David Bahn at Metropolitan State University of Minnesota asked me last week if I had any information about implementation and maintenance costs of open source versus proprietary learning systems. I referred him to Edutools and Brandon-Hall for comparative information as well as an older study done in French for the Québec government.
David then send me these other information sites that he had come across in his research:
Blaisdell, M. (2004). Course Management Systems >> It’s the Support, Stupid! Campus Technology, 12/28/2004. Retrieved from http://www.campustechnology.com/articles/38766/ on 3/23/2008.
Cheal, C., Cummings, R., Fernandez, K., & Penney, M. (2006). Choices and Changes: How Four Public Universities Are Coping with the LMS Market Consolidation. Presentation (and podcast) from panel discussion at the EDUCAUSE 2006 conference. Retrieved from on3/23/2008.
Cheal, C. (2006). LMS Comparison from ELIS at Oakland University. Retreived from http://www2.oakland.edu/elis/policies.cfm on 3/23/3008.
Heid, S. (2006).  “Course Management Systems: A Tipping Point. Campus Technology, 12/28/2006.  Retrieved from http://www.campustechnology.com/articles/41719/ on 3/23/2008.
Marshall, M. & Mitchell, G. (2007). Benchmarking International E-learning Capability with the E-Learning Maturity Model. In Proceedings of EDUCAUSE in Australasia 2007, April 29 – May 2, 2007, Melbourne, Australia.
You may want to take a look at Clark Shah-Nelson’s presentation “An Outsourced Open Source LMS and a Pot of Gold?” http://connect.educause.edu/Library/Abstract/AnOutsourcedOpenSourceLMS/46399
This presentation was given on March 10, 2008.
Thanks, Kris. Always good to get up to date figures. I notice that the OS system (Moodle) in this case has between 3 and 10% the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the compared proprietary systems [see Slide 7].