To Moodle or not to Moodle

Friends of Two Brown Shoes would of course be familiar with our extensive support of the Moodle open source Learning Management System (LMS). Moodle has enabled thousands of educational institutions access to a near-enterprise-grade system - with an incredible and ever-growing feature set and a passionate support community.

So I guess this ringing praise begs the question: if Moodle’s so great, why are the main commercial providers (notably Blackboard) still gaining so much traction? Why is there still so much hesitation when one speaks to many so-called "experts" in the area?

One possible answer is the thinking of key educational decision-makers. All too often in the education community (particularly in K-12 environments), open source software is derided as cheap, unsupported (and unsupportable?) children’s toys. This is interesting given that Two Brown Shoes’ contact with many commercial software providers in the education sector has left such a bad taste in the mouth… why do we assume that it’s all about the software?

We know that it’s all about support

As an elearning systems manager at a Sydney school I know only too well the importance played by training and support. Merely acquiring software is never the answer to any educational need (although in many schools it perhaps temporarily satisfies some marketing need). Rather in our organisation we have had to carefully graft a scheme to train and equip teachers… and to delicately move through the selection and adoption of tools that will best meet our specific educational goals.

??? So what’s this got to do with open source vs commercial/proprietary software? Nothing… and yet everything!

…we’re still not getting it right…

The ongoing debate in the UK over the DfES position on learning platforms highlights the significant flaw in the thinking of many decision-makers in the industry. As Miles Berry points out, the DfES position emanates largely from their supplier-dependant approach. It’s true that it’s all about support… but then that’s the point, isn’t it?. Why is the belief prevalent that decisions about decisions about support are only discussions about vendors?

Separating platforms and services

LMS providers have in recent times highlighted that their systems are "platforms". That is, for them to accurately address the needs of a specific institution they must be tailored to those needs.

What is needed now is a shift in the thinking of decision-makers. The rhetoric of open systems (interoperability, freedom from vendor lock-in, etc) must be progressed to its natural end-point. Thanks to the open source community, many areas of technology are rapidly developing to the level that we can think of software as a "commodity".

The decision then for schools and universities gets back to which platform will provide the simplest, least-expensive options for configuration, customisation and support - either by in-house or external staff. Vendors seeking merely to "lock in" schools to proprietary platforms will find themselves locked out. Is there still a market for commercial software suppliers? Perhaps there is - but I think it is really time for the entire thinking on the topic to change…