Learning Management System

Urban Insight offers an open source Learning Management System that is designed to help organizations who want to create high-quality, affordable online courses. Unlike the leading proprietary software vendors, such as Blackboard and WebCT, which have expensive licensing models and hardware requirements, the open source LMS supported by Urban Insight is based on a series of linked, license-free components that can be hosted by Urban Insight, or hosted by you.

Scenario:
Your organization offers several traditional courses, and you'd like to explore using your existing curriculum and materials to offer a standalone online course, or a "partner" course to go along with your traditional course so students can participate outside of class. You have evaluated Blackboard and WebCT -- which are impressive products -- but they are simply too expensive for your organization's current efforts, especially since you're not sure how much income, if any, you'll be able to generate from your online courses.

Solution:
The Learning Management System offered by Urban Insight is built around a series of modules that provide many of the same features of higher-end systems, but at a fraction of the cost. Urban Insight can also provide a branded, hosted "school" in which you have full control over managing the courses, but without the worry of hardware, software, or network issues. The LMS is suitable both for online-only courses, and for supplementing traditional courses.

LMS features include:

• Easy to design courses: Create and edit course content through a web browser, or copy and paste from existing documents.
• Simplified access, with each person requiring only one account for the entire school. Each account can have different levels of access within different courses.
• Full control for the administrator over the creation of courses and instructors.
• Full control for the instructor over all settings for a course.
• Activity reports that are available for each student, with graphs.
• Ability for students to upload assignments, which can include a specified due date and maximum grade.
• Courses, within a school, can be placed into categories and searched.
• Chat module that allows users to interact via text.
• Poll module that allows students to vote on topical issues.
• Forum module provides a sophisticated online and threaded discussion form.
• Forum discussions that can be viewed nested, flat or threaded, oldest or newest first; discussion threads can be moved between forums by the instructor.
• A calendar module provides event tracking and management for public and private events.
• A Journal module allows students to keep private or public journals that can be reviewed by the instructor.
• Quiz module that enables online quizzes and tests. Instructors can define a set of questions for use in different quizzes, and questions can be shuffled to reduce cheating.
• Automatic quiz grading.
• Survey module that allows students to analyze the course.
• Workshop module that enables students to conduct peer reviews and public instructor comments on assignments.

Find out about how the Southern California Center for Nonprofit Management is using the Learning Management System.


"Online education is exploding and it's a terrific opportunity to reach non-profits with budgets that don't allow for conference travel or university-based continuing education.

Because we don't have to pay heavy licensing fees, the LMS will enable us to not only improve our training programs and better collaborate with our partners, but it will also allow us to begin to offer free and low-cost support to nonprofit collaboratives and advocacy efforts."

Peter Manzo, Executive Director
Southern California Center for Nonprofit Management (CNM)