The enrolment and induction stress should be on the wain as the teaching kicks in. Hope all is going well and things are settling down. The ULCC Moodler has been very busy with a large planning exercise (details of this will follow in future blogs), and participating in a RSC West Midlands Webinar. Incidentally, ULCC will be providing some Moodle webinars and currently organising a programme for administrators and practitioners - dates/programmes will be circulated in the next week or two.
Anyway, what caught my eye and made me smile was an article in the Education Guardian last Tuesday "Moodle takes lead in secondaries". The article outlines the exact reasons why the ULCC service makes so much sense!
Schools are moving to Moodle in a big way because it’s seen as a ‘free’ option. Ray Barker, director of Besa says "Schools see it as a way to save money, but they often end up spending much more than they anticipated due to the cost of resourcing it". Hidden costs to install, maintain and develop the Moodle software is something that requires expertise and infrastructure and, if you don't possess it, can be an enormous additional cost. In FE/HE, the expectation is that IT Departments will look after it. As a critical service, IT usually doesn't want or can't take care of it and they don't want burdening with the added responsibility.
Ray Barker goes onto say ‘Because of the nature of open source software, technical support often costs much more than with a proprietal equivalent’! Blackboard/WebCT with annual licensing costs of £15K doesn’t seem such a bad idea when faced with new staffing costs of £50K - £100K. "For a school to successfully implement an open source system, they often have to have a champion who can see it through its technical difficulties." Surely he can't be suggesting an organisational dependency on one individual is a solution? Many of you have learnt by bitter experience that this is a recipe for a future catastrophe!
He reckons that proprietal VLEs will still flourish – but then wasn’t Besa something to do with Becta's advice to schools to lay off Moodle?
http://education.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,330756020-126004,00.html
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