PS. - Excuse the double post on the same topic - I thought I had lost it all ;-( and re-wrote from memory...
It appears to me that separate institutions often go through very similar processes and 'battles' with various stakeholders (e.g. their IT department) over which virtual learning systems to deploy. Sure, the context is always a bit different, but there are many commonalities and rules of thumb to follow.
I was recently asked to offer advice on a decision making process going on at a University of an island nation. They have been using WebCT for 6 years or so, but one school in the Faculty had built a home-grown LMS using Plone. Another area, Maths and Computer Science, have been using Moodle since 2005. 3 different LMSs - sound familiar?
Now, they want to consolidate and they are inclined towards open source. But it is still a tug of war between the home-grown PLONE tool and Moodle.
Do they even need to choose? What's wrong with multiple applications? At an organisational level, there's often some compelling reasons to consolidate - partly economics on support, part reduction of complexity and being able to focus resources and service, part ensuring consistent student experience.
I was closely involved in a similar decision back in 2003/2004 and we selected Moodle. The rationale is compelling. Over the medium term a home-grown development can never keep pace with a leading LMS (either proprietary or open source), simply because no institution in the world has enough resources to maintain that level of investment. The likes of BlackBoard and Moodle have the equivalent of millions of dollars of development every year. In comparative terms a single institution would be going backwards if it were to stick with a homegrown application. Not that Moodle had any clear lead back in 2004 but we did some research to help us get the decision right. See our Technical Evaluation.
But now the decision is much more of a 'no-brainer'. With Moodle, it has hit critical mass and any individual institution can be assured of continuing investment. There are now over 20,000 Moodle installations with some big installations such as Open University UK, UCLA, Athabasca and Moodle is now the most widely deployed LMS in NZ.
Home-grown can be appealing in the short-term because it is tailor-made to an organisation's requirements. But an individual institution can not hope to keep a home-grown application up to speed with what's happening in online learning. In any case, the M in Moodle stands for Modular. Many institutions have custom modules for their particular needs.
A footnote on the Blackboard Patent Pledge. I see that the Sakai Foundation and Educause have reservations and fair enough. However, overall, the Pledge is a major "victory" for the trend towards open source in education. It remains to be seen whether the patent will be thrown out altogether - afterall, as many of us recognise, the key problems for BB is that there is so much evidence of prior art, and the patent is way too generic to be defensible.
Decision makers can adopt open source solutions with confidence.
I wish we could have taken this further, but the session was about to close. I strongly disagree
