Established in 1839, Mount Allison University is home to over 2300 students in the heart of Atlantic Canada, and is ranked as the #1 undergraduate university in Canada according to the 2025 MacLean’s University Rankings – the 25th time Mount Allison University has received this recognition.
Extended Learning at Mount Allison University is a growing initiative focused on expanding learning formats and audiences supported through the University. The unit offers programming for learning within and beyond New Brunswick, with different durations, flexible scheduling, and a mix of synchronous, asynchronous, and hyflex modalities.
Key Needs and Challenges
In 2024, Mount Allison University took vital steps to expand their non-credit continuing education offerings to support learner needs and expectations. This required setting up a platform that would support this growth.
Mount Allison decided to leverage Catalyst’s expertise. A Premium Certified Moodle Partner, Catalyst has over 20 years of experience in integrating robust, flexible, and fully managed learning management system (LMS) solutions for higher education institutions.
The Extended Learning unit of Mount Allison University needed Catalyst to help deliver an LMS solution that is:
- Scalable and resilient to support continuing education courses
- Fully-managed to relieve internal IT teams from the burden of system administration and maintenance
- Able to seamlessly integrate an e-commerce plugin to improve course enrollment process
- Reliable with high availability, performance, and security to support learners from within and beyond New Brunswick
- Capable of producing custom reports based on course enrollment and activities
- Visually cohesive and reflective of MtA’s branding
- Offers an intuitive user and learning experiences
Findings and Solutions
The team at Catalyst IT Canada worked closely with the Extended Learning team at MtA to:
- Understand MtA’s needs and challenges as they grow their continuing education programs
- Design and implement a new Moodle LMS instance with MtA’s visual branding
- Migrate MtA’s Moodle to Catalyst’s secure, flexible and fully-managed cluster on Amazon Web Services (AWS) tailored to their needs.
Designing a visually-cohesive Moodle LMS
Using Moodle’s built-in functions and themes, Catalyst implemented a template-based Moodle site design, customised with Mount Allison University’s visual branding and styling preferences.
The MtA team was able to use recommended outlines, use cases and implementation support and ensure visual cohesion across all Moodle sites.
Initial configuration assistance
As part of the scope of work, Catalyst conducted the configuration for the Moodle instance, including setting up the infrastructure, user registration, and enrollment workflows.
With the integration of an e-commerce plugin, MtA will encourage prospective learners to enroll for their courses and conduct payment online by completing the sign-up process.
Fully-managed services and ongoing support
The fully-managed service offering means that Catalyst acceptsfull responsibility for ongoing monitoring, maintenance, data back-up, system upgrades, and security patches of the Extended Learning’s Moodle LMS instance.
Catalyst’s ongoing support ensures full incident and maintenance window flexibility, providing MtA with assurance that they have ‘real person’ support when they need it most, including answering any questions they had about cybersecurity risk mitigations and Moodle tools, such as H5P and video content.
Results
Mount Allison University’s Extended Learning Moodle instance was delivered seamlessly in just four weeks, ahead of the projected deadline. Since the go-live, the team now has a reliable platform to support non-credit courses – from sign-up to payment to course delivery – providing access to diverse learners within New Brunswick and beyond.
The team can now take advantage of high availability, performance, and security support to ensure a great user experience conducive to learners with various connectivity needs.
With the collaboration between Extended Learning at MtA and Catalyst Canada, administration and IT teams now have relief from the burden of system administration and maintenance, allowing the Extended Learning team to finally focus on delivering quality learning content and engaging with their learners to the fullest.
Working with Catalyst Canada for our continuing education has been a wonderful experience. Thanks to the Catalyst team we were able to launch programming quickly, efficiently, with nuanced and individualized formatting, and the security and support of the managed system.
Meeting growing demands
Lifelong learning is reshaping the educational sector. With Extended Learning’s flexible and scalable Moodle LMS instance, Mount Allison University is now ready meet Canada’s growing demand for continuing education. Having an up-to-date and future-ready platform for course delivery will provide MtA with better user experience and a competitive edge. It will also ensure support for the University’s future growth.
The Catalyst IT Canada team is friendly and easy to work with, answering questions thoroughly and with understanding, and in a timely fashion. Their team addressed our needs easily through their managed ticketing system and were able to launch our system upgrades ahead of schedule. Catalyst Canada has not only provided great support and service but have also made us feel like a value member of their community.
Catalyst thanks Mount Allison University for partnering with us and trusting us with this project. We are proud to support their future growth and innovation in learning.
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