'Mothership Project' Looks To Sync Courses Across Schools -- THE Journal

Learning Management Systems

'Mothership Project' Looks To Sync Courses Across Schools

By Dian Schaffhauser
12/11/12

Edvance360 is testing new learning management system cloning technology that the educational software company said will be of great interest to districts and schools that want to standardize curriculum across multiple locations. LMS administrators were reporting challenges with managing all of the different versions of content across their sites. To address the problem, Edvance360 came up with the Mothership Project, which it's currently testing among its client base.

The Mothership Project is an LMS that doubles as a central class catalog. The typical LMS has courses and a global learning object repository that can be shared across classes for one school. Additionally, courses can be cloned from one semester to the next within that one school.

"The Mothership builds on these capabilities and allows this functionality to occur across multiple institutions," explained Catherine Garland, vice president of marketing and sales. "For example, let's say you have an organization with three technical schools. You provide the same course offerings at all three schools. Maintaining a sense of consistency is important across the three schools. The Mothership allows the administrator to maintain a higher-level course catalog/LMS where changes in any one course at the top level can be replicated across the three schools."

Using Common Cartridge import/export functionality, the Mothership LMS exports course "cartridges" into each second-level LMS at a specific school. Additionally, content developed at those individual sites can be exported back to the Mothership LMS.

Garland said the company expects the new functionality will be most helpful in enabling districts to better track and compare learning outcomes and core competencies across schools that use a similar curriculum.

The new capability is expected to provide Edvance360 administrators with a central course catalog through which they can distribute and manage curriculum and learning outcomes. At the same time, Garland, noted, each school can maintain its own LMS site with a unique brand and logo. Also, there would be no difference for the teachers at the second-tier sites. She added that the new functionality is available as an add-on module to the company's flagship LMS product.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

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