Blackboard's Competition

The 2008 TLT conference in Raleigh was even better than the earlier versions of the conference that I have gone to, and there were many times when I had to choose one of three or more interesting-sounding sessions. However, one I particularly wanted to make time for was "A Study of Three CMS Systems: Blackboard, Moodle, and Sakai." The idea of open-source course management systems intrigues me, and I am very interested in alternatives to Blackboard.

The session presenters (Biwu Yang, Sharon Collins, Matt Long, and Ginny Sconiers) were from East Carolina University. They described a CMS platform evaluation project they are conducting, using all three CMS systems at once. They were able to recruit a number of faculty members to use Moodle, Sakai, and then Blackboard 7.2 in successive semesters. (This struck me as being so remarkable that I double-checked with one of the presenters afterward, to make sure I had heard correctly.)

The study is continuing, but the presenters reported that Moodle was challenging to get going, but users liked it for its "social feel": faculty said it "feels good." However, Moodle lacks a good conversion tool for moving materials from another CMS platform, and faculty needed a good deal of help in reformating their courses.

Sakai does have a conversion tool that reformats material from Blackboard. However, importing outside content, particularly tests and quizzes, presented some problems. The platform has only a few templates, and there are so many settings for tests and quizzes that learning to use the system is complicated.

I'm still shaking my head at the idea that faculty members taught their courses using three different platforms in three successive semesters, and it was clear that this test required a great deal of technical support, something that is probably more feasible for a large school like ECU. Therefore, I have no desire to see us try to replicate this study, but I do want to follow up on ECU's work and look for another report from them next year.

The ECU page describing the "CMS Platform Project" has links to more information about each system, a "contact us" link, and a search box (at the top) that can be used to find the presenters' e-mail addresses.

I found what seems to be Moodle's home page at http://moodle.org/, and Sakai is at http://sakaiproject.org/. Both these sites have demonstration courses and other materials describing the systems.

The presenters did mention that ECU is hosting Moodle sites for some instructors at other schools, but they didn't mention whether they are accepting any more applications.