Video: Face-Off—Moodle v. Blackboard

Dougiamas, not Dougiamos :)

Just curious – was there no one available at Educause to talk about Sakai?

I can’t see how any IT, Faculty or Admin can justify paying for Blackboard when Moodle is free. Blackboard will not survive the decade.

Sure Moodle is free… but to do it right you need skilled programmers who can create tools that work well and consistently. So for a true system wide product it ends up costing about the same to do it right (the money either goes to a group of programmers salaries or the big guys who do it for you).

The real question is to decide if you want the responsibility of managing an in-house design and production team (most flexibility & custom product offerings), to buy from a 3rd party vendor or to go with the big guy and have all done by them (the last two options have less flexibility and customization options).

I think it is funny (perhaps telling?) that the Blackboard model expressed in this video is “We don’t mind if we lose market share, because we will still make more money from a smaller number of clients.” Basically, the idea is that by selling more services to the shrinking client base, they will be able to grow their profits. But if a client chose an open source LMS instead (such as Moodle or Sakai), they would have access to the full range of offerings for that system without the increased costs.

Flexibility and self-determination, the core of the open source model, are also supposedly possible with Blackboard through their “building blocks” model, where schools can supposedly build their own applications to tie into the Bb API. It is interesting that the Blackboard rep didn’t mention this in his discussion of what Blackboard has learned from the open source community. Perhaps because the API, and thus much of your data, is still locked down behind their black box, which only opens up at Bb’s discretion.

I agree that Bb is bound to continue to lose market share. However, considering its numerical dominance now, the company is not doomed. If it wants to remain relevant and profitable, Blackboard will need to differentiate itself by innovating and having a stellar product that integrates flawlessly, akin to what Apple has done with its products. Given Blackboard’s track record however, that doesn’t seem very likely.

lsterling, I have been involved with the implementation of Moodle at a few institutions now. None of the institutions needed programmers to install or run Moodle, or to add several of the plugins available at Moodle.org. These were all self-hosted, and were Universities that had several online programs. It is a myth, and one that individuals continue to use as an excuse for not choosing an open source option.

just_another_human, I have also been involved with universities/colleges as well as corporate businesses that run Moodle etc, and you are correct – you don’t “have” to employ programmers.
However, those systems that are running Moodle and the like sans-programmers are very “lean” to say the least; and frankly from what I have seen the courses are not that well developed from a rich media standpoint. Aside from that, the faculty are even more frustrated and lost if they lean towards, shall I say a more “luddite” style of computer user, and tend to need more hand holding. These are not the folks who will just set up a Moodle account and course on their own; but their students are screaming for it.

I should state that I generally do not work with general ed institutions, but ones that have specific trade/vocational needs. The courses tend to be very large and require loads of multimedia and storage in the content as well as in the interactive/community areas. This requires programmers in order to meet the needs of this style of course offering.

So my bad – I should have stated that “special needs” institutions are caught in this odd space of resource allocation. Certainly not for every institution.