Emerging Technologies Consulting

Today on College 2.0, I noticed a link to a post about the costs of Moodle, an open-source course management system.  Now, I’ve always said that open-source doesn’t always mean free, but I do think in most cases, the costs can be less than those of a proprietary system like Blackboard.  Using my own experience working with Blackboard for six years, let me rebut some of the costs raised by the post.

Initial install and setup: The claim is that at least one person would be needed to install and setup Moodle.  This is true for Blackboard as well.  Most schools have at least one if not two people devoted to the back end work involved with managing Blackboard.

Site branding: Not even possible with Blackboard really.  In most cases, the person doing the backend stuff may also be able to do the site branding for Moodle, adding nothing to your costs.

Customization: Not even possible with Blackboard beyond adding building blocks, many of which cost extra.  Again, this work is probably going to be handled by the sys admin you hired to install and set everything up.

Hosting: Most people I know host Moodle or Blackboard on site, so much of the costs are in hardware and to some extent, bandwidth costs which can’t always be separated from general bandwidth costs.  In any case, these costs are going to be the same if done on site.  Going off-site might cost more or less, but I know many companies out there offering plain old hosting at a reasonable cost.  In fact, this site, using Bluehost, costs me about $5/month and I can install Moodle here if I want at no extra cost.  In addition, there are companies offering hosting of Moodle and much of the backend support for it.  You can’t say that about Blackboard.  As far as I can tell, only Blackboard offers managed hosting for their application, meaning there’s no competition for their services.

Training: In the post, they’re thinking specifically of training the tech people, but there’s also training of the faculty and students to be considered.  Blackboard offers a good deal of online resources, but so does Moodle.  In addition, my experience has been that getting a response to a question from Blackboard was quite difficult while getting a response from the Moodle community, even for very technical questions, takes no time at all.  I think the costs here will be in a person who serves as the trainer for the CMS, whether it’s Moodle or Blackboard and Professional Development for both the tech people and the trainer.  Often this means going to conferences to share knowledge.  Generally places budget between $1000 and $1500 per year per person, so let’s say this costs $3k.

Additional Software: The post talks about SQL as and “extra cost.” For one, the software is free and two, many, many places already used it.  And second, it’s likely that the person installing Moodle (or Blackboard or whatever) will be managing web software also.  And, Blackboard costs between $50k and $200k/year, according to many figures I’ve seen.  It’s priced according to enrollments so that a small school pays less than a large school.

Overall Site Upgrades: Okay, upgrades need to happen.  Again, if the person you hire to manage this stuff is responsible for everything to do with your install, then you’re adding no real costs here.  It’s only if you parcel it out to contractors or other IT people that there will be costs involved.

Authentication: This was a huge headache for us with Blackboard.  It was less of a headache with Wordpress, which makes me think that it would be less of a headache with Moodle

Communities and social networking components: I actually think that most CMS’s are bad at this.  But, most community and social tools have RSS feeds, which can be pulled into just about any CMS, including Blackboard.

So, I think the overall cost of an open-source system per year, hosting it yourself, might be $150k, a portion of which would be an initial layout for hardware for the server.  That’s 2 people @ $50k and $70k, plus some professional development.  Yearly costs would then be around $120k.  So over five years, assuming a replacement of the hardware at the 5-year mark, you might pay close to $700k.  With Blackboard, you’d pay that plus the annual fee, which averages $70k/year,  you’re well over a million dollars.

The two week gap in this blog was due in part to my participation in Faculty Academy at University of Mary Washington.  Webcasts of many of the presentations are slowly but surely going online.  I love when conferences do this, put videos of the presentations online after the fact.  Conferecnes are expensive ventures these days (though this one isn’t!), and with tight budgets, many people can’t attend, so it’s great to be able to see some of the material.  I’ve been able to do this for a number of conferences, including ELI, and it’s so important to me to be able to keep up with the latest discussions in the field. I highly recommend watching both of the webcasts that are up on the FA site.  James Boyle’s talk was about how the University needs to be more open, and the debate between Jim Groom and John St. Clair is about open web tools for courses vs. closed systems like Blackboard.  It’s entertaining and informative.

Blackboard, 9.0 :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education’s Source for News, Views and Jobs

IHE describes the launch of the new version of Blackboard as including Web 2.0 and social learning tools. I’ve only seen the company video showcasing the new Blackboard.  So, it may not be fair to comment at this point, but I’m going to anyway.  The interface definitely looks better, incorporating drag and drop customization and context menus that eliminate much of the clicking that annoyed so many people.  It seems to have absorbed the blog and wiki tools that were previously provided by a third party.  However, the look of the blogs (and the rest of Blackboard) still appears to be bland compared to “blogs in the wild”.  Also, Blackboard is still course-based with content contained within individual courses and unable to be shared outside or even across courses within the institution (I do know that course content can be share if you buy Bb’s Content System). 

Although I prefer an open platform that allows students to present their work to the world, this semester working with WordPress Mu as my class platform for the first has made me appreciate why someone would gravitate to Blackboard.  The main issue is getting people into the system.  Although it’s tied to our central login system, the steps to get people logged in are clumsy.  Also, managing the work of 40 or more students gets somewhat overwhelming.  I do have a plugin that shows me how many posts people have made and we’re doing some work to organize their papers when that time comes, but it’s still required some significant work to make all that work.  Partly, of course, this is because WP Mu wasn’t built to do this, but that’s what happens to most Web 2.0 apps.  They start life as one thing and become something else entirely because of the way people really use it.

I think a few minor improvements to a Course Management system might make it something that those of us on the bleeding edge rethink using it.  Here’s what I propose.

1. Make it possible to share content across courses easily.  Allow, for example, two courses to link together.  They might be courses being taught this semester by different instructors centered on the same theme but in different disciplines.  Imagine the conversations that could take place!  Or they might be courses from previous semesters.
2. Make it possible for “real” customization of a course.  Let instructors be able to design the front page not just by changing the menu items across the left nav, but change where that navigation is.  Allow widgets to be added that pull in content from outside sites right onto the front page.  Allow the instructor to minimize the institutional branding so that they can feel more ownership over their course. 
3. Allow students to customize their area too.  They might be able to customize their blogs within a course, but they might also be able to build a portfolio by pulling in work from their courses that they’re proud of.
4. Make it possible to make the course public.  Make it possible for faculty to allow the public in if they want.  You can still make copyrighted materials private and obviously, grades, but allow the outside world to see the course and see the blogs and other student work.

There’s probably more that could be done here, and it does seem that Blackboard is moving in the right direction to a large extent, but they are driven in their design in part by the assumptions of institutions who are still very course and discipline-based.  Until they get beyond the idea that learning is closed off from the world and contained within courses and disciplines, course management systems aren’t going to change.