The Montana University System

The Montana University System (MUS) serves learners across one of the largest geographic footprints in the U.S., with a relatively small population spread across wide distances.

As Joe Thiel, Interim Deputy Commissioner for Academic Research and Student Affairs, described it, the state of Montana “takes something on the order of 10 to 12 hours to drive across and has just over a million people,” with 15 campus locations and seven tribal colleges.

Many of these institutions are small and serve as the only local access point to higher education for entire regions; sometimes the next closest college is three or four hours away. When small campuses can’t offer enough of the right courses at the right time, it doesn’t just delay degrees, it can quietly shrink the future talent pool those communities depend on.

A critical access hospital still needs nurses, radiology staff, and other clinical roles, and local schools and businesses still need qualified workers. If there are barriers in the way of students earning degrees (missing courses, limited schedules, or gaps in lowerdivision offerings) they may not complete degrees, take longer, or leave the region entirely.

This geographic reality creates real pressure on smaller campuses to do a lot with limited resources: serve place-bound learners, support local workforce needs, and offer enough coursework to keep students progressing toward their chosen degrees. MUS already had strong transfer infrastructure, including statewide common course numbering, so students could understand what courses they needed. But even with aligned pathways, students hit roadblocks when a needed course wasn’t offered at their home institution at the right time, in the right modality, or with available faculty capacity.

MUS needed to solve several connected problems at once:

1. Many small campuses couldn’t consistently offer the full core/foundational curriculum that students needed to stay on track, (especially in high-demand transfer disciplines), because they didn’t always have the faculty capacity or sufficient enrollment to run every course.
2. While MUS had strong curriculum alignment and transfer architecture, they lacked a practical, student-friendly way for learners to actually take needed courses from another institution when their home campus couldn’t offer them at the right time.
3. As MUS explored course sharing approaches used elsewhere, they found, as Joe put it: “some pretty arcane, labyrinthine processes that didn’t integrate within student information systems and didn’t have a very user-friendly experience for students.” Most solutions were complex, required a lot of staff hours, and were difficult to scale.

Montana’s internal analysis clarified the size of the access gap. In the lower division, where transfer momentum matters most, sharing online catalogs had the potential to dramatically expand options for students at many institutions:

“For three-quarters of our institutions, we found that sharing our online catalogs would more than double the unique lower division courses available to students in a typical term.”

That combination of insight and data helped Montana commit to course sharing as a practical way to make transfer pathways real. The insight was straightforward: statewide scale would only work if enrollment felt simple for students and didn’t require manual workarounds for staff, which meant tight SIS integration. The data backed it up, showing that course sharing could expand access by opening seats in high-demand courses across campuses and reaching more students per term.

Another insight: Transfer success depends on more than pathway maps and course numbering. MUS already had those pieces. What they needed was a functional mechanism that made it easy for students to take the right course at the right time, without adding complexity for students or creating an unsustainable workload for campus staff.

That shaped MUS’s priorities for any course-sharing solution. Joe emphasized two requirements early:

1. It had to be “as straightforward and simple for the student as possible.”
2. It had to integrate into the systems campuses already use intelligently, so it wouldn’t create more work for the people supporting enrollment, billing, financial aid, and student success.

Montana implemented Parchment Course Sharing to create an online course exchange that presents shared course offerings and streamlines the crossenrollment experience for learners, while keeping enrollment and billing tied to the home institution. MUS deployed an iterative rollout to test and improve the exchange term-by-term while expanding participation to additional institutions and learners.

As the exchange matured, course sharing also became a driver for a broader student experience goal: reducing friction across institutions by moving toward a more consistent learning environment. Joe noted that as students increasingly flow between campuses, having everything in one familiar place becomes a meaningful adoption factor:

“We want to get to a place where a student who is participating in a course exchange saw that course in their home Canvas environment.”

Together, Parchment Course Sharing and Canvas are helping MUS work towards a unified cross-enrollment and learning experience: students enroll in needed courses through the exchange and access them in the familiar Canvas environment they already use at their home institution.

Montana University System’s steps for course sharing success:

1. Make it straightforward for students. The exchange needed to feel like a normal part of enrollment, not a special process learners needed to “figure out.”
2. Integrate into campus systems and workflows. Montana prioritized reducing added work for campus staff. The goal was to support core functions (enrollment, billing, financial aid) without piling on complexity.
3. Integrate the learning experience in Canvas. Ensure exchange courses appear in the student’s home Canvas environment to deliver a consistent experience for learners.
4. Design incentives that support “stay on track” use cases. Montana wanted learners to use the exchange to access required courses and maintain progress and not to “shop around” based on price differences.
5. A phased, term-by-term implementation. A phased rollout allowed MUS to learn what worked, identify pain points, and improve processes over time.
6. Student billing consistency. Students pay at their home campus tuition level and receive one bill— reducing confusion and unnecessary barriers.
7. Hands-on advisor support. Students largely enter the exchange through home-campus advisors, keeping the exchange tied to degree progress and program planning.
8. A revenue-sharing model. Institutions aren’t penalized for participation, and teaching institutions can make use of available seats.

Montana’s course sharing initiative is helping students access required coursework when local options don’t align. This allows students to keep moving forward with their education instead of stalling out due to scheduling gaps or unavailable classes.

Joe summarized the core win:

“Course sharing is helping us make it so that students can access the coursework they need, when they need it, to be on track (and stay on track) with their degree program.”

Canvas reinforces this by keeping the learning experience consistent for students, even when the course originates from another institution.

Key benefits Montana highlights:

• Expanded access to unique expertise statewide. Course sharing can broaden access to specialized faculty, especially in areas where qualified instructors may be concentrated in specific institutions, including tribal colleges.
• Access becomes real, not theoretical. Transfer and degree pathways work better when students can actually take missing courses.
• More options for small campuses (without overextending resources). Institutions can support learners while still operating within staffing and budget constraints.
• A more scalable operational model over time. Early manual work and “failed attempts” were gradually reduced as processes were refined and automation increased. Joe noted that MUS has reached a point where participation could grow significantly and still be feasible for campuses to support.
• Momentum toward more strategic program coordination. Beyond a marketplace model, Montana is moving toward planning course availability more intentionally (e.g., methods courses and other hard-to-staff requirements) so students can access key courses reliably.
• A more seamless experience across campuses. Students xcan enroll through the exchange and access the course in their familiar home Canvas environment, reducing platform friction and support needs.

Make more courses available, without adding complexity.

See how course sharing can help learners stay on track, expand access across institutions, and support campus teams with a scalable model.