Benoît is a sessional instructor in the English department of a large, research-intensive university. Previously he has used WebCT to disseminate lecture notes and readings for his face-to-face Business Writing course.
His department head has approached him about offering an online version of Business Writing. However, WebCT is no longer available at his university and Benoît must choose either WebCT/Vista or Moodle. WebCT/Vista is the university’s “official” LMS and has university-wide IT support, but the Help Desk is difficult to get a hold of and can be very slow in responding to e-mail. Moodle is hosted within the Faculty of Arts, but operates as a stand-alone tool with no real technical support: instructors need to set up their own courses from scratch. More and more faculty and instructors in the English Department now use Moodle, since it isn’t administered by IT support: less paperwork, less red tape.
Benoît is very comfortable in the design mode of WebCT; he has also done some general web design, mostly for personal use. In terms of web design he’s developed content, uploaded it via FTP and then left it there. He’s heard from colleagues that WebCT/Vista is dreadful, that doesn’t have half the functionality of WebCT, though he has not yet had time to do any evaluation himself.
Because of his teaching load, Benoît estimates he could spend up to 5 hours a week developing the online version of Business Writing. The course would go live next semester.
Benoit’s Deal Breaker
While I agree with many of my peers in here that speed, flexibility and being able to deliver the content in an interesting way are all important meanwhile reducing cost I am going to take a different stance for Benoit here.
“Will Moodle provide the security and privacy that is seen as acceptable by his university that WebCT/VISTA currently provides?”
Panettieri states: “Roughly 24 percent of schools with LMS deployments wind up with buyers’ remorse”. I can’t help but think that some of these buyers were shot down by the privacy and security guidelines that may or may not have been created at their institutions. Benoit could tick off all of the boxes of a great online course, only to have his institution create/rewrite their privacy policies and deem his LMS to not meet the criteria. In this way this question needs to be asked as it can be a deal breaker.
Panettieri, J. (2007). Addition by subtraction. University Business, August, 58-62. Accessed online 11 March 2009 http://www.universitybusiness.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=845