New lessons in course management: a group of universities have banded together to offer a low-cost course management software alternative; commercial vendors compete with new applications

University Business, Sept, 2004 by Jean Marie Angelo

In mid-July, just one week before college and university leaders were to launch into their summer season of conferences, a nonprofit group known as The Sakai Project (www.sakaiproject.org) introduced software for higher education providers to use for course management. Sakai's project leaders timed the announcement right.

Sakai's goal of providing open source software that may someday save academic computing departments significant amounts of money was the subject of casual commentary during the week that followed. Hallway conversations at the annual conference of the Society of College and University Planning, held in Toronto, speculated about this new set of tools for creating course Web sites, posting homework, creating e-mail threads and bulletin boards, archiving lectures, and uploading lectures.

Why the Interest?

The Sakai Project is taking the best solutions from course management systems built at four universities--the University of Michigan, Indiana University, Stanford University (CA), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology--and offering them to any interested party. Built as an open source system, Sakai's software is meant to be shared among education providers and enhanced by partner schools' academic computing departments.

If the higher ed sector takes interest and supports the project, Sakai's open source software may end up providing an alternative to commercial course management systems in this nascent sector of the software industry. Course management systems serve one of the most traditional institutions--the academies of learning--but have been available for only the past seven years, with much development occurring during just the past few. Academic computing managers have taken a variety of approaches to providing online tools for faculty and students. In addition to using the best commercial resources, some, like the four universities launching The Sakai Project, took the do-it-yourself route and developed home-gown applications.

Now Sakai stands to provide a different solution.

To date, Blackboard (www.blackboard.com), WebCT (www.webct.com) and eCollege (www.ecollege.com) are among the leading commercial systems. Added together, the client bases of these companies represent thousands of educational enterprises. In addition, there are a mix of campus IT solutions and other projects that have morphed into commercial offerings. One example is ANGEL, the course management system of CyberLearning Labs (www.cyberlearninglabs.com) which was developed in the mid-1990s in the CyberLab of Indiana University-Purdue University. CyberLearningLabs has since spun off as a commercial venture.

Today, more than 80 percent of the four-year private and public universities that use course management systems have settled on a "single product standard" for course management, meaning they use one primary system, says Kenneth Green, director of The Campus Computing Project (www.campuscomputing.net), an independent enterprise that studies higher education technology trends.

Having a single source for CMS is a logical development, says Michael Roy, director of academic computing services at Wesleyan University (CT), who adds that Wesleyan once used two CMS systems but eventually settled on one provider. "We found that when we ran both, the faculty couldn't help each other. There is a lot of this collegial support that happens on campus."

Those colleges and universities that don't use a single source CMS model are probably providing a "detente" for departments that need to use a non-commercial or homegrown CMS system for very specific applications, says Green.

Commercial CMS systems have come to require significant investment. A university serving 15,000 students could spend $75,000 annually in licensing fees to use a commercial course management system. CMS providers charged less in annual licensing fees when they introduced their systems to the market, but soon realized they had to increase pricing if they were to grow. In 2002, higher ed users of two major commercial systems were hit with annual fee increases as high as 20 percent.

The installation of such complex systems generally require a school to spend an additional $10,000 to $20,000 on a commercial vendor's consulting services.

Then come the infrastructure costs. "The cost of buying the software only begins to capture the cost of running the system," says Roy, who is also a member of the Northeast Regional Computing Program (www.nercomp.org), a group whose members look at innovative ways to use technology in the classroom. It can cost at least $100,000 annually to pay the staff to keep the servers backed up, to install patches and perform upgrades, and to ensure that the software works with other databases. Any software, including course management software, requires these infrastructure costs "if you look at all those who touch the system," he adds.

By contrast, The Sakai Project is asking that users become partners and pay $10,000 annually to use its CMS software. Partners are asked to sign a three-year agreement to use Sakai. For this they have a say in where the project focuses its resources and energy. Given that Sakai is an open source project, any institution can download the code for free.