Sub Ubi

The Project

Led by Bob Keim, and with the support of the Kent New Technology Initiative, we are developing an on-line tutorial creation system for BlueJ, an environment designed for beginners learning to program in Java. If at all possible, one of our design requirements was that we integrate this system not only with BlueJ, but also with WebCT, Kent University’s current e-learning solution.

We are particularly committed to leveraging the technologies available to maximize online interactions between the learner, their instructor, and other peers. This means making effective use of email (individually and via lists), discussion fora, weblogs, SMS, and other similar tools in tight conjunction with an interactive tutorial. WebCT is unable to support the kinds of interaction we wish to support in our particular e-learning context.

Why WebCT is Inadequate

WebCT, Blackboard, and other e-learning and course management systems are expensive propositions. I would guess that any institution looking to deploy these systems on a large scale will be spending upwards of £15,000 or more for installation, and similar figures for support contracts. These support contracts do not cover extension of the software in critical ways to better enable their effective use in a given learning environment. In our case, we have no way to programmatically access the WebCT grade book, email system, discussion fora, or any other aspect of the system from our e-learning tool, which exists largely outside of WebCT itself.

This is a problem. If WebCT is the chosen delivery platform for e-learning content at the University of Kent, and we cannot adequately interact with it in a real-world, useful distance education offering, we are left with only three choices:

1. Make our software work with WebCT,
2. Upgrade WebCT, or
3. Leave WebCT as a platform.

I will briefly consider the pros an cons of each of these options.

Make our software work with WebCT

We will never be able to do what we really want to do with WebCT; for example, our external tutorials will never be able to update the grade book in any automatic way. Therefore, to even come close to making use of WebCT, we would need to give up a great deal of functionality. So much functionality, in fact, that we would likely fail to produce a tutorial system of any pedagogic value. This is not acceptable.

Upgrade WebCT

This is the most viable option, if we are committed to keeping WebCT as our platform of choice for the delivery of e-learning content. WebCT Vista is more than an educational content management system: it is an enterprise-class middleware platform that can be programmatically accessed via many different protocols. With this power, however, comes a price: a typical Vista installation will likely cost upwards of £30,000, with support contracts easily doubling from a basic WebCT installation.

This kind of power and flexibility would likely solve the problems of external educational softwares and utilities interacting with WebCT, but I do not believe it is justifiable in either the short or long term. An upgrade to Kent’s WebCT installation would cost many times more than the tutorial itself will cost to develop; the phrase “for want of a nail” comes to mind.

Leaving WebCT

While no-one was ever fired for buying IBM, there is a question of whether IBM was needed in the first place. Leaving WebCT behind actually creates new development opportunities at Kent that would otherwise not be possible, while simultaneously benefiting institutions of higher learning both within the UK and around the world.

The idea of moving from WebCT or Blackboard to an open-source e-learning platform is not new; in a post to DEOS-L (The Distance Education Online Symposium), Timothy Takemoto provides a compelling comparison between WebCT, Blackboard, and Moodle, an open-source product for delivering e-learning content online. Looking at a head-to-head comparison of these three products, we find that the open-source offering is not “wanting” in any significant way; in fact, it is generally more flexible on infrastructure issues (eg. authentication) than the closed-source or proprietary solutions available. Mr. Takemoto highlights much of the same in his comments to DEOS-L:

The solution that benefits the world

If Kent is looking to invest in an e-learning solution that is

1. Flexible,
2. Extensible, and
3. well supported

they should consider Moodle. The benefits to the larger educational community are many:

1. [ Flexibility ] If our work on a tutorial system for BlueJ is a motivator, we believe that the kinds of online interaction we imagine being beneficial to students would be possible under a framework like Moodle, because of it’s extensible design and well-documented approach to storing content and student data.
2. [ Extensibility & Support ] Moodle has both an engaged community (as evidenced by on-site fora and searching the web), as well as the opportunity for direct commercial support (via Moodle.com, eg. a support contract). Given that development of modules and extensions to Moodle involve work in PHP (a commonly used language for developing web content all over the world), finding developers and staff capable of this work is not a difficult proposition.
3. [ Ecology ] If Kent were to invest £15,000 per year in either A) hiring a dedicated Moodle developer, or B) using money that would otherwise be spent on a WebCT contract to partially “buy out” the time of existing staff, extensions to Moodle developed at Kent (and given back to the Moodle community) would benefit approximately 1,500 institutions in 86 countries around the world (ref). This is a fraction of the cost of upgrading to WebCT Vista, and while the installed user base of Moodle is much smaller than WebCT, tying freely available tools to other freely available tools is a winning proposition for both. In the free- and open-source world, we might call this “being ecologically sound.”

There are other educational content management solutions that are open-source or otherwise freely available to the educational community. I do not pretend to have done a thorough comparison of all the systems available; however, I am not alone in my belief that Moodle compares favorably with it’s commercial virtual learning environment peers. In our particular situation, it is clear that the commercial offerings cannot, pound for feature, compete with Moodle in meeting the particular needs of a tutorial builder for the BlueJ programming environment.

In Conclusion

We believe there are few benefits to the community at large by investing in closed or proprietary solutions, especially when viable, open solutions exist. A course management solution like Moodle would have eliminated any question of whether our investment of integration effort would be possible (as we could easily use Moodle’s extensibility to our advantage) and valuable (as we would leverage one freely available educational product against another).