Hidden Costs of Moodle
With the state of most school district budgets these days, what administrator wouldn't perk up at the word free? Fortunately, educators are also savvy enough to look for hidden costs. In the case of Moodle, there are plenty of hidden costs, though they aren't necessarily obvious or easy to find. Administrators planning to offer online classes might do better to investigate the IQity Learning Management Suite, which is also free to school districts.
Playing the Host
For starters, school districts choosing Moodle need a place to host it. You can install Moodle on your own server either at the district level or in each individual school. The first downside to that solution is that your own IT staff must administer and maintain it. If you are hosting Moodle at the district level, you will need to make IT support available to teachers and students from each school offering online classes, possibly around the clock. After all, high school students in an online school or class are just as likely to log on at 2:00 am as 2:00 pm to work on their assignments. So figure the cost of adding two more shifts of IT support. If you are hosting Moodle at each individual school, multiply that cost (and obligation) for each one.
The second major cost of hosting Moodle on your own server is the cost of running the server itself. Even today's more energy-efficient servers give off considerable heat and data centers need to be cool, so they are notorious energy hogs. A study by Jonathan G. Koomey, PhD, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and consulting professor at Stanford University, found that between 2000 and 2005, energy use by servers doubled in the US and worldwide. Koomey also found that servers accounted for 60% to 80% of the energy use in data centers.
According to a study by Advanced Micro Devices, the cost of powering and cooling a data center is high indeed. The report states, "Today, high-density [server] racks producing up to 500W per square foot can cost as much as US $5,000 per square foot for the necessary air conditioning, power supply, power conditioning, and other equipment."
There are plenty of companies that will host Moodle for you, for a fee of course. One of them in Moodlerooms, which offers three levels of hosting service. At the most basic level, Moodlerooms merely puts Moodle on their server for you; you don't get any technical support at all. That service is $1 per user per year and it's sold in blocks of 500. So you have to pay for a minimum of 500 students, even if you have far fewer using Moodle. For a minimum of $1500 per year, you can technical support by phone or email. If you want to add a repository for storing class content, that will run you at least $2500 a year.
Open Source or Open Wallet?
One of the major selling points of Moodle is that it's open source. This means that the source code for the software is available to users, allowing them to adapt the program for their particular needs. That's all well and good, but it is not free. Moodle itself makes the distinction on its web page, saying, "The fact that Moodle is Free (not free as in no money, but Free as in Free Speech) means that the efforts of the core team are entirely public."
Yes, it is possible to run Moodle as is, right out of the box. (Which also is not free, as the preceding section describes.) But if you want to customize it at all, that's going to cost you in one of two ways.
The first choice is to hire a programmer to make the changes for you. A search for PHP programmers in Portland, Oregon revealed annual salaries ranging from $55,000 to $80,000. The average in Fort Lauderdale, Florida is $66,000 a year. So it would seem you can expect to pay a developer somewhere in the neighborhood of $65-$70 an hour as full-time employee. Plan to pay two to three times as much hourly on a project basis.
The second possibility is that every teacher who uses Moodle can customize it for her own use. That requires some programming knowledge. Moodle's web page says, "PHP is actually a fairly easy language to pick up, and the Moodle code is well documented, so . . . it's a fairly gentle learning curve." Swell. That is, if you want your teachers spending their time learning programming code and rewriting open source software instead of spending time with students who have standardized tests to take.
Comparing Cost of Use of IQity vs. Moodle
Let's compare the costs of Moodle - now that we know there are costs - with the cost of using IQity's Learning Management Suite (LMS).
First, IQity is indeed free to school districts. Schools pay a small per student fee for using the content that comes with IQity, much as they now pay for textbooks at a bricks-and-mortar school. All content is aligned with state standards.
Some teachers may prefer their own teaching materials. It's easy to upload content into the IQity LMS. Schools that upload a significant amount of content may pay a small fee to keep it on the IQity server. That is the only potential hosting cost associated with IQity. No need to put the program on your own server, pay the energy costs, and pay the IT staff. None of that.
Each school using IQity can customize the LMS by its features and functionality, tailoring it meet your specific needs. Adding school logos, for example, can also help provide continuity of the school's visual image for its online students.
Furthermore, IQity comes with unmatched features: award winning content; a real-time web-casting tool; and preparation tools for state graduation tests. REACTOR, the new, dynamic learning object repository, allows teachers to upload content for others to use and to search for standards-aligned content of many kinds, rivaling any open source provider.
School administrators looking for a truly economical solution for online learning would do well to request an online demonstration guided by one of our elearning experts.