Emerging Technologies Consulting

Mike Bogle argues that social media creates a better environment for learning than a Learning Management System does.  He goes through each learning goal set by his university and examines which set of tools does a better job at meeting those goals, and each time social media wins.  Mostly, I agree with him.  I do think that social media does a better job of encouraging reflection, collaboration, and personal responsibility for learning than most LMS’s do.  What I think the issue is is the default settings for each set of tools.  I’ve seen faculty create great environments for learning within course management systems, but it’s taken a lot of work and it often requires doing some serious outside the box thinking.  And it still has the drawback of not being open.  On the flip side, I’ve seen faculty do a blog “all wrong.”  They’ve worked hard to recreate a closed, non-interactive environment that’s on a blog instead of within an LMS.  In both cases, they’ve worked against the default.  The thing that I like about starting with social media is how stripped down it is and how it forces faculty to think pretty hard about the environment they want to create.  They may have to use different tools and connect them together using RSS or embedding it within a blog or wiki or other tool.  In an LMS, you can forgo thinking about the environment too much. First, there’s a default that looks familiar–a place for documents, a place for grades, a roster, etc.  Second, there’s little one can do to change the look and feel of the site, so that one often feels trapped.  You can add a discussion board, but you can’t change what it looks like or how it’s laid out.  Often the course exists within a frame where the school’s chosen banner and colors show up, overpowering any customization one might do. If a faculty member feels like they don’t have control over the site, imagine how students must feel.

The default for social media can usually be changed quite readily.  There are themes for blogs, changing its look to fit with the theme of the class or lay it out in a way that facilitates student work and learning.  Widgets that can incorporate Twitter feeds, video feeds or del.ici.ous links can be easily added.  There’s also the larger option of having a class site versus having each individual student set up their own site.  Either way, it’s easy to get student input and/or let students be responsible for what gets included and what tools will benefit them in their learning.  Links to wikis or other tools can easily be added to the site.  Learning needs to be flexible and the learning context needs to responsive to student needs.  It seems to me that social media offers that flexibility and responsiveness in a way that LMS’s just don’t.

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.

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.