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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.
Moodlerooms
190 West Ostend Street, Suite 110
Baltimore, MD 21230
410-779-3400
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