Blackboard Contract for UNC System and thoughts on Moodle

Recently, Blackboard announced that "The University of North Carolina & North Carolina Community College System Select Blackboard for Statewide e-Learning Platform."

While Blackboard is heralding it as a "system selection", I think it's just spin.  In reality this is really more of a short-term (3 year) economic solution for the UNC system's current users of Blackboard, which includes us and Charlotte and UNC and maybe others.  While the release would imply that all UNC schools would have Blackboard forced upon them, that is not the case.  Really this agreement should be applauded as a collective bargaining agreement that probably saved North Carolina some money.

Some might read this news release from Blackboard though and fret about implications with Moodle or other open source LMS solutions, as NCSU and other UNC schools are in the middle of evaluating these tools as replacements for Blackboard.  The thing is that, at least at NCSU, a potential migration away from Vista would take a minimum of 3 years, which would actually be perfect timing with this recently struck agreement.  But, while I'm on the subject of LMSs, I'll take a moment to talk about Moodle versus Vista. 

While Moodle and open source solutions represent a shift to a better ideological place, moving to Moodle isn't a no-brainer decision.  Moodle represents a great deal of pain if it would be selected.  Migrating faculty to a new system would take a lot of resources, both financial and in man-hours of both training staff and faculty. Also, who really knows what problems Moodle could potentially throw at us down the line if in fact we went with it as a enterprise-level LMS?  The problems could potentially be even worse than what we've seen with WebCT/Bb Vista.  This is probably something that could be researched, but to the community at large, this is a total unknown. If in fact Moodle did have a serious problem, the only difference would be that instead of being able to point at Blackboard as having deficient support, we'd only have ourselves to blame.  And as a last point, the money involved is a moot point, they both (Moodle and Blackboard Vista) would cost about the same amount according to our best estimations.

Now don't misunderstand me, I do like Moodle and I'm very much in favor of piloting it and I am an advocate for open source.  I'm also not saying sticking with Blackboard is a no-brainer either.  I'm just trying to represent an opinion/argument that doesn't get a lot of air time.  I think we often over-inflate Moodle or paint too rosy a picture, what we need is an as-objective-as-possible comparison of the two systems and an equally objective decision to move forward.

Posted by cdmorris ( Jul 23 2008, 03:52:04 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [1]