Approximate costings for VLEs?

[bossman]

Moodle set up here and being used by group of year 7s, framework sorted, LDAP sorted and also mahara e-portfolio integrated.

Looking really good have shown it to staff and now it is ready for them to learn to use through 20min workshops which have been set up by the art teacher who took on the role of VLE manager of resources.

We the IT team just get it to work change one or two things integrate plugins etc and it just works.

Yes there is an initial cost hardware, time and training but this is minimal when held up against other proprietary VLEs which I have seen such as Talmos, University, Kaleidos, Blackboard, Fronter and Frog plus others which I cannot remember.

It's what your school requires that counts and if you have the money and resources then I would probably choose Frog (latest version) and then Moodle with fronter a close third.

[gareth.davies]

From the horses mouth:

Cost for Frog in a typical secondary school is 25K + 4K per annum (starting in year 2)

Additional products are: Secure Gateway, and Parental Engagement Portal. Other than these two optional items there is nothing else, no hidden extras. This price includes hardware, installation, training, consultancy, bespoke build, etc. System has 2 x duplexed 1TB drives, if you need more space, we just stick some more drives in.

Breakdown of what the "package" includes available at: Why is Frog so Expensive? « Gareth Davies’ Blog

[Messa]

We have frog at the school i work at, well worth the money and support is literally a phone call away!

[mleighton]

Also i heard from my friend - IT director of one Dutch colledge that they are starting to use Learning management system for SharePoint, though i think it is more expensive as based on MS technologies.

We use MS SharePoint, including full MIS integration with SIMS. Costs us approx £4000 p.a. to use with 200 staff, 1800 students and approx 3000 parents.

[mattmoo]

Frog sounds super expensive and fronter is ridiculously expensive given how poor it is.

We have started with sharepoint and are hoping to add something like SharepointLMS.

Total cost of ownership is an issue for most of the "free" VLE's but i suppose it all depends on what you want to achieve, we are using sharepoint as the staff are already used to how it works thanks to the development of the intranet. We will market the VLE parts as an extension to the Intranet so not too overwelm the staff.

Matt

P.s. my spelling is awful i know.

[john316]

Had a demo off Serco for their platform yesterday - rather underwhelmed. We've got RM, Netmedia, Fronter and Uniservity to demo to us as well in the next few days. I doubt we'll see anything better than Frog but we're open minded

[sahmeepee]

Had a demo off Serco for their platform yesterday - rather underwhelmed. We've got RM, Netmedia, Fronter and Uniservity to demo to us as well in the next few days. I doubt we'll see anything better than Frog but we're open minded

If you're looking for something "better than Frog" then I'd save some time and cancel your Uniservity appointment. You can take a look on www.School-Portal.co.uk* to see the VLEs of all schools using Uniservity.

Is it unusable? No. Would I be surprised if it's "better" than any other VLE? Yes. Judge for yourself though.