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.