LoudCloud Systems and FASTRAK: A non walled-garden approach to CBE

As competency-based education (CBE) becomes more and more important to US higher education, it would be worth exploring the learning platforms in use. While there are cases of institutions using their traditional LMS to support a CBE program, there is a new market developing specifically around learning platforms that are designed specifically for self-paced, fully-online, competency-framework based approaches.

Recently I saw a demo of the new CBE platform from LoudCloud Systems, a company whose traditional LMS I have covered a few years ago. The company is somewhat confusing to me – I had expected a far larger market impact from them based on their product design than what has happened in reality. LoudCloud has recently entered the CBE market, not by adding features to their core LMS but by creating a new product called FASTRAK. Like Instructure with their creation of a new LMS for a different market (corporate learning), LoudCloud determined that CBE called for a new design and that the company can handle two platforms for two mostly distinct markets. In the case of Bridge and FASTRAK, I believe the creation of a new learning platform took approximately one year (thanks a lot, Amazon). LoudCloud did leverage several of the traditional LMS tools such as rubrics, discussion forums and their LoudBook interactive eReader.