Faculty Committees April 5, 2011

Timeline for move to Moodle, 12 -18 months
 
·     Meeting with interested/invested faculty early next week

·     Meeting with the CEP –ASAP – 2 FCC committee members

·     Meeting with theCo6- ASAP - 2 FCC committee members

·     Recommendation/meeting with Greg Call

·     Announcement to Faculty  - May 3rd Faculty Meeting

·     Focus group #1, 5 Faculty? -  Migrate during Summer 2011 – run test courses Fall 2011 to determine needs and bugs.

·     Focus Group #2, 10-20 Faculty, Migrate during January 2012, run test courses, Spring 2012 determine bugs, needs and upgrades.

·     Migrate all Faculty, or as many as we can Summer 2012, complete migration January 2013

·     Go live Fall 2012 or Spring 2013 Depending on how we are doing

-   Blackboard discontinued June 2012

·     CMS-LMS down December 2013

Reasons to Drop Blackboard
 

• Diminishing support and increased costs -- Blackboard has been diminishing support for smaller institutions, future development of Blackboard are driven by their core customer base (large institutions who are more profitable) and increasing licensing costs. As a result, liberal arts colleges have been dropping Blackboard at an increasing rate and moving to Moodle.
  

• Courses are closed
  

• Predatory company

• Blackboard is a proprietary system that may not be customized to evolve with the needs of our faculty.

• Intellectual property of faculty used in courses can only be extracted from Blackboard with great difficulty.

• Blackboard can not be modified to integrate more effectively with other institutional resources and repositories.

 Reasons to Move to Moodle

• Promote collaboration among five college institutions -- Smith, Hampshire, UMass have already either moved or are in the process of moving to Moodle. MHC is also seriously considering moving to Moodle. If all 5C schools were on Moodle, we can collaborate on development and possibly share resources between systems. Smith and Hampshire are already members of a consortium of liberal arts colleges that customize Moodle for the liberal arts context. Amherst could participate in this group.

• Reduce development costs -- customizing existing features is much more cost-effective than building from scratch.

• Moodle supports the Shibboleth single sign-on solution -- five college institutions will be implementing Shibboleth for authentication in the coming year or so. Moodle already supports Shibboleth and Hampshire has already implemented Shibboleth for Moodle authentication.

• Moodle uses the same core technologies as Drupal (CMS), which should simplify integrating Drupal and Moodle to create a more seamless user experience.