Today, I participated in an Adobe Connect session run by Educause about selection of a CMS. It's good timing because Penn State is at a bit of a crossroads now that ANGEL has been acquired by Blackboard. Misc notes and observations below:
Donna C. Llewellyn - Sakai at Georgia Tech: They were WebCT users, but decided to move when Blackboard acquired WebCT and wouldn't extend their WebCT license. They also didn't have much of a faculty adoption of WebCT at the time (only about 25%), but there were a lot of faculty who had created their own home-grown online materials. They had three requirements for their CMS:
Their support site:
http://info.t-square.gatech.edu
Although there is a cost, it does seem like they got a lot out of hiring Unicon to get them started quickly. I don't think we would be able to transition to Sakai in one year, mainly because we have such a high adoption of ANGEL and we're offering a lot of courses completely online, but that doesn't mean that we couldn't start a pilot within a year after making a decision to get some initial feedback.
Patrick Masson - Moodle at SUNY Delhi: Rather than doing a feature comparison of the tools, they looked at existing in online and hybrid courses. They wrote these into use cases (stories) about online course activity. They decided to go with external hosting (Moodlerooms) so they could get 24/7 system support instead of trying to hire staff. The cost for hosting is $3/user/year (started as $1/user, but they have added some additional features such as site-wide encryption).
The only real downside is that the performance was a bit slow because of the off-campus hosting. On the positive side, there are a lot of free add-in modules for social networking and Web 2.0 tools, a ton of open online tutorials, responsive open source development community, and a very low cost of ownership. They took about about 1.5 years to develop training materials and migrate to Moodle.
Clare van den Blink - Blackboard at Cornell: They have been users since 1997. Their criteria: how well does it support teaching and learning, how does it perform for course administration, how easily can students and faculty be supported, what does it need for IT infrastructure (i.e. how does it scale), does that infrastructure match Cornell's IT infrastructure?
Most commonly used features: course information, course documents, announcements and e-mail, assignments and gradebook, and other basic course administration tools. Even though this is a commercial product, they still need to have developers on staff to build custom tools and integration points. They are not on the most current version of Blackboard and have found that version upgrade cycles can impact user experience and support systems.
Interesting: Cornell is currently piloting Moodle, just to see what some other tools are like.
OVERALL DISCUSSION
Sections:
For courses with multiple sections, Sakai has a lot of section-aware features such as the gradebook and content tools. Moodle has features similar to the "master courses" in ANGEL. Blackboard 9 has some section-aware tools, but most institutions haven't upgraded yet.
External Tool Integration:
It sounds like all three tools have some extensible tools/widgets, but varying levels of integration with external tools. It was difficult to tell from the discussion - I think we'd have to investigate this on our own or have a specific list of requirements to discuss with an experienced user.
This was probably the best Adobe Connect session that I have ever participated in. All three presenters were well informed and concise in the presentation of their information. Once the archived presentation is ready, I'll edit this post and add the link.
Donna C. Llewellyn - Sakai at Georgia Tech: They were WebCT users, but decided to move when Blackboard acquired WebCT and wouldn't extend their WebCT license. They also didn't have much of a faculty adoption of WebCT at the time (only about 25%), but there were a lot of faculty who had created their own home-grown online materials. They had three requirements for their CMS:
- Stable - They had some problems with WebCT vista in the past
- Secure - Their students are good at finding security holes
- Enterprise ready - able to be integrated into their student information systems, e-mail, and login
Their support site:
http://info.t-square.gatech.edu
Although there is a cost, it does seem like they got a lot out of hiring Unicon to get them started quickly. I don't think we would be able to transition to Sakai in one year, mainly because we have such a high adoption of ANGEL and we're offering a lot of courses completely online, but that doesn't mean that we couldn't start a pilot within a year after making a decision to get some initial feedback.
Patrick Masson - Moodle at SUNY Delhi: Rather than doing a feature comparison of the tools, they looked at existing in online and hybrid courses. They wrote these into use cases (stories) about online course activity. They decided to go with external hosting (Moodlerooms) so they could get 24/7 system support instead of trying to hire staff. The cost for hosting is $3/user/year (started as $1/user, but they have added some additional features such as site-wide encryption).
The only real downside is that the performance was a bit slow because of the off-campus hosting. On the positive side, there are a lot of free add-in modules for social networking and Web 2.0 tools, a ton of open online tutorials, responsive open source development community, and a very low cost of ownership. They took about about 1.5 years to develop training materials and migrate to Moodle.
Clare van den Blink - Blackboard at Cornell: They have been users since 1997. Their criteria: how well does it support teaching and learning, how does it perform for course administration, how easily can students and faculty be supported, what does it need for IT infrastructure (i.e. how does it scale), does that infrastructure match Cornell's IT infrastructure?
Most commonly used features: course information, course documents, announcements and e-mail, assignments and gradebook, and other basic course administration tools. Even though this is a commercial product, they still need to have developers on staff to build custom tools and integration points. They are not on the most current version of Blackboard and have found that version upgrade cycles can impact user experience and support systems.
Interesting: Cornell is currently piloting Moodle, just to see what some other tools are like.
OVERALL DISCUSSION
Sections:
For courses with multiple sections, Sakai has a lot of section-aware features such as the gradebook and content tools. Moodle has features similar to the "master courses" in ANGEL. Blackboard 9 has some section-aware tools, but most institutions haven't upgraded yet.
External Tool Integration:
It sounds like all three tools have some extensible tools/widgets, but varying levels of integration with external tools. It was difficult to tell from the discussion - I think we'd have to investigate this on our own or have a specific list of requirements to discuss with an experienced user.
This was probably the best Adobe Connect session that I have ever participated in. All three presenters were well informed and concise in the presentation of their information. Once the archived presentation is ready, I'll edit this post and add the link.