Advantages and disadvantages of LEs

[agiles]

What are the advantages and disadvantages if any when purchasing a commercial Learning environment and those of an open source?

thanks agiles

[wiseoldowl]

I think it depends on what you want to achieve.

 

Commercial environments can be successful. They will be fully managed, no technical expertise required. There will be a training requirement. The downside is that you will have an environment where you cannot influence change much. So, features that are important to you can only be developed by the provider. There is little control over the environment that is delivered.

 

Open source has to be managed by yourselves or a company specialising in that environment. Some technical expertise will be required. There will be a training requirement. The upside is that if you go open source and there is an active community involved in the environment's development it can be exciting and you can end up with an environment to suit your school.

[shadowx]

I think it depends on what you want to achieve.

 

Commercial environments can be successful. They will be fully managed, no technical expertise required. There will be a training requirement. The downside is that you will have an environment where you cannot influence change much. So, features that are important to you can only be developed by the provider. There is little control over the environment that is delivered.

 

Open source has to be managed by yourselves or a company specialising in that environment. Some technical expertise will be required. There will be a training requirement. The upside is that if you go open source and there is an active community involved in the environment's development it can be exciting and you can end up with an environment to suit your school.

 

This.

 

If you have in house support who are experienced and happy enough to develop the VLE then go open source. If you don't have the workforce/time to devote to developing and testing it then go to the dark side and get something hosted.

 

You can still hit the middle ground though by either buying into a commercial system that you host yourself, that then gives you the opportunity to tweak and code addons and what not or you cna pay a company to develop and support an open source solution. A lot of companies out there will design and setup a free system and then you can buy support from them. That's probably the best of both worlds really, you can play with it and if it gets out of hand you can call a support line for a bit of help.

[agiles]

thanks for your fast reply. You really shared useful information.

regards,

carmen

[agiles]

Can anyone give me a simple definition of a commercial learning environment and an open source learning environment?

 

Thanks in advance,

agiles