More than 190 Nationwide Univeristy Co-op Associations Are Supporting their Students with learningBOX

Release Date :July 19, 2023

• Knowledge sharing

Release Date :July 19, 2023

National Federation of University Co-operative Associations (UNIV.CO-OP) is a consumer's cooperative association whose members include approximately 190 universities and intercollegiate cooperatives in Japan. It offers a variety of support services to universities and students. As a complement to its face-to-face and online courses, the cooperative had been looking for a system that offered courses for all universities nationwide and for each university. In 2021, learningBOX was implemented for the solutions. In this article, you will find the decisive factors why they chose our system, use case and their future outlook and more.

Supplementary Use for Face-to-Face and Online Courses

First of all, could you tell us about your business?

As UNIV.CO-OP, our business is to provide beneficial programs to universities and students such as running cafeterias and on-campus bookstores.

I belong to a business federation, collectively carrying out common projects among universities. The learning support department is involved in various support services, mainly career and skills development support for students until they start working. I am mainly in charge of product planning.

How did you come to know about learningBOX and what was the decisive factor for the implementation?

The trigger was an exhibition held in 2018 or 2019, I think. Including learningBOX, we had compared some e-learning services, and officially decided to implement learningBOX in 2021.

There were several decisive factors, but the most important one was expectation of high efficiency. By maximizing role management on learningBOX, we had a grasp on less workload on admins. Also, the system made it possible to offer courses either by the federation to all universities or by each university to each student.

learningBOX offers customizable management roles, and based on the settings, each university can set up the curriculum and manage users. Also, flexible and versatile usability was a perfect fit for us according to our fluid operations.

Annual cost control was also attractive. Since our use is very unique, the number of users fluctuates from double digits to 4,000 or so through a year. Regardless of our uniqueness, we found learningBOX offered the solutions for our cost control depending on the situation.

Let us hear your current usage of learningBOX.

We use learningBOX as a complement to our in-person courses and our online conferencing services. For instance, we provide content and share information for follow-up and review for those who were unable to attend a course.

We had originally planned to introduce a system for follow-up to facilitate face-to-face courses. However, the COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible to conduct group training at each university, and we started a new support to deal with this issue in addition to our original purpose.

In 2021, we began to create and develop common courses for all universities. For example, we have uploaded dozens of videos to learningBOX on how to operate a computer, which is required during the entrance season. According to the requests from each university, we assign necessary content respectively. With the role settings, operation is managed by each university, which result in less workload for us.

Classes are handled separately by each school, and in the case of computer utilization course for a new semester, approximately 30 classes are assigned within a single course.

We are not using learningBOX for exams so far, and are basically uploading videos, but we often use the survey function.

Succeeded in More Efficient Operations

Do you have any requests to improve our service?

We use another communication tool with students. We are happy if learningBOX enhances the active communication features like social media.

Apart from that, there are some cases to have difficulties to register users since many students do not have their own e-mail address lately. We ask them to sign up for the course when they purchase a computer, and then the admins register them so far.

Because of the situation, some of our notification is sent as junk mail or undeliverable, which may take time to respond to.

If we remove e-mail addresses from the required fields, it will be difficult to provide a means of communication. However, there are also difficulties to let the students change ID and passwords in advance for their first sign-in. We have received inquiries from some universities regarding user registration, and we would like to find a better way.

Talking about our unique usage as I mentioned, there are some areas that do not fall under the general usage pages provided on your website, and a more detailed manual of some sort would be helpful.

Thank you very much. Your opinion will be helpful for our future development. We would like to hold another learningBOX study session. It will be great if we could involve those who are in charge from each university. Next, do you have any positive impacts after introducing learningBOX?

As is basically the case with LMS, it is helpful for admins to know who accessed to which course. This can be the trigger to motivate those who are in charge in that their efforts visualize the results.

Videos are easy to upload and I like the questionnaire function, too. Based on the students' progress records and results of questionnaires, we can improve the quality of content. Sometimes, drag-and-drop does not work smoothly, but I am satisfied with the service as a whole.

It has been about two years since the introduction of learningBOX but are there any positive effects?

Certainly. Before the implementation, uploading videos to video-sharing sites was problematic in terms of regulations, but learningBOX has eliminated that concern and reduced workloads.

learningBOX is the newly introduced system, and we cannot compare with another system but until we provided the common courses to all universities through this system, time and efforts were required to create content at each university. We had tried to reduce their tasks for higher efficiency, and received a lot of positive feedbacks from each university after the implementation of learningBOX.

Unlock the potential to support students' careers

Could you tell us about your plans or outlook for the future?

The Learning Support Division provides services in various situations from the time students enter university to the time they graduate. We would like to take advantage of learningBOX at any stage including qualification acquisition, study abroad and job hunting support. Especially, we would like to emphasize on the career support courses offered throughout the four years until graduation.

Also, instead of adding an account each time a student registers for a course, we would like to make it possible for one student to register once and use the same account for the entire four years, so that he or she can apply for multiple services. This would be a compromise between cost and availability though....

The way of use will be changed in the future, but learningBOX's customer support always helps us and is very reassuring in giving us ideas and advice.

Could you give any advice to those who are considering implementing learningBOX?

Although it is unlikely that many people will use it in the same way we do, it highly recommended to be used as a platform for information sharing by uploading content and documents. The way of use will be overwhelming and the flexibility of the system will meet your needs.

The fee structure is also easy to understand, with a pay-as-you-go, and while initial investment is inevitably a bottleneck when it comes to LMS implementation, learningBOX is a cloud-based service that can be used immediately. I think you can start e-learning system even with a small budget. We don't use all functions on learningBOX, but even so, we feel it's pretty worthy.

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