Blackboard – a student’s source for grades and a professor’s first choice for class cancellations and updates. To administrators, it is known as a Learning
Management System (LMS) and is a valuable tool used to continue faculty/student communication outside of the classroom, store vital class course documents and as a place to turn in work electronically.
Capital’s current Blackboard system is outdated, as Capital is using Blackboard 8.0, while Blackboard 9.1 is the system. After October 2012, Blackboard will no longer offer upgrades for Blackboard 8.0. With that timetable only months away, Capital University is working to determine what the best course of action should be with either upgrading to Blackboard 9.1 or using an en- tirely different LMS – Moodlerooms.
“I would not want to stay on a system that is no longer being recognized by the host compa- ny for upgrades because it could create security and vulnerability issues as well as programming problems from using a no longer supported software,” Autummn Caines, Capital University’s academic technology specialist, said.
Blackboard 9.1 has an entirely different interface system than Blackboard 8.0, which would require retraining faculty and students on how to use it. Due to this fact, Capital University has decided to keep its options open within choosing an LMS.
“Since we will have to retrain no matter what we do, we decided to look into other options and compare them, in order to provide the best services to the university,” Caines said.
Besides Blackboard 9.1, Sakai and Desire- 2Learn were both seen as possible alternatives, however Moodlerooms has become the alternative of choice within the testing period and is currently being piloted in a test run by having a small number of classes being taught with it as opposed to Blackboard.
Moodlerooms has become the main alternative to Blackboard for a number of reasons. These reasons include the fact that Moodlerooms has a partnership with Datatel, the company that Capital uses for its WebAdvisor services for students and employees; Blackboard does not currently have a partnership with Datetel.
Both Blackboard 9.1 and Moodle 2.0 (the Moodleroom version that Capital would switch to) offer upgraded blogging and wiki abilities. However, Moodlerooms offers the ability for professors to determine the absences of students via photo identification (something blackboard does not offer) as well as instant messaging capabilities to allow communications with students to be easier and more efficient.
“Every 3-5 years we should reevaluate our LMS needs in order to best determine what to do within the changing market, as well as how to best provide for the changing needs of students and faculty. We should always be open to change,” Caines said.
Moodlerooms is an Open Source Learning Management System. It is available freely and can be more customized by faculty to whatever they feel will best supplement the course outside of the classroom. Although price and costs are not the primary factor in determining which LMS to use, Capital University is taking into account the price difference.
“If we switch to Moodle, we plan to reinvest any savings into other technology to help faculty and students at Capital,” Caines said.
Capital started using Blackboard in 2005, and in the summer of 2008, Capital upgraded from version 6 to version 7. In the summer of 2010, Capital again upgraded from version 7 to the current version.
“Here at Capital we have always tried to stay in the middle of upgrade cycles. If you’re right on the bleeding edge of upgrades from the company you are also subject to any bugs that might come with the upgrade. We always try to make sure that the release is stable before we do the upgrade,” Caines said.
