Beyond Boundaries is the University of North Dakota’s technology in higher education conference. It is a nice regional conference with the ability to bring in some “name” presenters.
A presentation I attended this morning was provided by John Dennett, Blackboard Solutions Engineer (previously of MITs OpenCourseWare initiative). The presentation contasted open source and commercial course management systems.
Some of the arguments favoring commercial products I have heard before (e.g., total cost of ownership). A couple new suggested limitations of open source solutions also surfaced:
1) robustness – the presenter claimed that open source educational software is typically developed using something like PHP (e.g., moodle). This works well in encouraging contributions of distributed authors, but PHP was claimed not to have the robustness necessary to stand up to enterprise level applications. While WebCT and Blackboard began with Perl, the applications have moved away from scripting languages. Scripting languages also seem to come and go.
2) 508 compliance – the presenter claimed that Moodle was not 508 compliant and this will be a serious limitation for higher ed institutions willing to accept federal support. I asked for a specific example of a failure to meet 508 standards and John directed me to a Blackboard white paper. I asked whether Blackboard would fix a noncompliant web page uploaded by a faculty member and he acknowledged that no CMS can guarantee that the content provided will be 508 compliant.
