Technology@Purchase

A group of faculty and staff met regularly during fall semester to evaluate options for our campus learning management system (LMS): maintaining Blackboard or switching to either ANGEL (a commercial product) or Moodle (an open-source product).  The working group

• surveyed faculty on their current use, likes and dislikes for Blackboard, and what features they would want available in an LMS;
• set up demo accounts at ANGEL Learning, and had a web conference with an ANGEL representative on ANGEL features;
• set up a local test Moodle server with demo courses, to review Moodle features, and had a web conference with staff from SUNY Ulster about their experience switching from WebCT to Moodle;
• had an on-campus visit from a representative of Turning Technologies, to discuss how each of the LMS’s would integrate with the classroom response systems in use on campus;
• reviewed options for integrating ArtSTOR and EmbARK with the LMS’s;
• did initial tests on migrating Blackboard courses into Moodle;
• discussed transferring electronic reserve functions from ERes into the LMS that is eventually selected;
• investigated ongoing costs for each of the LMS’s.

Generally, faculty members of the committee have been responsible for comparing functional capabilities among the three systems, while staff members of the committee have looked into technical implementation issues and cost data.

After one semester of review, here is a general sense of where things stand on this issue:

• There is little support among the working group for maintaining Blackboard long-term, given its relative lack of functionality and escalating costs.  This position is consistent with nation-wide trends among colleges and universities, where Blackboard has been losing in market share in recent years.  The working group generally supports maintaining Blackboard for one additional year (2009/2010), to ease the transition to a new LMS.
• There is still some interest in ANGEL.  ANGEL has been growing somewhat nationwide as Blackboard has been declining.  It was characterized by a faculty member of the group as a ‘better version of Bb’.  It is especially strong at supporting asssessment, which some faculty members of the group thought might be overkill, given current use of LMS by Purchase faculty, and it has a repository function that makes it easy to reuse files across courses.  Licensing costs would be about half what Blackboard would cost.
• This is a fair amount of support among the group for Moodle, which has been the fastest growing LMS in recent years.  Moodle uses a different organizational structure than Blackboard or ANGEL, in that it has an explicit focus on assembling online learning activities and resources into an integrated sequence to support course learning goals.  That was seen as a strength for the LMS, but one that would require some getting used to by faculty in transitioning from Blackboard.  As an open source product, it is flexible and we would be able to add new features through the use of modules developed by various univerisities and colleges.  There would be no company to turn to for support (unless we contract with a Moodle hosting site), but there is an active development community to submit questions to.  There would be no licensing costs if we host Moodle ourselves.
• There is no reason to keep electronic reserves as a standalone function, separate from the LMS, so ERes will eventually be discontinued.
• We have a production server set up for Moodle, and several faculty have expressed interest in piloting courses on the server this spring so that we can gain familiarity with running Moodle on campus.
• It would be useful to run some pilot courses with ANGEL this spring, but so far no faculty have stepped forward to volunteer.