A while back I was asked to evaluate some learning management systems and part of the project required a price comparison. Costs over five years, for 5,000 users averaged $370,000 for the proprietary systems.
At the time, there were not a lot of open source services providers (which I had suggested was a good business model). Now that Moodle has over 10,000 installations, including Online Campus with 54,955 users, there are a number of reputable service providers for Moodle hosting, support and consulting, in several countries.
I know that it is possible to get full Moodle hosting and support for ~$5,000 per year for 5,000 users. So what could you do with all of the savings (~$345,000)? How about:
- Hire an internal technical support person
- Hire an internal learning support person
- Pay to develop the one additional function that you need and then give it back to the community under GPL so others can benefit as you have from open source
- Buy Moodle T-shirts for the accounting department
Anyway, open source learning management systems are not only viable options but can be an order of magnitude cheaper than many proprietary systems. Other systems and resources are listed on OpenSource4Learning.
3 thoughts on “Open source in education for bean counters”