Lots of money sloshing around!
As the fall semester starts, I'm getting the first courseware debug requests. Last year I sorted out most of the real internal problems, so I'm expecting Murphy stuff now. Inadequate instructions or misunderstood instructions.

The steady rentalization of the world is affecting my debugging ability. Blackboard, the biggest and best of the e-learning systems, has always offered a free 'testbed' where developers could try out and debug their products without any actual students. They've ended the service now, so I'm trying to find alternatives.

As usual with web services, there's no middle ground, no correlation of quantity and price. Pay for value is obsolete.

Before the web, most services had analog prices. For instance, you could get 1000 copies of a pamphlet printed for about $100, then after the setup you could get the second thousand printed for another $20.

The web has eliminated the concepts of price per unit and amortization. You get nearly full service for free, or full service for MEGABUCKS.

How MEGA is Blackboard? They don't publicize their pricing structure, but one author acquired a close estimate from 'sources'. An average university pays $150k per year to Blackboard, or about $1200 per student.

That's MEGA. Entirely out of my range.

I've been using a 'bite-size' service from ScormCloud for many years, costing about $1000 a year. This service is fully professional. It can handle any amount of courseware, and (IIRC) about 20 students. So the cost per student is $50, not $1200. A very small training school or business OJT class could function with this level of service, and some do.

BUT: ScormCloud doesn't have the same peculiarities as Blackboard or Moodle or Canvas. ScormCloud is more resilient. A project that runs perfectly on ScormCloud will NOT necessarily run on the major commercial services. So I'm still looking for a bite-size way to test with the ACTUAL peculiarities of Blackboard.

Later thought: ScormCloud also offers larger-scale services for larger bucks. I don't know their pricing, but their service would be a better deal for the same price BECAUSE of the broader resilience. More flexibility means less hassle for instructors and developers. Oddly, their marketing runs backwards.... they advertise that their service is stricter than the big brands. They say that if the package runs on ScormCloud it will also run on the other brands.

Labels: Bemusement, Experiential education

  ¶ 5:54 AM