing technology was not a deterrent against moving various routine college-related tasks online for greater efficiency.

Aware of growing sentiment on campus, Houghton began its search for web-based course management systems that would aid in augmenting pedagogical quality. Houghton sought a solution that would allow time-consuming ancillary tasks such as grade request, regular learning assessment, and schedule maintenance to be fulfilled efficiently online, thereby providing professors with more class time to teach and discuss.

In keeping with the college's philosophy of being good stewards of its finances, Houghton required a solution that was cost-justified: providing a great return on investment, guaranteeing a high adoption rate, and not providing ancillary add-ons that are useless to the institution but are still paid for.

From a technical stand-point, Houghton College needed a course management system that could be easily integrated into its existing administrative back-end systems. The CMS also had to be very stable with a high level of accessibility and support.

Solution

After having looked at Blackboard, WebCT, and Angel, Houghton College decided to use Synapse. Synapse's affordable cost structure coupled with powerful software capability presented Houghton with a cost-justified solution especially attractive to institutions its size. Synapse's rigorously audited development ensures that Synapse is strictly course management. By keeping functionality strictly relevant and forgoing ancillary add-ons, superfluous costs were eliminated, providing Houghton College with a higher return on investment.

Synapse's strong selling point to professors was its ease of use, with equivalent man-hours of development time dedicated to accessibility and usability testing as the actual programming of the system. When compared to Blackboard and WebCT, Synapse-using faculty commented on the comparatively superior ease of use. Most faculty were fully trained in the use of Synapse within an hour and subsequent support calls were very light. A high adoption rate was facilitated largely through the simplicity of Synapse.

Feedback from Houghton College was positive on the first semester use of Synapse. The Synapse development team took a partner approach to the implementation and support of the system, listening carefully to Houghton faculty and their needs in developing the next release beta of Synapse. The stability of the system was also a strong selling point to Houghton, with Synapse being down only for planned maintenance.

Student response to Synapse was also overwhelmingly positive, with 72% strongly supporting the continued use of Synapse. Student favorite features were 24/7 access to course materials, a centralized class calendaring system that notified them of due dates and upcoming events, online grade monitoring, and web-based learning assessment features.