Blackboard just put out a press release announcing that the Hawaii Department of Education is moving their Hawaii Virtual Learning Network (HVLN) from an open source LMS to Blackboard. The press release doesn’t name the platform, but HVLN is currently running Moodle. This is notable because it’s the first move I have heard of away from open source to Blackboard in the United States and one of a very few that I’ve heard of globally. One data point does not make a trend, but this does bear watching.
Hi Michael – agree, it bears watching. I’ve spoken with several educators and administrators over the past few weeks traveling (a few in South Africa, a few in Sweden this week) who have expressed similar interests away from moodle to proprietary systems. When I ask why, the response centres on: “our IT dept can’t handle moodle. We have a plain vanilla install and we’re not getting the support we need”…and “it’s not as cheap as we thought it would be”. As you note, it’s only a few data point, but when you start to hear it a few times you start to wonder…
Hi Michael,
It is an interesting move. Especially with the added context of George’s comments. I think a lot has to do with the expectations of educational technologists and the expectations of IT departments. Many IT departments are increasingly looking to outsource complete systems and either host them internally or externally but either way rely on vendor support for the application. They are also looking to outsource greenfield software development while retaining in-house software development capability that focuses on the integration of systems rather than the modification and enhancement of a single system . This can leave an internally supported open source LMS looking increasingly unpalatable to an IT Director.
The problem is that a vendor supplied LMS may not actually be much better for the end user. My experience is that support requests can take a long time to be addressed. Enhancement requests disappear into a black hole and, to be brutally, frank the quality of the code is not that great in many cases.
Overall I think the future for OS LMSs is positive but increasingly they will be hosted externally and supported by specialist service suppliers. They won’t be much cheaper than private LMSs but they will be more flexible, adaptable and able to to support the changing use cases for the LMS.
Cheers
Mark
Just read about this item today: as a result of state-wide consolidation there has been a move from Moodle to Desire2Learn at Indiana University of Pennsylvania – “About two years after IUP switched to Moodle, it is making the switch again to Desire2Learn” – here’s a link to the article: http://tinyurl.com/5vvxl69 (It came to my attention because it was pushed out through D2L’s news feed.) There is what you could call an animated discussion about the way the article is written (i.e. as if the students are the main beneficiaries of state-wide consolidation) here at Google+
https://plus.google.com/111474406259561102151/posts/GaSCbsJ6NEi
This is a pretty general statement. It certainly has never been the case with Blackboard. In fact, my own anecdotal experience is just the opposite. I’d report bugs with Blackboard that would go literally years without fix. Conversely, after moving to Sakai, bugs or issues would get addressed (by internal staff newly-hired from the money that previously would have been spent on expensive licenses, or by external contractors) almost immediately.
I also think it’s really hard to make the case that Blackboard is more user-friendly than open source alternatives (the story may be different for newer solutions like Instructure; not sure. But, of course, Instructure doesn’t exactly fit into rigid OSS vs. proprietary distinctions).