“Martin Dougiamas is the Linus Torvalds of the LMS world and his software is the Linux of this software.” — Brent Simpson
Recently Ashford University announced that it's ditching Blackboard, the most commonly used system for delivering online courses. Called a Learning Management System, or LMS, these sorts of systems are the ones you as an online student log into and through which you do you class discussion and similar activities.
Blackboard has dominated for quite a while, especially considering that the industry isn't all that old. A few years ago they shored up their dominance by buying their largest competitor, WebCT. Earlier this year they announced they were repeating this move by buying yet another competitor, called Angel Learning.
Their rapid growth hasn't been effortless. Along the way their technical support has earned the scorn of many Blackboard administrators. And their system doesn't come cheaply. Schools that use the more comprehensive systems that Blackboard offers will easily pay over one hundred thousand dollars per year in licensing fees. Wow!
Even with their healthy appetite to gobble up their competitors, however, they are far from the only LMS available. Ashford is moving to a system that was called eCollege, which has since has been bought up by academic publishing behemoth Pearson. There have also been a number of open source systems developed, which means systems that are free for anyone to use, copy, modify, and adapt to meet their own specific need. The two most often cited open source alternatives are Sakai, which was developed by a consortium of universities, and (by far the more often used) Moodle, an independent project which was founded by Martin Dougiamas as part of his doctoral research.
I'm familiar with most of these different systems. I was a Blackboard administrator for nearly three years, and while it has a useful array of features, I can testify as to the difficulty one can have with their technical support. Before that I used to train new online students how to use eCollege, and thought it pretty well designed, especially the expanding/collapsing discussion board feature — I can see why Ashford liked it, and I hope Pearson doesn't mess it up. As a student at A.T. Still University, I've used WebCT, although by the time I got to try it it had already been melding with Blackboard for some time.
And then there's Moodle. This one is my favorite for many reasons. Obviously, I appreciate that it's open source, and there aren't ridiculous fees involved just to get one's hands on it. I like the design of its courses, where the main page of a course can be laid out like a clickable syllabus, and students never have to root around to figure out what they're supposed to be doing in any given week. I like that it's easy to develop and teach courses in it, which I've done as an adjunct faculty member for LCOOCC. And I especially like that there's a whole ecology of third party support and consulting providers that have grown up around it.
You see, a lot of times one of the objections raised about open source software is that there's no central company that offers support for it. I like to think that in Moodle's case this is an advantage, not a disadvantage. Whereas with Blackboard one is stuck with them whether they bother to respond to pleas for support or not, with Moodle, if your provider is unresponsive you can replace them with another. If for no other reason, this should give university IT departments cause to take a look at ditching someone who charges six figures but often can't be troubled to pick up the phone.
Next up, part two, where I speculate whether everything I just said in this post might be swept away by a wave from a certain company whose name rhymes with MacDougall.