This afternoon, I went to a three-person panel session: one for Moodle, one for Sakai, and one for Blackboard. I was hoping for a knock-down drag-out fight that would leave one clear winner in my head, but frankly, the people on this panel were too polite for anything like that to happen. [Recording here if you want to watch it.]
Even without the fight, they had some interesting points. The first was my favorite. To paraphrase, a free open source course management system is more like Free Puppies than Free Beer. There may be no up front cost, but there is still an ongoing cost of ownership. All three agreed that the cost of the software should not be the most important decision point. The ability to support the chosen tool within your infrastructure is much more important.
The other issues that they discussed included support, risk involved with one product or another, roadmaps/innovation, and looking toward the future. The overall sense that I got was that on each topic, the issues were different, but fairly balanced. Again, I think they were just being a little too polite. I don't think that you can look at the list of tools or the number of people on each platform (although Moodle has 30 million users world-wide).
The real differences will emerge as you look at cultural activity: the culture of the central organizing body (if there is one), the composition and activity of the developers, the degree to which an individual institution can be heard or even make changes, and the affordances of the tool itself. How do all of these mesh with your institution's culture and the teaching and learning activity that happens there? Does the tool assist with an academic workflow or does it fight against it? These are questions that are as important - maybe more important - as the questions about initial cost versus integration within an infrastructure. In this case, it's the cultural infrastructure.
A final note: If you listen to the recording, you may be able to faintly hear me bring up this issue of flow around the 44 minute mark. I brought it up by comparing course management systems to operating systems. They all have the potential to write e-mail, browse the web, play movies, edit documents (that checklist again, right?), but the user experience is very different between Linux, Mac, and Windows. Anyway, I didn't get a very good response, but after the session, I was approached by four people who were interested both in my question and with what Penn State was planning to do. I told them that we hadn't made a decision yet, but gave them my card and invited them to check out this blog to keep tabs on us.
Even without the fight, they had some interesting points. The first was my favorite. To paraphrase, a free open source course management system is more like Free Puppies than Free Beer. There may be no up front cost, but there is still an ongoing cost of ownership. All three agreed that the cost of the software should not be the most important decision point. The ability to support the chosen tool within your infrastructure is much more important.
The other issues that they discussed included support, risk involved with one product or another, roadmaps/innovation, and looking toward the future. The overall sense that I got was that on each topic, the issues were different, but fairly balanced. Again, I think they were just being a little too polite. I don't think that you can look at the list of tools or the number of people on each platform (although Moodle has 30 million users world-wide).
The real differences will emerge as you look at cultural activity: the culture of the central organizing body (if there is one), the composition and activity of the developers, the degree to which an individual institution can be heard or even make changes, and the affordances of the tool itself. How do all of these mesh with your institution's culture and the teaching and learning activity that happens there? Does the tool assist with an academic workflow or does it fight against it? These are questions that are as important - maybe more important - as the questions about initial cost versus integration within an infrastructure. In this case, it's the cultural infrastructure.
A final note: If you listen to the recording, you may be able to faintly hear me bring up this issue of flow around the 44 minute mark. I brought it up by comparing course management systems to operating systems. They all have the potential to write e-mail, browse the web, play movies, edit documents (that checklist again, right?), but the user experience is very different between Linux, Mac, and Windows. Anyway, I didn't get a very good response, but after the session, I was approached by four people who were interested both in my question and with what Penn State was planning to do. I told them that we hadn't made a decision yet, but gave them my card and invited them to check out this blog to keep tabs on us.
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