“Our commitment to the institution-wide adoption of Aula’s Learning Experience Platform is a commitment to building learning communities that engage and excite today’s students in their academic experience at university.”
As universities move towards more flexible delivery, deeply engaging students is key to improving retention, achievement, and satisfaction.
Forward-looking institutions like Coventry University, shortlisted for UK University of the Year in The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2021, are showing their commitment to learning excellence by embracing a community-first approach with Aula, the Learning Experience Platform (LXP) for higher education.
In September 2020, Coventry became the first institution to transition all courses from Moodle to Aula—a process that benefited more than 40,000 students across 6 campuses.
Coventry’s existing VLE, Moodle, acted primarily as a repository for course materials (e.g. slides and video lectures), which resulted in very limited interaction between students, their peers, and educators, and failed to foster any real sense of community.
Provost Ian Dunn was looking to replace Moodle with a community-first learning experience that would truly engage learners, facilitate meaningful connection, and improve students’ likelihood to succeed—so he turned to Aula and kicked off a pilot in the academic year 2018/2019.
For the pilot, Coventry migrated 26 modules from Moodle to Aula and compared student satisfaction, sense of community, and engagement across the two learning experiences.
The impressive results and positive feedback from both students and educators gave Coventry’s leadership the confidence to pursue a larger implementation.
On average, it can take an educator about 80 hours to design and build a highly engaging digital learning experience—and that’s time most educators just don’t have. Aula’s combination of easy-to-use technology with evidence-informed learning design enables them to create highly engaging learning experiences in around just 8 hours.
With pressure to move more modules online faster in order to support students during the pandemic, Aula’s team of expert learning designers worked one-to-one with Coventry’s educators in the transformation of their modules, guiding the shift from a content-first to a community-first approach to digital learning.
The Aula scale-up continued throughout the summer: between June and August, Aula’s learning designers transformed 1200 modules into community-first learning experiences for the Autumn semester.
At the start of the 2020/2021 academic year, the rollout allowed Coventry to extend Aula to its entire student body of 40,000 learners across 6 locations.
As the UK re-entered lockdown in January 2021 and face-to-face delivery was suspended again, Coventry’s decision also ensured that staff and students would not experience additional disruption and could continue the learning journey together.
