Subject: Proposal to acquire Moodle Server for Vancouver Community College
Prepared by: Mike Tunnah
Submitted to: VP Education and Student Services
CC: Director of Information Technology, Dean School of Hospitality and Business Studies
Preamble
Online Learning is an effective way of reaching our student population. It offers learners choice and flexibility allowing them to meet their educational requirements while fulfilling other roles in their lives. The traditional definition of the college learner is changing to include a more mature learner who may be returning to school to finish previously started coursework. This learner might also be retooling in an attempt to gain new knowledge for a career switch. As mentioned above this new demographic of learner may have more responsibility with family thus requiring more flexibility in delivery of coursework. Vancouver Community College continues to expand its geographical reach by implementing programs in communities around the province. Moodle would allow an easier way of communicating and reaching these more remote corners of BC, thus enabling learning to take place outside of the traditional classroom model.
VCC is also under considerable funding pressure from the provincial government. These revenue challenges are not unique to VCC, however, they do impact the choices made at the college in terms of expenditures and sourcing of alternate revenue streams. Learning technologies such as Moodle have the potential to increase revenue by allowing more FTE’s.
Why I “chose” Moodle?
- Costing: MOODLE is a low cost option requiring little startup capital and no licensing fee. In comparison Blackboard startup and ongoing maintenance is expensive. Should one wish to acquire add ons for Blackboard they also come with a cost. With Moodle, many modules can be added thus improving the functionality of the program. Moodle runs on many operating systems. ***quote moodle website on cost comparison with Blackboard. As an example the University of North Carolina ( Croy & Smelser, 2009) calculated that they would realize savings of 52% of their current cost by switching from Blackboard to Moodle. Even though this example is based on a change in LMS it showcases the significant cost structure difference between the two.
- Administration; flexible and adaptable administration: Moodle is scalable, meaning that it can grow as elearning within the institution grows.
- Ease of use(students): Moodle has been designed on the tenents of a constructivist philosophy of teaching( Moodle, 2010). Student engagement and interaction is one of the key aspects Moodle developers kept in mind when designing it.
- Adoptable: Being an open source product allows Moodle to be operated by the user and edited by the user. This could be seen as a benefit when convincing faculty to try using it for their courses. Control and autonomy are very important to a college instructor when designing courses and developing content.
- Faculty Support: There has been a grass roots movement within the college whereby instructors are adopting learning technologies into coursework. While the college has no official support mechanism, a collegial atmosphere of sharing is growing interest in said learning technologies. Timing would suggest that the adoption and support of the Moodle platform would see many more instructors take on learning technologies creating a much larger community of practice.
- Alignment with Institutional goals: Vancouver Community College is proud to be an inclusive low cost education option for a wide range of learners. Moodle is able to meet the diverse and low costs needs of our students primarily through the end user control it offers and lack of a licensing.
Process used to evaluate different LMS platforms
I decided to utilize the Edutools ( Edutools, 2006 ) evaluation document for evaluating the different LMS options available. It is comprehensive and details the important points of user interface, administration, costing, and development. It also compares almost every available LMS on the market.
I also came across a document which compared Moodle and Blackboard(WebCT). Although there are many other options available BlackBoard WebCT is in broad use throughout post secondary institutions. SkillSpark (SkillSpark, 2010) provided a very comprehensive side by side comparison of these two LMS platforms.
The above two documents seem to favour Moodle and its open source platform.
Required Budget:
This is very difficult to piece together as there is no set cost per FTE because Moodle has no licensing and contract fee. I have suggested some figures below which would be higher or lower depending on the budget the college has to work with in achieving their desired outcomes.
Installation Options: Moodle allows us the option to install on our inhouse servers or host it externally. Both options have benefits. VCC could outsource hosting to a company such as Lambda Solutions ( Lambda, 2010). Lambda offers a hosting package which would cost the college approximately $600/month based on 10,000 user accounts***Lambda solutions****. This would be a good start and allow us to meet our needs for storage and bandwidth without the expensive cash outlay for internal server infrastructure.
Centre for Instructional Technology: I am suggesting that the college create a centre based on the project management model. It would consist of 3 support people working together supporting the active deployment and uptake of Moodle by faculty.
Moodle specialist $50-70K per year
General Technology specialist $60-80K per year
Instructional design curriculum specialist $50-70K per year
This team of 3 can work at supporting faculty in integrating technology throughout courses. These 3 specialists would cover the spectrum of needs an instructor may have when acquiring any new technology.
Contracting Out Option: By purchasing Moodle the college will have the option of outsourcing the development of sites and course shells to a professional service firm. This is a huge advantage in using an open source system such as Moodle because you can shop around for services that best fit your institutions needs.
Conclusion:
Moodle is the right fit for Vancouver Community College. It meets our cultural, pedagogical, structural and budgetary conditions for implementation. Choosing to install a Moodle server will enhance every aspect of teaching at VCC.
References
Croy M & Smelser R. (2009) Report to the Provost from the Learning Management System Evaluation Committee retrieved from http://lmseval.uncc.edu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=62&Itemid=9
Edutools (2006) retrieved from http://www.edutools.info/item_list.jsp?pj=8
Lambda Solutions(2010) retrieved from http://www.lambdasolutions.net/
Moodle.org,. Making a Case for Moodle., retrieved from http://docs.moodle.org/en/Case_for_Moodle
SkillSpark (2010) retrieved from http://skillspark.ca/info/MoodleandWebCTComparison.pdf