Miguel guhlin's personal annotations on this page
Mguhlin bookmarked
on 2009-10-30
-
Blackboard has not been having a good time in the state of North Carolina. As I noted recently, the University of North Carolina (a Blackboard customer) reported highly favorable results of their pilot study of Sakai, with an outcome of further investigation into Sakai as a full replacement of Blackboard as their primary LMS. It turns out that this was following on the heels of a similar study done by the North Carolina Community College system favorably comparing Moodle to Blackboard. The details were different but some of the underlying dynamics were the same: the open source system in each case was found to be functionally equivalent to Blackboard for all practical purposes, the open source platforms did roughly as well as Blackboard (in the Moodle evaluation) or better than Blackboard (in the Sakai case) in usability evaluations, and Blackboard was deemed to be expensive relative to the alternatives.
-
poor support was one of the major complaints about Blackboard in the original NCCCS report. It is important to remember that, just as software development under and open source license is not inherently inadequate for the needs of large institutions, neither is software developed under a proprietary license—even by a relatively large company like Blackboard—inherently adequate.
-
It’s important to understand that open source projects are not inherently any more insecure than proprietary software development efforts.
-
If Blackboard can’t help you fix your problems, you’re out of luck, because nobody else understands their code or has the right to look at it. If your Moodle vendor can’t help you, you can go to another vendor, or find another adopting school that knows how to fix the problem. You can also fix it yourself. You don’t have to, but unlike with Blackboard, you can. Likewise, if Blackboard were to go out of business (ask WebCT or ANGEL customers if this sort of thing ever happens), you would’t be able to find somebody else to support and continue to develop your platform. Not true with open source support vendors.
-
Schools that have their systems hosted by Moodle vendors such as Moodlerooms or Remote Learner, or Sakai vendors such as Unicon or rSmart, have highly predictable costs with no additional staff required.
-
the Moodle community includes some of the largest distance learning programs in the world, such as Open University UK and Open Polytechnic in New Zealand, not to mention many U.S. community colleges.
-
With a proprietary product like Blackboard, just as with an open source community, development resources are going to go toward whatever projects that whoever controls the resources perceives to be in the interest of a critical mass of the adopting schools. Any proprietary company, including Blackboard, is obliged to prioritize functionality requests of a majority of the customers they happen to have, sometimes at the expense of the needs of a minority. The risks to adopting schools are therefore substantially the same.
-
Blackboard provides the least transparency of any vendor or open source project in this product category. Their dismissal of the notion that an open source project could keep up with new innovations also rings hollow, and not just for LIS. If I recall correctly, Moodle also supported grading discussion posts long before Blackboard did, to cite one example of innovation that started in the open source LMSs and has been copied by Blackboard.
-
NCCCS’s pilot and case studies found that Moodle’s usability is basically equal to Blackboard’s. UNC’s pilot studies found that Sakai’s usability is better than Blackboard’s.
-
According to the NCCCS report, member schools went to Moodle in the first place because the high fees and poor customer service from Blackboard were creating costly resource distractions.
This link has been bookmarked by 9 people . It was first bookmarked on 30 Oct 2009, by Grant Potter.
-
Mathieu Plourde"As I noted recently, the University of North Carolina (a Blackboard customer) reported highly favorable results of their pilot study of Sakai, with an outcome of further investigation into Sakai as a full replacement of Blackboard as their primary LMS. It turns out that this was following on the heels of a similar study done by the North Carolina Community College system favorably comparing Moodle to Blackboard."
-
-
Blackboard has not been having a good time in the state of North Carolina. As I noted recently, the University of North Carolina (a Blackboard customer) reported highly favorable results of their pilot study of Sakai, with an outcome of further investigation into Sakai as a full replacement of Blackboard as their primary LMS. It turns out that this was following on the heels of a similar study done by the North Carolina Community College system favorably comparing Moodle to Blackboard. The details were different but some of the underlying dynamics were the same: the open source system in each case was found to be functionally equivalent to Blackboard for all practical purposes, the open source platforms did roughly as well as Blackboard (in the Moodle evaluation) or better than Blackboard (in the Sakai case) in usability evaluations, and Blackboard was deemed to be expensive relative to the alternatives.
-
poor support was one of the major complaints about Blackboard in the original NCCCS report. It is important to remember that, just as software development under and open source license is not inherently inadequate for the needs of large institutions, neither is software developed under a proprietary license—even by a relatively large company like Blackboard—inherently adequate.
- 8 more annotations...
-
-
David CorkingIt is 2009, and I am still annoyed by marketers use of the word "enterprise" to describe a college. It distracts me from the main point of the article, which is that Moodle is much more thoroughly supported than potential customers might guess.
Would you like to comment?
Join Diigo for a free account, or sign in if you are already a member.