User Story: Purdue University Global

Peggy Hohensee’s Role

As Mathematics Department Chair at Purdue University Global, Peggy Hohensee leads nearly 100 faculty members across both full-time and part-time roles. Her focus is on supporting nontraditional students, most of them working adults in their mid-30s, who are pursuing career-focused degrees while balancing jobs and families.

About Purdue Global

Purdue Global is designed specifically for this population, offering continuous enrollment with new terms starting every three weeks. Students can choose the format that best fits their lives; traditional quarterly courses, modular classes, or competency-based programs, and even mix and match within the same term. This flexibility creates opportunity, but also brings challenges when students arrive with gaps in foundational skills, especially in math.

The Challenge

Working adult learners at Purdue Global often enter with skills gaps, especially in math, after years away from formal education. Traditional LMS platforms deliver the core curriculum but are often rigid, difficult to update, and inaccessible once a course ends.

Instructors needed a way to provide just-in-time learning resources, organized refreshers and scaffolded materials, without replacing curriculum. Students needed support that was easy to navigate, immediately available, and relevant to the unit they were studying.

“That’s one of the things we’ve been able to successfully leverage LiveBinders for—to remediate skills for students who might need a refresher in certain topics, especially as a just-in-time resource.”

The Solution

Peggy implemented LiveBinders to provide unit-specific, just-in-time resources: refresher videos, example problems, and curated links that help students reinforce foundational skills as they progress through a course.

Instead of assigning lengthy remedial courses, they could point students to curated binders.

“We’ve been able to use LiveBinders to scaffold content right where it’s needed,” Peggy explains. “If a student struggles with fractions or algebra while working on a higher-level math concept, they don’t have to pause their course. They can click into the binder, get the refresher they need, and immediately return to the work at hand.”

This flexibility made the binder a bridge between classroom expectations and student readiness helping learners stay on track without losing momentum.

Why LiveBinders

What made LiveBinders stand out for Peggy and her team was its ability to collect diverse resources into one intuitive, organized hub. Faculty could build binders once, then continually refine and share them across courses, without worrying about links or files getting lost.

“The ease of building and maintaining the binders was key,” Peggy notes. “Instead of creating a list of links or separate documents that students might miss, we could create a central space where everything lives. Students knew exactly where to go, and they could return to the same spot every time to find what they needed.”

With LiveBinders, instructors no longer have to wait for course revision cycles to implement necessary updates, ensuring students always have access to the most current information.  For Peggy the  power of real-time updates is key for her team:

“One of the things that has helped us is the fact that the URL for the binder doesn’t change. But as soon as we update the binder, the update is live in all of the classes that are using that binder.”

Figure 1. Hohensee uses color coded tabs and links multimedia content for her Math Department.

No more waiting for course revision cycles. With LiveBinders, students get immediate access to what they need, when they need it.

The Impact: 

The numbers at Purdue Global show the power of just-in-time learning resources:

• Across 7 math courses, LiveBinders were accessed 450,000+ times in a single academic year.

• Graduate Statistics (MM570) saw an 11,755% engagement rate, the highest in the department.

• Introductory Algebra (MM150) generated 163,375 views.

• Students revisited unit-specific binders multiple times per unit—and even after graduation—demonstrating long-term utility.

By delivering resources scaffolded to specific units, students aren’t overwhelmed with irrelevant content—they only see what is immediately useful for their current learning.

Figure 2. LiveBinders usage across six math courses. Light blue bars represent total binder views, while the dark blue line indicates usage as a percentage of enrollment.

“What we are finding is that because the number of binder views is so much higher than the enrollment in our classes, students aren’t just using all 10 binders for all 10 weeks—they’re going back to a binder two, three, even four times in a week. They know what’s there and where to find it, and they’re discovering that these resources are truly valuable for them.”