IT Issues & Strategic Viewpoints in Higher Education: Campus Technology
Interesting short piece in Campus Technology about CMS's:
IT Issues & Strategic Viewpoints in Higher Education: Campus Technology
I found this quote illuminating:
"CMS products from the vendors Angel (www.cyberlearninglabs.com), Desire2Learn (www.desire2learn.com) and eCollege (www.ecollege.com) were uniformly praised by their users. In contrast, WebCT (www.webct.com) and Blackboard (www.blackboard.com) were routinely criticized for skyrocketing prices, bugs, and ease-of-use problems."
1 Comments:
With respect to Blackboard, since recovering from a new release debacle, criticism of Blackboard has been much more roundly levied against Blackboard the Business than it has at Blackboard the product.
The product is pretty good, stable, and easy to use. It's been adopted like gangbusters at Swarthmore.
Unfortunately, the business is built on hard-to-stomach subscription-based licensing, it's expensive, and the customers often feel that they're getting gouged with the price increases brought by each renewal.
But just to offer a touch of devil's advocacy... the products like eCollege that rate high on satisfaction are minor players. The users of those systems have adopted them despite the flow of the mainstream. Blackboard and WebCT are the big kids on the block and represent a giant share of the market. I'm critical of Blackboard, but was in total agreement with the committee at Swarthmore-Haverford-Bryn Mawr that decided that eCollege was inadequate for our needs.
Count me among the group that hopes that Sakai helps to put some competitive pressure on Blackboard. First, though it needs to be good, evolve into a commodity package (as Red Hat is to Linux), and have flawless migration tools. If that happens, Bb and WebCT will know that their customers do have options. I'm not sure that the Sakai project folks really have the twinkle of world domination in their eyes. Who knows.
By the way, we have a lot of Bb implementation expertise here at Swarthmore. If we can be of any aid, let us know.
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