Moodle and Blackboard… I’m not worried.

Posted on 03/28/2012 by William Stites

There is a lot of talk out there right now about the fact the Black­board has pur­chased both Moodle­rooms and NetSpot.  There are numer­ous blog post about it, includ­ing Remote-Learners response (Black­board Buys 2 Lead­ing Sup­port­ers of Open-Source Com­peti­tor Moo­dle - The Chronic & Remote-Learner Responds to Blackboard’s Acqui­si­tion of Moodle­rooms and NetSpot — Remote-Learner) as well as talk on the list­servs (ISED) and Twitter.

Am I wor­ried… NO. Am I naive? Maybe, but here’s what I think.

I see the acqui­si­tion of these com­pany by Black­board as a val­i­da­tion of Moo­dle and what it rep­re­sents to Black­board in the mar­ket­place.  To me Black­board has had to make this move so not to lose any addi­tional ground to the open source com­mu­nity.  By pur­chas­ing these com­pany and putting them­selves in a posi­tion to offer Moo­dle ser­vice, they are cov­er­ing their bases and mak­ing a smart busi­ness decision.

As some­one who has always hosted their Moo­dle install locally on our net­work we have used Remote-Learner in the past, but only at times when we have had no where else to turn (and they’ve been great).  Recently we man­aged to migrate our own server from a Linux install to two Apple servers on our own… with­out any part­ner help.

My point it you can do this on your own.  Moo­dle is open source and I have seri­ous doubts it will be any­thing but mov­ing for­ward — if that changes then I might worry.

Moo­dle Part­ners are just that… part­ners.  They don’t own the prod­uct, they pro­vide ser­vice and sup­port around the prod­uct, but you own it.

Trust me if I can do this, so can you.

 

About William Stites

Currently the Director of Technology for Montclair Kimberley Academy, "Blogger in Chief" for edSocialMedia.com, husband and father to two crazy kids who make me smile everyday.
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  • Richard Kas­sissieh

    I a sim­i­larly tak­ing a “busi­ness as usual” atti­tude toward this. I have hosted Moo­dle inter­nally for nine years and had no issues that exter­nal host­ing would have solved. Host­ing inter­nally allows for tighter inte­gra­tion with the school’s other sys­tems, for exam­ple LDAP authentication.

    I would like to hear more about how own­ing Moodle­rooms may or may not change the com­mu­nity devel­op­ment land­scape for Moo­dle. I don’t know how many mod­ules Moodle­rooms con­tributed to the Moo­dle project, but I sus­pect that most schools don’t use community-contributed mod­ules. Are they involved in core mod­ule con­tri­bu­tion to Moodle?

    Richard

    • http://www.williamstites.net William Stites

      I think that is the ques­tion.  I don’t have a full under­stand­ing of what the guide­lines are for con­trib­u­tors and part­ners, but I do know that when it comes to cus­tom con­fig­u­ra­tions to the code around pub­lic mod­ules they need to be release back in the wild.  As for code that is devel­op­ment as a cus­tom offer­ing by a com­pany they can only charge for those cus­tomiza­tions for pieces that they actu­ally owned such as images they cre­ate. Often what they are doing is build­ing hooks into non-open source pieces.

  • http://about.me/bcampbell Bill Camp­bell

    The blog post by Audrey Wat­ters and com­ments on this issue at 
    http://hackeducation.com/2012/03/26/blackboard-moodlerooms-open-washing/ are inter­est­ing. I don’t think the con­cern is about host­ing. From the (very) lit­tle I know about this sit­u­a­tion, it seems to me that the big­ger issue is a reduc­tion in the con­tri­bu­tions to the source from Moodle­rooms and NetSpot.  I don’t know what per­cent­age of the code changes came from pro­gram­mers at those com­pa­nies con­tribut­ing back to the devel­oper com­mu­nity for Moo­dle, but if it was sig­nif­i­cant, that could have an effect.  Blackboard’s press release says it will con­tinue to con­tribute to the project code base, but, obvi­ously, devel­op­ing Moo­dle is not their pri­mary method deliv­er­ing prof­its to their stockholders.

    • http://www.williamstites.net William Stites

      As Audrey points out it the com­mu­nity that makes a dif­fer­ence. When I made the switch from our Linux server to our Macs I did it on our own because our “part­ner” wasn’t ready to move their clients to Moo­dle 2.0. When I need to fig­ure things out I went to the com­mu­nity to learn how to do it.  The forums, blog posts and Twit­ter­verse was where I turned and was able to get it done.  It’s the rea­son I blogged about it after­wards as well… to give back to the community.  

      A lot of the added mod­ules I added to our install were com­mu­nity devel­oped and not from part­ners and the peo­ple that have helped were all non-partners.