"To get an honest view of the complete cost of the LMS/CMS learning systems, companies and educational institutions must look at the whole picture, from conception to fruition, maintenance and sustainability and longevity, while providing up-to-date support and technology."
Jeff,
I don't think you could have summarized the financial considerations when investigating LMS and CMS platforms any better. Your suggestion that institutions work to understand the "whole cost" of a project is critical. I know that within my business dealings, it is often quite easy to forget to address the continual operational or maintenance related costs that might exist within such complex systems.
Earlier this week, I was visiting a colleague's office and noticed that he had a Braniff Airlines poster next to his desk. Out of curiosity, I had to ask what the relevance of a now defunct airline could be for him or his students. He casually asked me what I knew of Braniff, and I responded that they were an airline who refocused their brand image to reflect fun, class, style and an "experience" that was not often found with competitors. Agreeing with my assessment, my friend continued the narrative and explained that they did this without critical regard for the bottom line. The lesson being that a company who was considered a model for the entire industry eventually filed for bankruptcy because they didn't account for all the associated costs which continued to climb, sometimes incrementally, as the airline enhanced everything from their planes, to their uniforms, and their food service.
Similarly, several years ago, my home institution decided to adopt Moodle to support both our faculty and students. This particular platform was chosen almost solely based on the upfront cost of the software. Moodle is an open-source platform and it is essentially free to use and build out individual components and settings tailored specifically for your own institutional needs. This choice was made despite the fact that our sister schools all used Blackboard. From my understanding, the licensing for our school to use Blackboard would have cost tens of thousands of dollars and that was considered too expensive by our immediate managers.
However, without any outside administrative support for Moodle, we had to spend significantly to have several of our faculty and staff learn the Moodle platform in order to train the rest of our employees. Furthermore, Moodle did not have direct integration to our administrative software package, and we had to hire an additional person in the registrar's office to port data back and forth between the two systems. In hindsight, between the cost of training and the subsequent hiring of personnel in both the registrar's office and our IT department, it is now quite apparent that Blackboard would have been less expensive in the long run.
All too often, I believe that societally we forget to analyze the bigger picture when considering purchases. Whether we are discussing the cost of a new iPhone (while ignoring future data costs), a vacation (and omitting the cost of eating out) or educational software purchases (and the continued development costs that can arise from maintenance, licensing, and training), we often forget to think about the TOTAL cost. I agree with your assessment whole-heartedly. This is a lesson not just for educators and administrators, but also our students as they learn to negotiate the myriad costs and expenditures that inevitably arise throughout life.
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