The Challenge
Democratizing Access to Higher Education
Access to higher education is critical for those striving to achieve financial stability and social mobility. But growing costs and rising debt can create hurdles that disproportionately affect individuals who most need the opportunities that a college degree provides.
Modern States Education Alliance was founded in 2017 by philanthropist Steve Klinsky to lower the barriers to higher education by offering free online courses that prepare learners for CLEP exams, which are accepted for credit at nearly 3,000 colleges in the U.S. Each free Modern States course includes instruction, online textbooks, practice questions and a practice CLEP exam. Modern States also provides a voucher that allows learners who complete its online courses to take the corresponding CLEP exam for free and covers related testing costs.
“By the time I got into college, all I had to do were degree-focused courses because every single one of my gen eds and every single one of my extracurriculars had been filled by CLEP,” says Julia Shingleton, a Modern States learner. “I got a bachelor’s in communications and an associate of fine arts in 18 months. For the entirety of my schooling, I paid $17,000. I can’t imagine that if I had done it any other way I would’ve gotten through it.”
Modern States serves a diverse audience, which includes high schoolers, college students, veterans and other adult learners returning to education after years or decades away from the classroom.
“I started with just three college credits from 43 years ago, and now I’ll graduate with my bachelor’s degree,” says General Parker, a Modern States learner. “If it wasn’t for Modern States, there’s no way I could have done it. They saved me not only money but also my own personal integrity, because I was really slowing down, thinking, ‘Well, you’re just an old man. It’s over for you.’ But no. Now I have the chance to be me—to be the lawyer I should have been years ago. Modern States made that possible.”
The organization has already benefited hundreds of thousands of learners; however, its growing popularity posed a new challenge: How could it scale its offerings to meet increasing demand while simultaneously enhancing its courses and better understanding the needs of hundreds of thousands of learners?
Modern States needed a partner that could scale to meet growing demand, understand the needs of different learners, have deep expertise in instructional design and online delivery, and give access to data.
The Solution
After thoroughly evaluating available solutions, Modern States transitioned to D2L Brightspace, which provides the scalability, flexibility and analytics the organization sought. The decision was informed by months of planning, including stakeholder consultations, technology assessments and careful consideration of how the platform could align with Modern States’ mission of democratizing access to higher education.
Partnering for a Seamless Migration
Across roughly 18 months, Modern States and D2L collaborated to design the environment that Modern States needed, transition its courses to Brightspace and support thousands of existing students as they shifted from one platform to another—all while enrolling 10,000 new learners each month.
“A migration of 32 courses and tens of thousands of pieces of content would not have been possible without a dedicated partnership,” says Jefferson Pestronk, executive director of Modern States. “Ultimately, the iterative approach we developed ensured our team could maintain its focus on running Modern States rather than moving content and enabled us to tackle major bodies of work in new ways.”
In the first half of 2024, Modern States recruited program alumni to review the migrated courses and provide feedback on the quality of the migration and the user experience. Their insights helped identify improvements that Modern States could implement before the launch.
“This quality check was essential, but equally important for us was the recognition that our alumni are willing to give back to our program in a variety of ways,” says Pestronk.
Redesigning Registration to Improve Understanding
Historically, Modern States’ learner registration process had gathered little more than each learner’s name, email address and age. This limited the organization’s ability to construct a robust picture of how well it was serving different groups of learners and identify the high schools and colleges that were using Modern States most extensively.
Modern States developed its own learner registration process, providing maximum flexibility to identify the most important data points up front, and leveraged D2L’s existing architecture to integrate seamlessly with Brightspace. It now gathers more than 20 data points—including geography, academic history and academic aspirations—while still permitting learners to opt out of disclosing personal information they view as sensitive.
The Result
Driving Engagement and Impact
Since Modern States was launched in 2017, learners have completed more than 200,000 courses and taken more than 150,000 CLEP exams—all at no cost to them. The nearly 100,000 exams passed equates to an estimated savings of nearly $200 million in college tuition and fees alone.
“The transition to Brightspace has helped fuel our growth,” says Pestronk. “In the months since its full launch in August 2024, over 80,000 learners have created accounts in Modern States’ Brightspace environment, a year-over-year growth of more than 35%. This showcases the incredible momentum and engagement enabled by Brightspace.”
Leaning Into In-Depth Analytics
As part of the transition, Modern States created an enhanced learner registration infrastructure that enables it to understand the learners it serves better than at any other point in the organization’s history.
The insights revealed the breadth of learners Modern States serves:
- Diverse Learners: 43% identify as white, 18% as Black, 17% as Latino, 10% as Asian and 13% as other.
- High Financial Need: More than 60% of learners are from families with household incomes less than twice the U.S. poverty limit and more than 80% with less than $100,000 in household income.
- Geographic Mix: Learners come from all 50 states and are enrolled in more than 5,000 educational institutions nationwide.
- Strong Representation of Special Populations: 7% of Modern States’ learners are homeschooled, and 15% are military-connected learners.
Leveraging D2L’s Performance+ infrastructure has enabled Modern States to understand its learners at a granular level. Using the Analytics Builder, Modern States was able to rapidly prototype and deploy analyses and dashboards to support enhanced decision-making.
Dashboards can provide educators with granular data about their students’ progress through courses, the time they spend on content and their performance on embedded assessments.
Automating Approval Processes
Modern States continues to closely collaborate with teams across D2L in ways that produce enormous impact for the organization and its learners.
Throughout its history, Modern States has relied on a labor-intensive process to award vouchers. After completing a course, learners had to complete an online form reporting their course completion before a Modern States team member manually reviewed each request. At its present scale of 50,000 voucher requests per year, this would represent full-time responsibilities for several employees and require that learners wait multiple days to receive a voucher.
Leveraging D2L’s integration services and solutions powered by D2L Link, Modern States was able to streamline its workflows with automation tools to create a groundbreaking learning ecosystem. Brightspace connector to Workato allowed the organization to move from a labor-intensive form that learners compete to a one-click button, seamlessly communicating with Modern States’ backend voucher system. Because this connection includes the standardized information Modern States needs to process voucher requests, it is building a fully automated approval system that it estimates will be able to fulfill more than 95% of all voucher requests and respond to learners in a matter of minutes rather than days.
“Brightspace’s extensibility allowed us to shift external processes from ones that learners must endure to ones that show respect and appreciation for how busy they are. They shift internal processes from ones that are labor intensive and costly to scale to ones that allow us to rapidly react to growth at nearly no cost,” says Pestronk. “None of this would have been possible without our collaboration with the broad D2L team—and it’s only the beginning.”
Shingleton adds: “The only thing it costs is effort,” If I know the people I grew up with, the kind of people who don’t have money have effort in spades. And if it is easier for you the way it was easier for me, you’re never going to look at education the same way again.”
Interviewees:
- Jefferson Pestronk, executive director, Modern States
- Julia Shingleton, learner, Modern States
- General Parker, learner, Modern States
