The Selection Process
How will the course management system be (or has been) selected at your institution?
We have online courses that are managed by a third party LMS and in house. As it turns out the third party is using a highly customized version of MOODLE. In house we chose MOODLE because it is free and had all the features we were looking for. Its been seven years now and I would still recommend MOODLE for most online learning applications.
Joseph,
Acknowledging that you seem to be satisfied with Moodle, have you conducted a comprehensive assessment of Moodle and faculty and student satisfaction levels. Granted switching to another LMS may be costly, in comparison, but you might want to reassess where you stand with open source vs a commercial system. The cost of commercial systems has come down significantly over the past few years and given seven years of experience, this might be a good time to conduct a review in the context of your broader institutional objectives and your successes with distance delivery. If you were to conduct a review, how would you go about structuring it?
Dr. Robert Roehrich
As part of researching the ways to launch an online program, we put together a team that is tasked to evaluate the selection process from beginning to end. In so doing, we continue to solicit advice from those with expertise in the field, in addition to conducting our own cost benefit analysis based on existing and future enrollments, type of licensing fees, while comparing vendors that will suit our needs best. It is a learning process for us, so we’re taking slow steps to ensure that we budget for it correctly and are able to leverage our resources appropriately. It is work in progress.
Our college has Blackboard as our learning Management system. Blackboard was selected because it has functionality that is standard of the industry, has great versatility in developing a course including a template course structure ease of activation of actions, files and functions. For example, the forum feature readily guides the developer through the process of picking the types of functions most needed for the course's forum.
