By: Jess Breiner
In the fall of 2026, Concordia College switched from using Moodle, their long-standing learning management system, or LMS, to CobberLearn, but Concordia’s integrated technology services (ITS) department say that very little has changed.
The change was necessary because some of Moodle’s features, such as professors’ ability to email students directly from Moodle, needed support from the third-party company that hosted Moodle’s servers, said Joe Kennedy, Concordia’s instructional designer for ITS.
“So, we had to change our house. We also went from Moodle version 4.5, which was no longer considered secure, and went to Moodle version 5.1. We also rebranded from Moodle to CobberLearn, which included the font change and the color change,” said Kennedy.
“There are only a couple choices they (professors) can make now about the basic layout of the page. And that was a direct response to the number one student complaint, which was ‘we can’t find anything,’” said Kennedy.
However, this transition came with more roadblocks than ITS, or professors, expected.
“There’s a lot of glitches being worked out right now.
I use discussion forums for business writing and tech writing every single week.
It’s a lot of skill application, and so we need those to work well, and there’s been three or four glitches that have been significant,” said Stephanie Lemmer, an English professor at Concordia.
Kennedy said that the transition went far less smoothly than ITS intended.
“So, the key frustrations were noticed. Faculty, we wanted them to have full access to every course on August one. That did not happen,” he said.
“The external tools did not integrate properly, and some of them until the second week of class, which is not really okay. Some processes and buttons, and tools were hard to find, or hard to access. Some functionality was changed for the worst or appeared to,” said Kennedy.
Considering this, ITS has been working since the beginning of the school year to iron out these major bugs.
“ITS is working them out constantly. They’re always working them out, and I don’t feel at all that they’re gonna be ignored,” said Lemmer.
Kennedy also said that some student frustrations are not exclusive to Moodle, and that due to the nature of learning management systems they would be present regardless of which system the college decided to use.
“And actually, the primary one is students who are like, my classes aren’t in Moodle. It’s like they are. They’re under the calendar because the top of the calendar is recently accessing courses,” said Kennedy.
Some freshmen students feel that CobberLearn is not that different of a system when compared to what they used previously in high school, and don’t feel like upperclassmandisdain for the program is justified. Rather, most of their difficulties from the program came from the lack of adoption by professors.
“I would say maybe half of my teachers actually, like, use CobberLearn, one of the hardest parts about using CobberLearn for me has been the fact that my teachers just don’t always use it,” said Kaylee Shepard, a freshman and Spanish major at Concordia.
“Every day, I don’t always know if I have any sort of homework or quiz to be doing, because I have to check, like, five different interfaces and at that point I just kind of give up,” she said.
This experience, however, varies across departments at Concordia. Kendell Berger, an undeclared major who has been taking classes in the business center, said that all her professors use CobberLearn, and that so far accessing courses has been easy for her because everything is in one place.
Both Shepard and Berger said that they had not noticed bugs or glitches in using CobberLearn. The main concern for Shepard was how to access her grade book, but once she figured that out, she said that the platform had worked fine from then on.
ITS also holds a weekly meeting where students and faculty can voice their grievances with the platform and provide feedback and suggestions on how ITS should manage CobberLearn in the future.
“Students are always welcome to join every Monday from 10 to 11 a.m. We have what we call the CobberLearn Council. It’s some of us in ITS and instructional design. Someone from the library, someone from student services, either the center for student success, or the center for holistic health, a couple faculty members, other people, so departmental, administrative, and executive assistants.”
Kennedy said that ITS will continue to work out any bugs as they are found, and Lemmer said that ITS is very active and works to provide fast solutions to students and faculty.
