Alton College is a sixth form college located in Hampshire, UK. The College provides further education, higher education and adult/community education programmes across a diverse range of subjects.

Problem

Having been using Moodle for some time already, the team at Alton College were looking to upgrade and refresh their learning platform to better serve all members of the college community, as well as better integrating it with existing systems.

We heard about Titus when first looking to upgrade our old Moodle system. We looked at a variety of different companies, and we were first struck by how responsive and quick the team were in replying to our initial query. We have found this excellent and responsive customer service throughout our relationship with Titus.

– Peter Cox, Director of Learning and Quality, Alton College

Consultation

Following an initial consultation between Alton College and Titus Learning, a project outline was jointly drawn up which laid out the following key features the new platform would need:

• To improve the design of the Moodle platform in order to make it easier to navigate and more efficient for staff and students to use.
• To integrate the new learning platform with the Office 365 suite already used by staff and students at the college for document creation, editing and storage.
• To provide a bespoke training and support service, which would assist the college in launching the new platform, ensure each user was able to take full advantage of the new features.
• To provide ongoing assistance alongside proactive advice on making the most of the new platform moving forwards.

We were really struck with how responsive Titus were to our specific VLE needs, and how they wanted to work with our College as part of our teaching and learning journey. It quickly became apparent that we were valued as customers and they really took on board our comments.

– Peter Cox, Director of Learning and Quality, Alton College

Actions

Having agreed on the goals, the project commenced and over the development period, Titus Learning implemented the following:

• Created a new responsive Moodle theme designed around key usability principles. This was achieved by implementing a clean, consistent layout throughout the platform, with high visibility of the most used and relevant features at each stage of the user journey and distinct signposting of next steps and help resources.
• Set up integration between Moodle and Office 365, allowing users to sign on with a single set of credentials, and access their office documents and stored files via the learning platform.
• Tested thoroughly across different devices and operating systems before being applied to the new Moodle platform.
• Implemented remote management of Moodle, allowing Titus Learning to monitor, patch and upgrade the new learning platform with minimal disruption to users.
• Provided full training on the use of the new features of the new Moodle platform.
• Assigned Alton College a named contact for ongoing support and arranged regular “check-in” calls to offer guidance and proactive advice on maximising the use of Moodle.

The process of consultation and development has been really clearly communicated, and we are really pleased with how quickly it has all been put together for us. The consultation process felt very collaborative and we were really included in the process.

– Peter Cox, Director of Learning and Quality, Alton College

Looking to the future

With the Moodle development phase finished, and staff training completed, Titus Learning are currently working closely with the team at Alton College on launching the new platform to students.

At present we haven’t yet launched the Moodle system to students. Things are going really well – we are looking forward to re-engaging and working with Titus as we work towards moving to our new Moodle home.

– Peter Cox, Director of Learning and Quality, Alton College

We’ll update this case study as the launch proceeds.

To learn more about the work we’ve done with Moodle, or to find out how we could help your organisation improve engagement, communication and learning outcomes, book a short online demo with one of our team.