Drug dealer analogies aside, an LMS does provide a simple template for online teaching and learning. Remember, most university faculty have never taken a course in (effective) teaching and learning so they really need all the bloody help they can get.

What I see from my institutional perspective is that WebCT has sunk all their money in marketing their product and not enough money in the design. They seem to fail to understand that simple is better (i.e., Moodles rapid ascendency).

As it happens that’s exactly what I did last year, talk to something like 90 undergraduate students, individually about how they felt about WebCT etc.

And interestingly enough they were pretty darn happy.

Happy because they got their lecture notes online.

That’s it, seriously, c’est tout. Got about 2 mentions of online communication (and they were negative) and nothing else.

And that’s where I disagree with you a little bit, I think that the vast majority of students (certainly in Australia) have fully bought into the consumerist model of higher education. So asking them isn’t really going to help much!!!

The problem is that we reinforce that through pedagogy, teach-to-scale (through inadequate funding) and woeful models of environments (read ‘LMSs’).

I agree that the conversation needs to shift away from whether you’re going to use a commercial LMS or an opens source one to ‘do we really need a frickin LMS at all?’

Or is this just me being a radical, impractical, punkish blogger who don’t know sh*t ;)

Whilst typically we might pat ourselves on the back with the quality of our existing LMS (be it proprietary or free) we are perhaps less ‘open’ to the quality (or lack) in how that LMS assists the learner to, well, er, learn.

Talk to many and you might just get the feeling that learners are succeeding DESPITE the limitations forced upon them by current popular LMS provided. When you’re own students are by-passing the existing LMS or creating their own work-arounds in order to gain what from their perspective is a more wholesome and useful learning system, then you have a challenge.

Discussion of costs to change typically ignore the effectiveness of the present system. Looking at the problem solely from the academic’s perspective or solely from the finance dept perspective or solely from the open v closed perspective seems to me to be ‘incomplete’. Shouldn’t, all things considered, the most important aspect of selection be whether the existing or potential LMS actually enables the learner (remember them?) get the job done, easier and more effectively with a more positive outcome? Why not ask the students how dysfunctional or functional they find the options of Blackboard and WebCT?

The biggest factor in choosing any form of technology for any organisation is to ensure the correct fit, based around features, culture (technology and non-technology) and cost. Every “largish” organisation goes through the issues discussed when they begin to think about moving platforms and the discussions get even more heated when you are moving a core business application, like LMS for education. In the end it does not matter if you choose properitary or OSS as long as it fits a clear long term strategy for the business, the issues happen when this does not happen. In looking from the sidelines I could decide that WebCT and Blackboard have had early success within the education market as first generation software and the real battle is going to be if they can retain this position as new enterants enter with second generational style tools.

I’m not comparing total cost of ownership of an OSS with the licence of the VLE. I realise that we have spent resource getting to where we are, but because that’s where we are, I have to calculate the ‘out of the box’ costs of an OSS alternative to compare with the current running costs. However, as you say, a major change to the proprietary system could be a good point for change as it will involve training and system admin changes.

The main factor for us to move to OSS would probably be a really easy course/module migration strategy. If we hadn’t already got a lot of experience with the proprietary option, our individual situation would be different.

Without wanting to pick on Rachael in particular, I’m always fascinated by comparisons between proprietary and open source software. The pattern to look for is a complete and thorough listing of all costs associated with the open source software and yet only comparing it with the licence fee for proprietary software. Obviously you need to look at the Total Cost of Ownership for all potential solutions.

In this particular case it would appear that if you pay for a proprietary licence fee you don’t need staff to ensure it runs well, you don’t need to train staff to use it well, nor do you need to migrate courses or staff skills (with a rather major upgrade to version 6 and its shiny new relational database technology in the offing, and a subsequent axing of the WebCT Campus *codebase*, this seems doubtful for those using WebCT).

The one year horizon for return on investment also worries me, as does the need to abruptly shift from one product to another with no overlapping transition period but neither of these show the classic problems that face those with the sudden need to compare proprietary and OSS software solutions after years of comparing only proprietary products.

Looking at OSS through a proprietary lens is always going to make it look odd. Rules of thumb such as “cheaper licence fees means worse at X” (’scalability’ being my favourite thing that open source *obviously* can’t do), or “the glossier the brochure, the better the pedagogy” no longer apply, if they ever did, and should be challenged whenever they are employed in the context of Open Source software.

I do however have sympathy with an earlier comment by Rachael on the MMU blog that “The annual licence cost is easier to find than the staffing costs for such a [open source] system.” Sadly, that’s all too often the case, whether the staffing is needed to properly support and run a proprietary or an open source system.

There is huge internet educational value in ACCESS, like a library. There is an emerging, fascinting second great value in AGGREGATION. LMS is a species of aggregation – but I think aggregation also happens spontaneously and thereby generates patterns from which we learn. Dynamic connectivity always happens when a person starts moving around among links following patterns of his thinking. Perhaps cognitive networking is a dynamic expression of the knowledge itself.

I agree that putting courses online now is a major step forward. My own, more limited, effort at GoldenSwamp.com is to provide access on a daily basis to fresh examples of superior knowledge nuggets and networks now free online.

Just briefly though, and partly tongue in cheek (but also quite seriously) if anyone is looking at migrating courses now is the time to do it, you’ll be better off in the long run, pedagogically far sounder and it won’t cost you as much. Promise.

And at the same time this discussion about the library / course is fascinating.

Something that another blogger put me straight on 3 years ago though springs to mind.

You can facilitate learning, encourage learning, provide environments and structures in which learning can take place and more.

But you can’t manage it.

Which is what most traditional LMSs try to do.