e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Ken-Udas

  • BRR Report Published

    I am pleased to announce that our report on BRR and LMSs for the Observatory on Borderless higher education has been published. Here’s the description:

    Apples to Apples: Guidelines for Comparative Evaluation of Proprietary and Open Educational Technology Systems
    Ken Udas and Michael Feldstein, SUNY Learning Network at the State University of New York, USA – May 2006

    Selecting a learning management technology has increasingly become a mission critical and strategic decision for higher education institutions. As technology supported and online learning has become more prevalent and learning management technologies more important institutional features, the selection environment has become increasingly complex. This paper presents a comparative model developed specifically for evaluating learning management software for adoption decisions in which open source software (OSS) and proprietary options are under consideration in higher education. It is intended to support senior academic administrators and policy makers who are responsible for or influence the software evaluation and selection process by proposing a methodology that accounts for organisational context and software system characteristics, while also providing the advantage of cross-organisational comparison.

    Unfortunately, it is only accessible via a paid subscription. However, they do offer a free trial that I assume would allow you access to this report plus other valuable resources published by the Observatory. (And if you do either get the free trial or subscribe, please do Ken and me a favor and let them know that it was our report that attracted your attention. Thanks.)

  • A Conversation About BRR and LMSs

    I’ve been meaning to write this up for a couple of weeks now. Ken Udas and I recently had a great conversation with folks from OpenBRR and Edutools/WCET about creating a community and framework to evaluate both Open Source and proprietary LMSs, drawing on the knowledge and resources of both OpenBRR and Edutools. In attendance were Tony Wasserman from Carnegie Mellon West, Murugan Pal of SpikeSource, Scott Leslie of BCcampus (and EdTechPost fame), Russell Poulin of WCET, and Bruce Landon of Douglass College (and LandOnline fame). What follows are some notes from the conversation.

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  • Presenting at EDUCAUSE

    Ken Udas and I had our half-day workshop proposal accepted for EDUCAUSE 2006. The workshop is called A Level Playing Field: How to Evaluate Open and Proprietary LMSs Using the Same Criteria, and it will be drawing heavily on the BRR framework. Here’s the description of the workshop:

    When selecting a Learning Management System, decisions are often based on generalizations about the advantages and disadvantages of Open Source software relative to commercial options. Without an appropriate evaluation model, critical strengths or weaknesses of individual Open Source alternatives may be overlooked resulting in an incomplete comparison of the available options.

    In this hands-on workshop, attendees will practice applying the Organizational Readiness Rating (ORR) model, which is based on a model
    developed by Carnegie Mellon University and SpikeSource, to the domain of learning management software selection. Attendees will engage in a facilitated software evaluation process of three learning management systems. including both commercial and open source options. They will also discuss the ORR model in relation to some of the characteristics oftheir home organizations that were uncovered during the evaluation process and how those characteristics may impact software selection.

  • Microsoft Takes the Lead on Openness (?!)

    Microsoft recently announced that they are making the issue register (i.e., bug tracker) for Internet Explorer public. Yes, there are a few hoops you need to jump through in order to see it, but basically anyone can now see the open bugs around IE. This is a big deal. As Washington Post technology security columnist Brian Krebs has pointed out, Microsoft takes an average of 46 days to patch critical security vulnerabilities (and 135 days for bug fixes in general) while Mozilla takes an average of 23 days to patch similar flaws, with a third of them patched in under 10 days. (There are some caveats to these numbers noted in the articles, but the basic gap is pretty soundly documented.) A recent study [PDF] from Carnegie Mellon found that Open Source projects typically patch security vulnerabilities 60% faster than proprietary vendors. I don’t have the data to prove that this applies to other kinds of bugs as well but it seems logical to infer that it would.

    LMS vendors should take note of this data and of Microsoft’s leadership in opening up their database of open issues.

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  • More Corroborating Info on Cost of Sales

    Mark Carden makes an interesting observation that supports Jim Farmer’s calculations regarding Blackboard’s cost of sales:

    I know something about the cost of sales issue, having sold library automation software for most of the past ten years (at Innovative and Dynix). I have long said that it costs the major ILS/LMS vendors an average of about US$50,000 per bid, which means that for a typical mid-sized university deal, five competing bidders will spend US$250,000 between them: and only one will win, so again that is US$250,000 per deal.

    Of course an individual vendor’s costs per deal are very dependent on the win-rate, something Jim has not really looked into.

    As a deal like this might only have revenues of US$250,000 anyway, it means the library community has paid US$250,000 to the library software vendors and none of this has gone into development � it was all spent on sales and marketing.

    It is in everyone’s interest to lower that $50K per-bid cost of entry. Following up on my earlier post, Ken Udas and I have been participating on a thread on the OpenBRR forum. If you have an interest in the topic, please feel free to join in.

  • More Thoughts About Blackboard: "The fault, dear Brutus…"

    Jim Farmer’s financial analysis of Blackboard certainly has gotten a lot of attention–and for good reason. To start with, that ~$250K cost per sale is a truly eye-popping number. But upon further reflection, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not the most important part of the story that Jim tells. Here is the most important part:

    Software suppliers do not spend on sales and marketing not considered ?necessary.? The costs are driven by customer demands and customer expectations. Enterprise procurements can be very expensive for software suppliers. Requiring extensive proposal responses, large-scale demonstrations using extensive prescribed scripts, and presentations with experts drawn throughout the company are required by customers as a condition of doing business; this is costly.

    Blackboard spends a ton of money to acquire each new customer because they have to. It’s the only way they can successfully run the gauntlet of the higher education sales process often enough to make money. The procurement process itself is broken. It requires proprietary vendors to spend between a quarter and a third of their revenue on sales–money that could be better spent on product development or discounts to customers. It blocks Open Source support vendors that don’t have armies of salespeople from participating in many RFP’s. And, according to Jim’s analysis, it results in a net price increase of as much as 26% for the customers. Everybody loses.

    The good news is that this problem is fixable.

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