Cohorts, exams, and the evidence an accreditor asks for.
Colleges run Lurno for the parts a course platform leaves to spreadsheets: release windows, prerequisite chains, exams that survive scrutiny, and a competency record with its evidence attached.
What Lurno does for a university
Lurno is a learning platform for colleges and universities. Teaching is built as programmes, modules and lessons, then scheduled — fixed dates, rolling, drip, or a cohort window — with a release plan you preview day by day. Entry to a step is gated by a prerequisite chain: completion, a minimum score, a date, group membership, a concurrent enrolment, or a named approver's decision. Exams run with shuffling, timers, attempt limits and recorded integrity events, and outcomes are tracked against competency frameworks with the evidence attached.
- Prerequisite chain
- A rule deciding whether one person may start one thing. Conditions — another module completed, a minimum score, a date, group membership, a concurrent enrolment, or a manual approval — join into paths with AND and OR. Two levels deep and no further, so the rule reads as a list, a graph, or a boolean expression.
One boundary, stated early: Lurno is not a student information system. It does not do admissions, fee collection or the registrar's transcript. It owns delivery, assessment and evidence, and runs beside the system that owns the student record.
A term, expressed as rules rather than reminders
Five ways to shape when things open
A step starts when the programme starts, a set number of days after it, when the previous step completes, or at a fixed date and time. A live preview draws the sequence as a timeline while you edit.
- Fixed dates, rolling, drip, a cohort window, or no dates at all — scoped to the thing, to one cohort, or to a single enrolment.
- A holiday blocks a date range so drip unlocks and cohort calendars skip it.
Prerequisites, co-requisites, and someone to approve the exception
Gate a module on what came before it, or on something running alongside it — the concurrent-enrolment condition is the co-requisite case. In a real term there is always an exception, so every exception has a route.
- A blocked learner sees what unlocks the step and requests access with a reason, rather than sending an email.
- Requests land in an approval queue with the justification, prior attempts, and a decision recorded as a state.
Drop policies, withdrawals, and a clash caught early
A drop policy sets the self-drop deadline, the date after which only an administrator can process a drop, whether re-enrolment is allowed, and whether progress is restored on return.
- A withdrawal records a reason and an effective date, then previews the consequences before it is confirmed.
- The conflicts inbox flags an instructor or room double-booked, a drip unlock landing on a holiday, and a prerequisite pointing at something nobody scheduled.
Exams that hold up, and marking you can defend
Seven assessment types, 19 question types, one grading queue across assessments, lessons and programme work. [Full detail on assessments](/platform/assessments).
Secure delivery
Full screen, clipboard blocked, one item at a time, no back navigation, a timer, an attempt limit, a fresh shuffle per attempt. Answer keys never leave the server.
Integrity analytics
Tab switches, copy attempts, a second concurrent session and suspicious timing, recorded against the attempt with time spent per item.
Rubrics and moderation
Analytic, holistic and single-point rubrics. Above a threshold a mark is held for a moderator, and appeals run inside the product.
Peer review
Anonymised reviewer pools with due dates, peer scores, feedback-quality ratings, and reconciliation when reviewers disagree.
Portfolios
Artefacts added over weeks, milestones with gates to clear, and an assessor workbench moving each submission through review, revision, acceptance or rejection.
Accommodations
Extra time as a percentage, extra attempts, an exemption, larger type, screen reader or reduced motion — per learner, applied automatically.
Adaptive testing, and the evidence the test was fair
Lurno runs psychometric instruments as measured tests rather than quizzes, which is unusual in a learning platform. You define scales, subscales and composites over the items, reverse-key and weight them, import norm groups, and draw the interpretation bands a candidate reads. In adaptive mode the instrument picks each next item by item response theory and stops once the ability estimate is precise enough. Fairness is kept as a record: differential item functioning, validity evidence, adverse-impact checks against the four-fifths rule, and Angoff or Bookmark standard-setting each write into an audit log that cannot be quietly edited.
- Differential item functioning (DIF)
- A check for whether a question behaves differently for two groups of candidates who are equally able overall — men and women, say, or first- and second-language speakers. Lurno runs the Mantel-Haenszel procedure, reports an effect size and a flag level, and stores it against the item.
That is what a placement test or a programme exit assessment needs. One honest limit: item parameters are imported, not estimated here. Lurno delivers and scores the instrument; it is not a calibration studio.
The file you hand to a review panel
Competencies mapped to what you actually teach
Build a framework, or import one from standards already on the platform. Each competency carries a code, the evidence it requires and a minimum score, in a tree by subject, level and domain. A publish check warns when a competency has no mapped question, so coverage on paper matches coverage in the test.
Six kinds of evidence, one mastery decision
Evidence attaches to a competency from an assessment result, a portfolio artefact, peer feedback, a supervisor observation, an external record, or a manual entry. Mastery is awarded against the thresholds you set, and a learner exports their verified evidence for one framework as a structured dossier. A cluster met or a threshold cleared can issue a certificate, checkable on a public page.
How certificates are issued and verifiedLTI 1.3, SCORM and xAPI
Standards conformance gates a lot of higher-education rollouts, so here is the plain position. LTI 1.3, SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2004 and xAPI are modelled in the product — an LTI 1.3 tool is already a resource type — but the runtime is being built. Tell us on the call if that gates your rollout.
Where Lurno stops
Worth being exact about, because a learning platform and a student information system are usually bought in the same year.
| Capability | Function | Lurno | Stays where it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Admissions and fee collectionPayments and checkout are designed, not built. | No | Admissions and finance systems | |
| The official transcript and record of study | Course records and verifiable certificates | Your student information system | |
| Room inventory and the master timetable | Flags a room or instructor double-booking | Your timetabling system | |
| Programmes, modules, lessons, content library53 resource types, including an embedded Zoom, Teams or Meet link in a lesson. | Yes | No | |
| Release windows, prerequisites, drops, withdrawals | Yes | No | |
| Exams, marking, moderation, appeals, peer review | Yes | No | |
| Competency evidence, mastery, dossier export | Yes | No | |
| Launch from an existing portal over LTI 1.3 | In development | No |
A pilot normally starts with one department's programmes, beside whatever is already in place.
Before it goes near a validated programme
Bring one programme and the exam you worry about.
A term with its real release dates, a prerequisite chain you currently enforce by email, and an assessment that has to hold up. We will build it on the call.