Moodle- Financial Aspects

Moodle- Financial Aspects

by Mohammad Khiami -
Number of replies: 5
Hello everybody,
I have prepared a study for my university regarding LMSs. Moodle was selected to be implemented amongst the different systems evaluated. However, I'm having a hard time evaluate moodle's financial aspects. I know its an open source software, meaning there are no licensing costs, but I need to prepare a costs-benefit-analysis, ROI(return on investment),  and TCO(total cost of ownership).
If anybody has documents regarding this subject, or at least regarding measuring the financial performance of an open source software please send it to me.
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In reply to Mohammad Khiami

Re: Moodle- Financial Aspects

by Don Hinkelman -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers
Very important question, Mohammad. I am sorry I have no documents (hopefully others will have some), but I can give you two ways to measure costs...
  • Outsourced server: Moodle partners will handle the whole hosting, management and updating of your software. It does not include enrolling and managing users, or setting up courses, just server operation. I know some Moodle Partners such as Martin's services cost between US$100-200 per month for a school, but I do not know exactly what size of institution that goes up to. You would need to contact some Moodle Partners for that. Anyway, at $1000-3000 per year for outsourced service, I would say that compares quite favorably with commercial licensed LMS, especially since your school would need *no* technical staff on payroll for handling the servers.
  • In-house server: Depending on the size of your school, you might need a technical staff person to assist with server setup, tuning and maintenence. In our school, which has a light load of about 10 courses using Moodle, we borrow a tech person twice a year to work on our server for about 20 hours/year (including estimating/purchasing/setup of hardware. All other administrative duties are done by teachers in their own time and by one admin teacher (me) who devotes about 100 hours per year on training teachers and Moodle course setup and maintenence. I consider that part of my regular teaching job as a head instructor and would not really include that in a TCO study. Our actual line item budget per year for hardware and some outsourced updating is US$2000/year. We also try for grants to do custom programming to make new modules, but that is a different story than TCO.
Hope this helps. smile
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In reply to Mohammad Khiami

Re: Moodle- Financial Aspects

by Thomas Haynes -

Mohammad...

We have 1000 or so users and 30 or so active classes when school is in session. This is administered by a teacher (me) in addition to two linux web servers and a backup server, and I figure all this as 10% of my time. I spend 4 or so hours a week with various support things or applying updates, checking problems, etc. We run Moodle on a retired server we bought off ebay for $500. It is a quad xeon with 4 gig of ram, hw raid, scsi, etc. Before that we ran it on a whitebox machine the computer club built from parts (some used).

ROI is absurdly high because the investment is so very low. Performance has been excellent, and the users have been very happy with the functionality.

Moodle is very user friendly, and it has been quite easy to administer. Any of my faculty members that have interest are made course creators, and users go to a "local resource" to get sites set up. We authenticate off the school pop3 server, and that helps make things easy as well.

Regards...   Tom

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In reply to Thomas Haynes

Re: Moodle- Financial Aspects

by Mohammad Khiami -

Thanks Don and Thomas for your feedback. In fact I have obtained a number of price quotes from many moodle partners.

In the beginning of the project I was very excited about the idea of implementing a web portal, but latter on I got used to the idea and I'm starting to loose interest. I'm afraid that students and professors will get bored eventually and stop using moodle as expected.

In the same time I want to convince the university's administration to do the initial investment.

Could moodle users, whether professors or students tell me about their feedback? In addition to that if anybody could give estimates the estimated costs and additional profit moodle helped generate.

In short, I need a measurement of moodle’s financial benefits.

Thanks in advance

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In reply to Mohammad Khiami

Re: Moodle- Financial Aspects

by Thomas Haynes -

Mohammad...

We had enthusiasts in the first year of schoolwide Moodling. We reeled in a few more users in the second year, and we moved all the faculty announcements to Moodle from email in the second semester. There seems to be a lot of enthusiasm as school is starting this year.

It is hard to know, but in our environment, the integrated gradebook is one of the things people like. The feature set for the gradebook has come a long way in the last year, and that may be responsible for some of the enthusiasm.

Growth here has been pretty steady. We have had people excited about Moodle who ended up doing very little, but we are making progress. 

Regards...   Tom

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In reply to Mohammad Khiami

Re: Moodle- Financial Aspects

by D.I. von Briesen -

Salams from Charlotte:

The benefits are that it's a LOT cheaper and easier than anything else for what it does. If you need an LMS, you won't find better for less... in fact you really won't find anything for less, since it's free.

So you have to decide if you need an LMS. If you do, then you can look at the costs - I think you'll find nothing can touch it. In addition, I'm confident that there are numerous technology savvy folks in your area familiar with open-source tools who can quickly ramp up - perhaps even in your own organization.

D.I.

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