LMS Reminiscing: Part 2: The Support Specialist Perspective
While sitting 10 days in silent meditation in January 2006, it occurred to me that I should get into higher education, using my online teaching and development skills to assist other instructors. I began applying, and a couple months later (after returning from the LMS user’s conference I mentioned in Part 1), I had a job supporting instructors at a small college with about 2,000 students in Manhattan. I had recently played around with installing an open source LMS, Moodle, onto my wife’s PC at home. I was thrilled that I could actually download, install and run it, (and I am not a programmer by any stretch), with full access right down to the source code, on my own. This came up during my interview, and the college was in the process of purchasing its own new LMS server. However, they ended up going with a US market-leading commercial enterprise LMS.
I have to admit, I was pretty appalled after seeing over $30,000 go out to purchase a nice new server, software and license, that aside from adding a logo I wasn’t even able to customize the login page. I even figured out enough to edit the login page, putting in the text I wanted, but somehow it prevented me from even replacing the file. I see both sides of this - on one hand, it’s protecting the school from having to fix what I might break. Or perhaps it’s protecting the company from having to fix (under warranty) what I might break. On the other hand, it’s preventing me from doing something even as simple as changing “username” to “ID number”, which would help my users and create less help call volume. Furthermore, it didn’t seem to come with any of the features I was yearning for in an LMS at the time - RSS feeds, blogs, wikis, instant messaging, and so on. Or perhaps these modules existed, but we’d have to shell out even more money for that. But for 2,000 students? This seemed a bit steep for what we got.
Soon thereafter I moved to the Catskills, SUNY Delhi, where I was faced with deciding what to do about the old WebCT server. We had to migrate to something, but what?
This might be something that could help institutions determine part of their risk factor in going with an open source vs. a commercial enterprise LMS solution:
- How much is it worth to you to be able to customize your LMS?
- Is the security and/or stability worth not being able to edit even the simplest parts?
- Is it possible for the LMS to be safe and stable and still have that capability?
- Can it be as secure and stable as a commercial enterprise solution?
- If you do go open source - do you have to hire a developer?
At the end of the day, what matters most: is it up and running? Does it have the features that meet the business, technical and functional requirements of your institution? Can equivalent or better service, stability and features be had for less than you are paying now? On Tuesday morning I’ll lay out the facts and figures for SUNY Delhi as we grappled with these very questions and chose to outsource Moodle.
Posted by Clark Shah-Nelson