A few years ago, during a student panel, one of our learners joined the video call from his car between shifts. When someone asked what wasn’t working in his classes, he didn’t miss a beat. “Everybody’s inconsistent with the technology,” he said. “Every time I start a new class, it’s like…fingers crossed—what’s this one going to look like?”
He told us how excited he was when he first downloaded Brightspace Pulse. For a moment, it felt like he’d have everything he needed in one place. But that didn’t last. While one class had every due date, the next had only one assignment. A third had nothing at all. Instead of helping him stay organized, the inconsistency forced him to relearn how to be a student in each of his classes. Eventually, he gave up and went back to printing every syllabus and highlighting it “like a caveman,”—his words, my emphasis.
For him, the problem wasn’t the technology. It was that the promise of the technology fell apart when everyone used it differently.
What that student described isn’t an isolated frustration. It’s the reality for almost every learner today. When each course uses the digital environment differently, the burden lands on the student, and none of that is neutral. Inconsistency forces students to reorient over and over again, long before they can engage with the material. The problem isn’t the tools themselves; it’s that every course creates its own structure with its own rules. The continual recalibration is the invisible load we rarely name, but every student feels.
By contrast, our physical classrooms are standardized almost to the point of invisibility. Whether you’re in Tucson, New York or Toronto, the rooms may look completely different, but the form is the same. Students step inside already knowing how to inhabit the space. The front of the room marks where the professor will stand and shape the lesson. And the seating isn’t just furniture, it’s an arrangement that signals how students should participate, whether the space is set up for listening, discussion or group work. The room communicates the norms of learning without a single instruction. That quiet consistency frees students to focus on the content.
The digital environment doesn’t offer that same stability. Every class can feel like a new space with its own expectations, navigation and rules. When the form changes from course to course, students can’t rely on prior experience. They have to reorient themselves every time—a cognitive load the physical classroom never imposes.
Higher education is one of the few places where digital practices vary so widely that students can’t rely on a consistent form. One class uses the LMS fully, another halfway, another not at all. Many faculty still see the LMS as optional if the course isn’t online, even though for students digital isn’t optional at all. They already live in a world where banking, transportation and shopping follow predictable patterns. You don’t have to relearn how those systems work every time because the mental model stays the same. That kind of digital stability reduces friction everywhere—except college.
All students are digital learners. Anyone who has ever brought on a digital service to support online programs has seen this firsthand. To offer online programs, you need to provide comparable services, such as online tutoring, embedded librarians, 24-hour tech support, remote advising and counseling. Not only because accreditors require it, but because your online students need it. However, the moment those services go live, they no longer just serve online students. Every student uses them. Even those who prefer face-to-face visits don’t always have time for them; they may not start their paper until after dinner, long after the learning center has closed.
Students aren’t dividing their lives into “online” and “not online.” They’re moving through one continuous digital layer, and they expect the college to meet them there. And if this is true for major support services, it’s just as true for the nuts and bolts of the academic experience—due dates, syllabi, grades and communication. The LMS is the one place where we can offer that kind of stability: a predictable starting point, a familiar structure, a shared way of navigating a course. It removes the “caveman work” from students and provides the institution with the foundation it needs to offer stability to students and build for what comes next.
Across higher education, and especially in community colleges, we’re responding to a rapid shift in how learning and work align. Strategic plans everywhere are recognizing the same reality. Automation, AI and continuous technological change are reshaping jobs, skills and industries. In this environment, learning isn’t something people do once before entering a career. It’s something they return to repeatedly as new skills emerge and existing roles evolve.
Educational institutions are positioning themselves to be the central learning hub for that kind of world. They’re aligning credit and noncredit programs, expanding microcredentials, strengthening workforce partnerships, building credit-for-prior-learning structures and promising students a real “no wrong door” experience. These moves matter because they recognize our communities’ need for ongoing, flexible, lifelong learning. But underneath all this strategic work is a quieter requirement that often goes unnoticed: the institution’s academic digital infrastructure must be strong enough to support the innovation we’re trying to build.
And this is the part that’s easy to miss: once we stop treating the LMS as optional and start treating it as shared academic infrastructure, the conversation shifts from “fixing problems” to unlocking what’s actually possible. A consistent digital structure isn’t just about organization—it’s the prerequisite for everything we say we want to do next. The real opportunity ahead of us isn’t just reducing friction—it’s building the kind of stable academic digital structure that lets personalized and adaptive technologies finally do what they promise. When course materials, assessments and learning activities all live in one coherent environment, AI can begin to surface insights we’ve never had: which resources actually help students learn, when momentum starts to slip and where extra support could make a difference. And that same foundation is what makes seamless transitions possible between workforce reskilling, noncredit training and credit-bearing credentials. This is where the LMS stops being a posting space and becomes the platform we build the future on.
Written by:
