University Learning Management System based on Office 365

Choosing and adopting in universities the appropriate Learning Management System (LMS) product is a difficult process. For many years, universities implemented their own LMSs or chose between Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Instructure Canvas, Moodle, Pearson LearningStudio, Sakai or other educational platforms. Recently, many new LMSs, such as Edmodo, Litmos LMS, TalentLMS, Docebo, are providing new facilities for content management and collaboration between users for a range of different devices (computers and mobile devices). Higher education must face challenges related to funding, global competition, while supporting students who are mobile and diverse. Efficient solutions must be found to solve those challenges. This paper presents a LMS solution implemented at the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, entitled ICE-Integrated Communication Environment, that combines locally developed components and software with applications from the Office 365 academic licensed suite. The initial implementation of the solution started within the DidaTec structural funds project that was financed between 2010–2014. The paper describes the configuration of the ICE LMS, the applications used for the management of content, collaboration between users (students, teachers), and several student assessment statistics from its usage.