e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Observatory-on-Borderless-Higher-Education

  • 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.)

  • 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.

    (more…)

  • The Portal is the Platform, Part III

    This post is part of a series on the concept of a Learning Management Operating System.

    I have argued in this series that the heart of an LMOS should be a portal. The main reason I have given so far is that a modern portal is well suited to handle the long tail of specialized learning applications. But portals have many other virtues as well. For a good overview of the benefits it offers to a higher education environment, check out this report [PDF] put out by The Observatory on Borderless Higher Education. In the specific case of an LMOS, the second virtue that I want to highlight is flexible groups functionality. (more…)