Migrant workers in Michigan, 1940. CC By: bobster1985
I would like to be able to say it was an ethical decision prompted by Blackboards intollerable patent grab, and offensive behaviour towards the education sector generally…
I would like to be able to say it is because Otago Polytechnic wishes to engage with the open source software and educational content community around Moodle and free software generally…
I would like to be able to say its because Otago Polytechnic reads major reports that recommend the use of free software as a way to cut costs and improve people’s skills.. in short paying people’s salaries and professional development instead of license fees…
And I would like to say the migration was because back in 2005 staff at Otago Polytechnic conducted research comparing Moodle to Blackboard and recommended that [Moodle] showed significant potential and should be seriously considered for further investigation…
But all I can do really is quote the leadership team:
This has been driven primarily from the uptake Moodle is getting within the sector.
To be fair, this sort of decision can’t be taken lightly, and I’m sure other’s had good reason to stay with Blackboard all this time.. what we have now however, is a large number of disgruntled staff who need to find time to migrate content from one system to another. The end in the use of Blackboard was inevitable if you’ve been following the NZ eLearning sector, and the Educational Development Centre (EDC) has been doing its best to inform and encourage staff to become independent of any particular Learning Management System so that they are not so affected by changes like this.
The EDC is recommending 4 possible approaches to those faced with this migration:
- Simply migrate content from Blackboard to Moodle and utilise the technical support from the IT support unit. A word of caution on this – there will no doubt be high demand on the IT Support people for this, so expect delays and get in early.
- Take this opportunity to review your content and find more up to date materials, review the way you teach or facilitate your online course and the interactions you set up, and consider your options before acting. EDC offer support for this option.
- Load content to the web by way of the OP Website, Blip.tv, Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikiversity or Educator, Survey Monkey, Blogger, Google Docs, GoogleMaps, etc and represent this now independent material in your Moodle by simple links and embed codes. Doing it this way frees the content up so that any migration is possible and simple. Getting to this level of independence is not for the faint hearted. EDC offers support for this option.
- Load the content to the web (as above) and run the course on the web without the use of a Learning Management System like Blackboard or Moodle. This approach will set you free 🙂 EDC offers support for this option as well.
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February 3, 2009 at 1:41 am
minhaaj
Sounds like a great idea. Open Source have its issues though and dunno if commerical support is available for Moodle like Ubuntu. Gotta be careful with that. Hope they set poor students back a little less because of decreased cost. Unlikely but hope for the best.
February 4, 2009 at 5:58 am
dave
Yeah – I know you can’t stand LMS’s, but lets ignore that for a minute. We disagree strongly, but you’d be mistaken if you believe I simply don’t understand the issues. I have considered the directions you advocate and reject most of it – but lets ignore that for a minute too.
I’ve used moodle before and although it is far inferior to blackboard in may ways, it does the job ok for most things. My problem is that Moodle, last time I looked, does NOT import the things that are central to my courses.
Sure it handles documents, it’s an ok file server. And yes it’s good for discussions. But if you use material provided by text-book publishers such as formative quizzes then you’re out of luck.
My problem is that my entire program was rapidly (very rapidly!) built on a formula of regular quizzes, a written assignment, and final practical and theory exams. All quizzes and most of the theory exam were automatically marked using questions provided by publishers (then heavily filtered by local staff). Great for teaching workload.
The quizzes receive extremely good feedback from students. They are a crucial part of the course. And now they are wiped completely.
The result is that I am having to re-design the entire programme, lose a valuable component, and in at least one case I think I will have to close a course which was 99% self-run.
While TANZ activities are forcing us to adopt moodle – we lose the ability to utilize material from publishers of some really good texts.
But my utilization of blackboard is unusual. As an organization, we will save an enormous amount of money in going to moodle – even given the admin costs. We probably will be leaches and not fund any serious developer to contribute to the project so all in all serious money saved.
However, in my corner of the world – an absolute disaster.
Moodle will still have it’s uses for this programme, but I think we’ll probably end up using the courses directory for most things.
It’s a shame we can’t afford the best – but that’s the reality of where we are.
February 4, 2009 at 7:43 am
leighblackall
You’re right Dave, I don’t like LMS’s for this (and other) reasons. I’m not sure you have considered my position though. We have never discussed even debated, rather been gruff and insulting to one another in throw away remarks on our blogs.
