At the July Syllabus2004 conference, one panel discussion, “Is Open Source in Your CMS Future?” tackled issues around choosing an open-source CMS. They focused on Sakai which we have been playing with. An article details the discussion….
In looking at the article, I’m reading a lot of concerns that are appropriate for large institutions, but not for one of our size. In looking back on our relationship with Blackboard over the last 4 years (the time I’ve been managing it), we hardly ever contacted them for support. The only times we needed them was when we moved from version 2 to 5.5.1, or when we moved our 5.5.1 install to a new server. Other than that it just ran and we figured out what we needed to know ourselves. Since it wasn’t running on windows, it kept on tickin’.
I think the size of these institutions involved, and the size of their online learning programs, makes them more sensitive to issues that come up with a large CMS. Also, when you run something like enterprise Blackboard (it’s more plugged into the registrar’s system than we are, and costs 10X as much) there’s more complexity and more points of failure. The CMS comes closer to the heartbeat of the learning community of the institution. For Augsburg, the CMS is a place in the learning community, but not the core of the learning community.
Leave a Reply