Thursday, April 12, 2012

Campus Technology: Institutions Cut Costs, Improve Performance with Cloud-hosted Open Source LMS


Moodlerooms
Campus Technology Focus
April 10, 2012
Institutions Cut Costs, Improve Performance with Cloud-hosted Open Source LMS

No matter the size and scope of an institution, choosing to host the open source Moodle LMS internally or through a trusted provider is a pivotal decision. Pennsylvania-based Baptist Bible College, with just 1,000 students, along with Louisiana State University, with 30,000-plus students, chose Moodlerooms to host their Moodle LMS. For LSU, the decision was cost-based; for BBC, the move to Moodlerooms was made to improve uptime and support. For both schools, benefits have extended beyond the original reasons for the move.

Offsite hosting by Moodlerooms means the hardware and software, as well as support, updates and maintenance, are all handled by the vendor. With uptimes of 99.9 percent and counting, both schools report high levels of satisfaction with their choice.

Louisiana State University

With over 25,000 courses in Moodle, LSU is one of the largest universities using Moodlerooms—and a leading source for Moodle services for other colleges and universities.

For LSU, the move to outside hosting came for the simplest of reasons: cost. A cost-benefit analysis by the university a number of years ago revealed that it would be significantly cheaper to host its LMS externally than run it internally, as it was at the time, according to LSU Analyst and Moodle Project Manager Robert Russo.

The university moved to Moodle from two concurrent LMSs—Blackboard and an internal system. After selecting Moodlerooms as its LMS, the university realized additional benefits, Russo notes, benefits that weren't evident in the original calculations. "Moodlerooms' service level has been significantly better than what we were able to maintain internally," Russo said.

The cost analysis included servers, staff, and data center power and cooling, and was based on LMS usage levels at the time. But when LSU moved to Moodle, usage almost immediately jumped from 1,500 users a day to 15,000 users a day—and kept climbing. Within a year, Moodle usage had mushroomed to 26,000 users a day. "We did not see that coming," said Russo, who attributes the jump to a perfect storm that combined a public campaign to encourage the quick move from the older systems, and a university-wide budgetary push to go paperless.

The leaps in use led to some growing pains on both sides of the hosting contract, but Russo said Moodlerooms, to their credit, stuck with LSU and worked through every issue—and the record reflects it. Uptime over the entire contract has been 99.94, Russo says, and has only gotten better.

While LSU is happy with its hosted solution for a number of reasons, price savings have vindicated the choice. Russo estimates savings of perhaps 50 to 60 percent a year with Moodlerooms compared to hosting an LMS internally. The school has reinvested those savings in staff for faculty technology training.

Moodlerooms at Baptist Bible College

For Baptist Bible College, part of the challenge in choosing a hosted LMS solution was finding the right host. The small college has about 1,000 students - roughly 600 traditional students attending face-to-face classes, and another 400 adult learners taking advantage of the college's growing online class program, according to Erica Vail, the director of distance learning at Baptist.

With just a few people available to support the LMS—Vail's role focuses on training faculty—the college had few resources to spare on an in-house learning management system, and so had turned to outside hosting as a good solution.

BBC has been using a hosted version of Moodle as its learning management system since 2008, having migrated to it from WebCT. However, issues with the company hosting Moodle for the college were preventing the school from truly taking advantage of its LMS.

As Vail describes it, daily downtime had become common. Functionality would disappear from the site with no resolution, and phone calls were unproductive or unreturned. Although most service interrupts were brief, the college was understandably hearing student complaints. For her part, Vail saw the downtime as akin to suddenly locking classroom doors just as class was starting—clearly unacceptable.

In the face of that sort of performance, Vail said that Moodlerooms' advertised 99.9 percent uptime sounded golden. After making the decision in January, the college is, three months later, in the final stages of moving to Moodlerooms. Although it's too soon to say what performance will be, Vail is already pleased with the customer service she's seen during the transition.

Researching Moodlerooms as a hosting company began in 2011, when calls to colleagues at other schools turned up plenty of positives. "Moodlerooms seemed to have a lot of credibility," Vail said. She and her team searched on LinkedIn for Moodlerooms users at other colleges, and she consulted a mentor at Linn-Benton Community College in Oregon, which is happily using Moodlerooms, turning up more impressive comments and helpful suggestions.

In the end, positive feedback from outsiders might have been the deciding factor in choosing Moodlerooms. BBC is now a happy new user, and Vail is eager to repay the favor by sharing her experiences with other schools, large and small.

To hear LSU and BBC's story and more, register for the webinar on April 26th.

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