But thanks for taking the time to explain your position here. I’m sure there are lots of people about to face a stressful year this year. 12 months to migrate is not a lot of time in the end. 3 years would have been better I think. As you know it wasn’t my decision to go to Moodle, but I certainly encouraged the dropping of Blackboard. As you state, we will save an enormous amount of money, and I hope that money saved will be better spent – although the outsourced host of our Moodle is charging an arm and a leg I hear.
The situation you find yourself in… you must have known you’d be in this position eventually. You follow the patterns, you’ve watched the golden arches spread over the educational map of NZ, and you know the financial situation our organisation has been in (not in the least due to IT related spending). It was only a matter of time. So the fact that your courses depended on Blackboard is an issue of design and sustainability isn’t it. Sure, if I had big money I’d be advocating the Polytech pay for its own video sharing site, photos, blogs, wikis, an LMS, even a 3D simulation platform.. but I have never worked for an educational organisation that had money, sorry.. I did work for the army once. I’ve worked for a lot that poured the little money they had down single “solutions” like Blackboard though, and content that would only work in LMS like Blackboard, with IMS standards never really met.
I hope this migration will result in an investment towards self sufficiency, though it doesn’t look like it – rather the sustenance of TANZ produced content that will only work in Moodle (back to square 1). But I hope we will employ developer staff who can make significant contributions back into the Moodle projects, just as I hope we will make contributions to Firefox, OpenOffice, Ubuntu, MediaWiki, and WordPress.
No doubt you’ll see red in EVERYTHING I say and do, especially if I say you’re now (potentially) free from your publishers lock in, and sure – you’ll have to accept a likely reduction in quality and an relatively short term increase in workload… but the reality is those publishers were in it to make money, and sometimes the only way they figure they can do that is to corner markets into narrow options and leech more and more money out of their “clients” once they are trapped and dependent. How’s this user pays system of education working out for you Dave? I know the Polytech sure is suffering.
I hope your department will invest towards self sufficiency. I hope they employ developer staff who can make significant contributions back into free and reusable materials. I hope its not long before you enjoy quality content from the wikis, or a publishing house in a different business model. I hope your students will help you get there. Or perhaps you’ll run your own LMS, maybe even a scaled down older version of Blackboard so you can keep doing what you do.
Not long now, you’ll be saying the same back to me. The “web2” services will start slowing down and shutting up as you’ve always said. I’m facing that reality soon too. I really hope we’ll make investments to self sufficiency though… but sadly I think we’ve already spent all the money we were gunna get for IT capability.. ooh look.. here comes Microsoft again.
February 4, 2009 at 10:56 am
dave
don’t get me wrong – I’m not lumbering you with being the author of the decision. Although, I suspect that your advocacy played a part. Which is fine.
And you’re wrong if you think I am not aware of your philosophy or if you think I am unaware of the whole open source, open document and creative commons stuff. I don’t think I need a debate and discussion with every proponent of an idea to say that I *have* considered the idea, and have reached a radically different conclusion.
>12 months to migrate is not a lot of time in the end. 3 years would have >been better I think.
Yes. Absolutely. Two years would be tight, three would be a reasonable project timeframe. Four I think would have been excessive.
>although the outsourced host of our Moodle is charging an arm and a leg >I hear.
bound to. The stuff ain’t free. There’s competition for hosting but none of it’s cheap for decent volume.
>you must have known you’d be in this position eventually. You follow the patterns …
The pattern you’re talking about is pretty much NZ polytechs and aussie tafes. Universities not so much. I did think it would come here but I did think we’d have a sensible timeframe.
Regarding patterns – you’re mistaken if you think that blackboard is disappearing internationally. I am left high and dry simply because publishers (who monitor trends far far more closely than I ever will) are creating material which suites the bulk of their customers ie the book buying/setting academics. If moodle was really a big thing internationally then they would be making stuff for it. It isn’t, they don’t. I have had this confirmed to me by a couple of publishers (prentice hall and cengage reps). There is no secret blackboard/publisher conspiracy going on.
> sure – you’ll have to accept a likely reduction in quality and an relatively
>short term increase in workload
The fact that you believe that we, and our students, should expect a reduction in quality just to meet a political idea of free/libre software disturbs me.
