Approximate costings for VLEs?

[john316]

Hi

 

We are a large 1500 pupil school in Liverpool and have pretty much had it with Assimilate before we've even rolled it out to staff. Too many bug bears, issues and just a general shrug of the shoulders whenever we see it so we want to move on to a new platform. Rather than go through the waiting game from suppliers, we're after some typical costings for each of the major systems (Frog, Kaleidos, Fronter etc..) along with the MIS integration aspect as well.

 

Thanks in advance!

 

John

[Andie]

I think Kaleidos is going to cost us about £6 a head (pupils and staff) when LEA stops paying for it in May 2010. That's for Platform plus VLE bit, and only 100Mb per user (though that is adjustable so big users can be given more of the slice and smallers users less). Extra storage costs more.

[DaveJ2717uk]

Try moodle costs nothing apart from time to set it up and works perfectly well. Glad to hear about Assimilate, we are a BSF school in Liverpool and we're having this sh1t pushed at us with no option to change, although we are quite happily using moodle. Assimilate is going to be the LDL BSF front end, they say - laugh I nearly cried:mad:

[sahmeepee]

Try moodle costs nothing apart from time to set it up and works perfectly well. Glad to hear about Assimilate, we are a BSF school in Liverpool and we're having this sh1t pushed at us with no option to change, although we are quite happily using moodle. Assimilate is going to be the LDL BSF front end, they say - laugh I nearly cried:mad:

 

I knew LDL was a bad thing. Vorderman told me so. Har har.

[Zorba]

Another vote for Moodle although we are really p!^"ed off as after all our hard work setting it up new Director of E-learning went straight to Head and got the go ahead to buy StudyWiz. Had since 2008 and still not launched as expected. Problem with all VLEs is getting them off the ground it does not matter how much you spend, if you cannot get the staff on board and trained it dies a death. Hence my vote for Moodle, highly customisable, we got LDAP working with no problems and did not cost a penny.

[adamf]

Fronter costs us £7000 per year based on our school size of 1900 pupils - I suspect that is part-subserdised by the London Grid for Learning.

[danIT]

I've said it before and ill say it again, Moodle isnt 'free' there is a cost involved.....

 

That should stir things up!

[NewOrder]

Dan IT is right there is a cost to everything and nothing is free.

 

The first thing you need to do is work out what you want?

 

List it and when you do a comparison make sure it is like for like

 

Cost everything. Even hosted solutions will have admin costs within the school.

 

Moodle will have costs hardware and connectivity.

 

Also its not always tangible things that are costed.

 

You have to consider risk and what if scenarios.

 

So on the face of it, something that costs £6000 could actually cost another £30,000 when total cost of ownership is worked out.

[Guest Guest]

I've said it before and ill say it again, Moodle isnt 'free' there is a cost involved.....

 

That should stir things up!

 

Yes but MS office isnt free in the respect you are talking, windows isnt, a new printer isnt, other VLEs have the same costs...

 

 

TBH im sick to death of the "it isnt free" line. If it isnt free then how much does it cost? Give me a figure, bet you cant. Give me a figure for a competitors costs, bet you cant do that either. How computer littirate are your staff, how many staff are there, are they willing to teach eachother, how intuitive is the application, how well has the concept/idea been sold to them, how motivated are they? These are all things which go to make up the cost of training, but not one of them could you put a meaningful figure on.

 

I dont think anyone on here is stupid enough to think that every teacher will just be able to "do it", but to imply that FOSS is somehow different to a commercial product in that you will need [extra] training is starting to get on my nerves abit, especially when the majority of "training" will be done by one teacher learning one thing and then teaching another and so on...

Edited March 18, 2009 by Guest

[danIT]

Just as i thought this has stirred thing up!

 

My point isnt the FOSS will cost more than a commerical product, my point is that there is some real cost involved.

[john]

Fronter costs us £7000 per year based on our school size of 1900 pupils - I suspect that is part-subserdised by the London Grid for Learning.

Yikes! Thats a lot! How much storage do you get for that?

[john316]

Try moodle costs nothing apart from time to set it up and works perfectly well. Glad to hear about Assimilate, we are a BSF school in Liverpool and we're having this sh1t pushed at us with no option to change, although we are quite happily using moodle. Assimilate is going to be the LDL BSF front end, they say - laugh I nearly cried:mad:

 

Our ICT department has set up their own Moodle site which they use for 6th formers - it works alright but I'm not entirely convinced less able members of staff will jump on board with it. The best of the demos we've had has been Frog and especially Frog 3.0 which looks ideal for our school.

[Michael_T]

I would suggest to look into LMS for Joomla - good system - we are using it in our school.

 

According to their price list a version for <5000 users will cost you 899 USD - that is less then 2 dollars a users.

 

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.

[jdibsdale]

We've been looking at Frog and LP+. Wasn't impressed really with LP+ but Frog on the other hand were very impressive and I haven't found a bad word about them either. Costs are about £25k to set up Frog and maintenance about £10k a year I think. Worth looking at though if your SLT are prepared to pay for it.

[Trojan]

Another vote for frog here, and it can be leased to spread the cost out.

 

We use syscap leasing for that, but frogtrade sorted it all out for us.

 

Also I agree that moodle is not free and takes a bit of setting up.

[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! Edited March 19, 2009 by Messa

[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.