Motivis Learning spins out with $7m

Southern New Hampshire University is spinning out Motivis Learning, commercialising its College for America platform it developed as an in-house major learning management system (LMS). The company will be set up as a for-profit subsidiary, and the university is funding its commercial launch with $7m.

College for America was created at the university in January 2013 when the institution realised that it could not built a satisfying platform on top of Blackboard Learn and failed to achieve that goal with Instructure’s Canvas software, too.

Instead, the university used customer relationship management software Salesforce as the basis for its platform. The platform can be sold as software-as-a-service and can be hosted in the cloud. To students using the system, it appears like a social network – complete with activity feed, overview of current projects and feedback – rather than the traditional learning management system that is merely used to distribute course materials. On the other side, academics can track students’ progress, hand-in dates, and time spent talking to professors.

Motivis has attracted Central Missouri University as a design partner, as it works towards developing the platform further. College for America will continue to exist but henceforth only focus on competency-based education, while Motivis will work solely on the software.

Paul LeBlanc, president at Southern New Hampshire University, said: “We speak of the world of LMSes as a world that is designed around content delivery, course delivery and the mechanics of running a course. It is very course-centric, so we built our program on the basis of our relationship with our students. I think this next generation of systems is really going to be about data and analytics and relationship management. The whole shift in conversation, it seems to me, is about student-centeredness.”