>the reality is those publishers were in it to make money,
I really don’t have a problem with people who create excellent materials making money. I will happily support them if it’s any good, and will move on if quality slips. There’s no real lock-in here. There’s plenty of competition in the fields that I teach.
> How’s this user pays system of education working out for you Dave? I
> know the Polytech sure is suffering.
The issue of funding is a problem. The split between university funding vs what gets put into polytechnics is horrible. But I really don’t see that having anything more to do with this except forcing us to use poorer quality stuff because we can’t afford the good stuff. And it has nothing to do with ‘user-pays’ education. The bulk of our funding is from the government not the student based fees.
>I hope your department will invest towards self sufficiency. I hope they
>employ developer staff who can make significant contributions back into
>free and reusable materials.
How on earth can we afford developers to contribute back to the community?
>I hope its not long before you enjoy quality content from the wikis, or a
>publishing house in a different business model.
I too look forward to quality wiki content. But I have no problem with the current publishing model.
The reality remains – now that we’re moving to a more basic platform, the quality of our courses will go down a tad, the workload will go up a bit, and some courses aren’t an option.
>I really hope we’ll make investments to self sufficiency though
You keep using that phrase – but I do not think you understand what it means. Isn’t self-sufficiency the absolute opposite of open-source and web2.0, I see those as more community-dependent and in a way Interdependent-dependent (ie absolutly dependent on a total interdependancy). Self sufficiency carries with it the idea that you are NOT dependent on a community to support you.
>ooh look.. here comes Microsoft again.
yeah … ok.
February 4, 2009 at 11:36 am
Reuben
Hmm, has anyone done a cost benefit analysis and requirements planning exercise with the results feeding into a properly scoped “total cost of ownership” (TCO) for the switch from one product to another, apart from using the cost of a system as the primary driver for replacement?
February 4, 2009 at 12:34 pm
dave
LOL
February 4, 2009 at 1:00 pm
leighblackall
We would hope so wouldn’t we. I do recall Mike Collins doing one.
From what I know, it costs something like 15 grand to outsource the Moodle and with it all the support, and staff to manage the install. Obviously support staff remain so no saving there. So that would be 15 grand against the Blackboard license and server admin staff.
Along with that we will be compatible to a lot of TANZ produced resources specifically made for Moodle.. though I’m no fan of some of that content and the fact that it is dependent on using Moodle, I guess this will save some departments the cost of producing or buying in resources. That could be a massive saving.
Other little benefits are that our teaching staff would be learning how to use Moodle and so be be more in a position to communicate and share with other Polytechnic and TAFE staff who are using Moodle. Not sure how you put a $ value to that.
Additionally, we will be able to help local schools and private providers obtain and use a learning management system.. so I guess there is potential consultation income like what I get for helping externals use wikis, blogs and RSS etc.
February 4, 2009 at 2:57 pm
dave
that’s still a considerable saving I believe. I’ve heard scarey-high figures for BB annual license. I wouldn’t expect any real return from school consultation. At best it tends to be community service (but we’ve a role there). I mean – go for it if you can, but schools tend to be pretty lean if you’re used to corporate consultation.
February 6, 2009 at 2:43 am
alexanderhayes
I’m in the process of negotiating within the context of my current role funding to support an assay of three differing types of LMS / CMS solutions for one of the biggest energy providors in the southern hemisphere.
Here’s some background on the Moodle side of the equation – http://www.edupov.com/2009/02/moodle-synopsis-for-choice/
Like you Leigh I’m sold on what would appear the most sensible option for hosting an interactive and valuable learning community oriented code however, I’m embroiled in the history of propriety and the mistrust they have of “free” anything. The free as in freedom principals are far from imbued as of value and what strikes me is that with licenced legacy systems so heavily underpinning core business it is any wonder that I have access to anything at all or find familiar to conduct and engage other learners through.
I acknowledge that I’ve been spoilt. ….rotten.
What exhaustion becomes of mediating a middle road. What solace there is in others acknowledging the contribution we have made to other organizations pushing our open platforms dream.
How little there is to celebrate when a data network administrator group arrives to participate in a face-to-face training session of which nine tenths of the event is about remote access using middleware.
The paradox of it all astounds me. Humans astound me.
Better we acknowledge the borg and be done with it.