An update on Campus and Catalog

Campus has served Extension well for many years, but the current environment through our vendors is no longer meeting the level of service I believe our instructors and learners should expect. Additionally, our Campus vendor has created their own learning management system that they want us to migrate to, and I do not believe it would serve our use-case, or any of yours, well. They will no longer be supporting the Moodle platform beyond our contract.

In recent years, we have experienced:

• Technical issues beyond our control that have taken weeks or, in some cases, months for our vendors to resolve.
• Significant delays in Moodle upgrades.
• Ongoing confusion around the name Campus, particularly among members of the public who understandably associate it with their local institution or university.

Most importantly, the Extension Foundation has the infrastructure and in-house technical expertise necessary to operate the platform ourselves.

Courses is operational and running on Moodle 5.2.3, and we invite you to create your free account and enter our free Roots to Results course to test it yourselves. The new platform will:

• Combine the LMS and storefront into one system instead of two.
• Support both free and paid courses.
• Give instructors access to newer Moodle features.
• Allow us to adopt future Moodle releases more quickly.
• Give the Extension Foundation much greater control over technical support and development instead of relying on third parties.
• Provide instructors with their own dashboard access to view transactions associated with their courses, creating greater transparency into registrations, refunds, payments, and course revenue.
• And, provide instructors a real-time feed of all updates made to the platform.

We are also changing our approach to advanced technical support. Rather than waiting on an outside vendor to diagnose and resolve problems, our team can investigate and repair issues directly in minutes instead of months.

The way Campus is used has also changed significantly. Historically, we supported the platform in part by retaining 10% of revenue from paid courses. Today, we have more courses and learners than ever before, but a growing percentage of those courses are free. Free courses still require hosting, storage, security, maintenance, updates, support, and administrative infrastructure. The cost of all of these has increased substantially, with no sign of slowing down, but they generate no course revenue to help sustain the system.

With Courses, we will move to an annual learner platform fee like most other publicly available online learning management systems.

Under the new model:

• A learner will pay the platform fee ($10) when creating an account or checking out for the first time.
  • That fee will provide access to the Courses platform for 12 months.
  • During those 12 months, the learner will not pay another platform fee when enrolling in additional courses. Only course fees where appropriate.
  • Learners may take free courses, paid courses, or both during that period.
• Any registration fee established by the course owner will remain separate from the platform fee.
• The Extension Foundation will eliminate the current 10% fee on paid-course revenue.
  • Aside from the standard Stripe payment processing fees, course owners will retain their full course registration revenue.
• Employees and instructors from Extension Foundation member institutions will be exempt from the annual platform fee. The system detects your email domain automatically. Of course, if you prefer using a non-work email for your account, we can exempt your account on an individual basis, just let us know.

We know that many instructors need to retain access to past enrollment, completion, grade, and participation records.

Before Campus is retired, instructors will have the opportunity to download and preserve relevant records from their existing courses. Depending on the course, this may include:

• Enrollment rosters and participant information
• Grades and completion records
• Course activity and participation data
• Relevant reports and other course records
• A Moodle backup of the course itself

On the Instructor FAQ page, we have provided step-by-step instructions, and we are also happy to assist as needed.

Our goal is to ensure that instructors have ample time to preserve the records they need before Campus is retired.

The new Courses platform is now open for you to take a look at. Campus and Catalog will remain available through June 30, 2027, giving instructors more than eight months to transition.

Beginning October 15, 2026, you will have three options: