By Daniel P. Tapaoan, Jr.

Students and the faculty of the Mariano Marcos State University (MMSU) can soon access their MMSU virtual learning environment (mVLE) accounts on a mobile application. Also, it will never be interrupted by any power outage as it moves to Cloud. 

With a Php 24.9 million grant from the Commission on Higher Education (CHED), MMSU is now intensively addressing the accessibility and functionality concerns of the virtual learning platform as a part of its smart campus development project. 

“By creating its mobile application version and migrating the mVLE to Cloud, we will soon be able to deliver academic activities despite power outages and internet connection issues, thus, making access seamless,” said Prof. Wilben Christie Pagtaconan, project leader and director of MMSU information technology center (ITC). 

Once developed, the ITC will train all university faculty and students on the use of the learning management system’s (LMS) newest version.

In addition, the university will purchase IT equipment and servers to support the learning spaces of students and local access to the virtual learning tool. The university will also subscribe to teaching-learning support systems such as Office productivity tools, virtual laboratory for IT courses, and plagiarism checker software.

In 2021, MMSU received the same amount of P24.9 million from CHED as an initial fund to install and maintain a virtual private network to connect all its campuses, and to establish the university’s IT infrastructure. 

CHED Chairperson J. Prospero De Vera III said the commission has pushed the smart campus initiative to address the difficulties that SUCs encounter in flexible learning and to help them continue with their new learning environment.

MMSU President Shirley C. Agrupis said the project is one of the university’s strategies to establish an Open University – delivering MMSU programs outside the physical campuses based on the open and flexible learning model. 

She added the project also contributes to fully realizing a FIRe-inclined MMSU. (FIRe is Fourth Industrial Revolution or the Industry 4.0.)

“This is our way of making MMSU a borderless university,” she expressed.  

Developed in 2013, the mVLE has become the common learning management system (LMS) of the university in 2020. Its function was further maximized when the COVID-19 pandemic came. It uses an open-source platform to administer online teaching and learning. 

MMSU, one of the first Philippine state universities to develop its own LMS, helped other higher education institutions in the region in developing their own learning platforms by conducting trainings and other capacity-building activities. (StratCom)