Motivis' new LRM addresses the shift to competency-based education

Motivis Learning, the company that designs innovative, student-centric and personalized teaching and learning models, has introduced its new Learning Relationship Management (LRM) system, claiming it to be the next-gen, cloud based software platform for educational institutions. The platform is a personalized, student-centered, and competency-based education (CBE) system that caters to K-12, higher education and education institution.

In an exclusive chat with Techseen, Brian Peddle, Founder and CEO, Motivis Learning explains, “Its about learning relationship management tools which we feel is the next thing, the LMS has run its course and the next thing for learning needs to be actionable intelligence, building relationships. Student should feel like they matter in school and these are the key pieces in getting student’s success.” The Motivis LRM is a holistic learning environment that fully-integrates Motivis’ Learning Management System (LMS), campus community system, coaching and advising platform and student information functions. Motivis Learning has combined all four systems – typically thought of as isolated education technology systems into one seamless platform that is powered by Salesforce CRM. According to the company by building the platform on Salesforce, it could be fast and agile as it saw CRM to be a perfect fit for a student relationship management tool, just like for customers.

“We got a lot of press around what we had built on Salesforce, either from Salesforce and from the education community which wanted to do competency based education. Developing a comprehensive teaching and learning platform for competency-based and other student-centric education models is not a one size fits all proposition. Every education institution approaches outcomes-based learning differently.”

Peddle states that the company spent the past two years working with seven design partners, different higher education institutions who each had their own implementation requirements to ensure that the new Motivis Learning LRM solution was designed to support multiple models of education, as well as allow for more traditional institutions to experiment with new models without being confined to legacy systems. Motivis states that this platform is a relationship management between the students and the teachers as well as the education community. It has LMS pieces, Student Information System (SIS) pieces, and community pieces that are all tied together to surface in one system having multiple goals. Learning Relationship Management (LRM) Solution Integrates Learning Management System, Social Networking and Communications with Student Information System into Powerful All-in-One Platform Designed for Student-Centered Learning. According to Motivis, the new platform addresses the shift to competency-based education (CBE) in the US market. The LRM is designed for CBE programs and works with direct assessment as well as traditional course/credit hour-based programs which includes:

• Student-centric design fundamentally geared towards transparency around competencies and assessment.
• Flexible curriculum creation for multi-tiered personalized and competency-based programs.
• Educators can create competency and sub-competency collections per program and tie mastery to assignment deliverables.
• Support for multiple roles for a single user; users can be curriculum designers at the same time they are an educator or student.
• Gradebook that illustrates a holistic view of students’ progress for assignments or towards mastering competencies and performance indicators.
• Social networking tool that allows institutions to create a private branded community for their campus to connect and collaborate. Combine the social front-end with Salesforce’s big data back-end to open new opportunities for student reporting.
• A student information bridge where administrators can track every student’s learning journey – from applicant to student to alumni and beyond – from one centralized record

The company states that schools today use multiple systems, there is a system of records, career solutions, multiple LMSs, grading, and all these little pieces start to add up to become a costly exposition. “All of them have to be integrated, its costly because all of them have to be integrated by a single person and it ends up being hap-hazard since people in schools are still working with excel sheets. We see us as a system of engagement where everything is at one spot,” says Peddle.

“The platform becomes the social fabric of a student’s school or college career replacing the web portal essentially. The social aspect is what we give away but the LMS and SIS pieces wrap around it and get deep analytics into every aspect of their education.”

For a student the system gives, the progress, the remarks from teachers, the upcoming and pending projects, instructor transcripts, and a host of other features that can help build an e-portfolio. And as this evolves, we can build mentoring and career tools. Motivis claims to continue to enhance the LRM, it will increasingly leverage machine learning to develop cognitive augmentation tools, helping students and educators engage in truly personalized learning experiences and creating a suite of tools to drive student success and degree completion. “Going forward, we want to see huge benefits from getting AI into the mix, with machine learning and predictive analytics in a way that addresses students to build the student-faculty and student-student relationships. We want to leverage machine learning to provide cognitive augmentation, which will have a powerful effect in student learning,” adds Peddle.