Nuvvo vs. Moodle

Nuvvo vs. Moodle

per David Scotson,
Number of replies: 14

Has anyone seen Nuvvo? It's a hosted, AJAX-y "Web 2.0" fully-buzzword-compliant LMS/CMS.

www.nuvvo.com

I watched their demo screencast/flash tour and thought it was quite cool. I wasn't as impressed with their Moodle vs. Nuvvo document, which seemed designed to scare people into choosing their service.

I can see how their basic sales pitch has value (basically hosted vs. not-hosted) but it all seems very negative, with a slight hint of desperation. Though that's being charitable with the grey areas (e.g. PHP vs. Java arguments that could rage forever), and ignoring the occasional outright mistake, like claiming their Skype integration is a first about a year after Moodle had the same functionality (I think, never used it myself but it looks the same).

There's also the fact that the Open Source nature of Moodle means there are many hosting options available across the globe, if you want to go that way.

Hopefully they'll soon get over their exitement about choosing the latest fashionable technologies (do normal people, i.e. their target customers, know/care what AJAX, Web 2.0, Hibernate are?), and get enough confidence to not need to dubiously badmouth competitors, as some of their stuff does seem interesting particularly the user interface and business model.

edit: can anyone find any info on Nuvvo's big brother, the Savvica Enterprise LMS? It appears to be missing in action, at least after a brief Google, though it gets talked about a lot.

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In reply to David Scotson

Re: Nuvvo vs. Moodle

per Miles Berry,
There was some stuff on this over on TechCrunch last month. I can see some appeal for independent educators, wishing to sell courses but not worry about hosting, but I think Moodle's open-source modular architecture is going to give it the edge for a while yet. Here's what I said at the time:

Its an interesting approach, and AJAX is impressive, but the comparison article is misleading on at least two counts. Firstly Moodle does scale, eg the UK Open University is moving all 180,000 of its students over to Moodle as the institutional VLE, and secondly its not difficult to set up a secure server for Moodle - were a 150 strong primary aged school and weve had no problems with Moodle in-house, and there are plenty of folk happy to provide Moodle hosting otherwise, for a flat fee rather than a % of the revenue.

Also, Moodle is far richer in terms of resource support and activities: an integrated wiki, collaborative glossaries and synchronous discussion (chat) are obvious examples.

More importantly, Moodle is open-source and thus institutions and/or teachers have complete control not only of the content of the environment but its structure and features too. The gentle learning curve presented by php and the well documented moodle code means that its fairly easy for teachers to start adding their own blocks, modules and themes to a moodle install, and then, if they wish, to feed these back to the community. With nuvvo, you take what youre given.


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In reply to David Scotson

Re: Nuvvo vs. Moodle

per Michael Penney,
My reply (on their Free Online Education blog:http://blog.nuvvo.com/2006/02/15/free/):

Hi, I found your marketing document here (http://www.nuvvo.com/moodle)contained a few errors and raised some questions.

A few misperceptions:

"Moodle is built using the popular PHP technology. PHP is a 'scripting' language that facilitates rapid application development by being relatively simple for programmers to work with. Unforunately, you trade simplicity for stability and performance: PHP and similar scripting languages have drastically less overall performance (response time, throughput, scalability) of their 'compiled' counterparts such as Java and .NET (consider computer language comparisons such as this one or this one)."

This is old FUD and long since put to rest. In the real world, PHP apps scale at least as well as Java, and you can see this for yourself by visiting Facebook or Yahoo. For a detailed discussion of this by someone who knows what he is talking about, see PHP Scales.

"Moodle is highly configurable, but due to feature and underlying technology choices, it is inappropriate for medium to large scale deployments. Institutions that outgrow Moodle have no choice but to move to another open source or proprietary solution."

Simply wrong, you should be embarrassed. NZVLE is upwards of 45,000 users on Moodle. There are a number of single instgallations in the 10,000-30,000 user range. The Open University, UK is building a Moodle install for 160,000 users. Moodle scales as PHP scales, and (see above) PHP scales quite well.

A few questions:

You say:
"Getting started with Nuvvo is fast and easy. Because the service is fully hosted and maintained by professional database and security engineers, there is no need for users to ever fret over the technical aspects of running an LMS."

This doesn't sound like a sustainable funding model. "Professional database and security engineers", are very expensive as is getting new hardware every few years. What happens when Nuuvo's start up capital runs out? Will there be a way for teachers to get their course content out of Nuuvo or will it just be lost?

In Conclusion

Nuuvo sounds like a well funded startup with a "Web2.0" "long tail" in it's business plan. However, I would be quite worried about what happens to my courses when the venture funding runs out.

TANSTAAFL, and all thatsorire.

HTH, HAND!
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In reply to Michael Penney

Re: Nuvvo vs. Moodle

per Tony Hursh,
I don't see your comment anywhere on the blog.

Somewhat disturbing....
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In reply to Tony Hursh

Re: Nuvvo vs. Moodle

per Michael Penney,
Hmm, I still see it here:
http://blog.nuvvo.com/2006/02/15/free/
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In reply to Michael Penney

Re: Nuvvo vs. Moodle

per Tony Hursh,
Nope, doesn't show up for me in either Safari or Firefox.

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In reply to Tony Hursh

Re: Nuvvo vs. Moodle

per Thomas Haynes,

I checked Michael's link, and I don't see his feedback either.

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In reply to Thomas Haynes

Re: Nuvvo vs. Moodle

per Tony Hursh,
I wonder if they've got some kind of odd comment moderation system where the originating IP can see it right away, but others don't?

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In reply to Tony Hursh

Re: Nuvvo vs. Moodle

per Julian Ridden,
Actually, I am not seeing any feedback at all. Got to love true transparency sorire
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In reply to Julian Ridden

Re: Nuvvo vs. Moodle

per Tony Hursh,
I'd like to think that it's just due to the comment going into a moderation queue, but we'll see.

Michael's points were entirely valid, of course.


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In reply to Tony Hursh

Re: Nuvvo vs. Moodle

per Dave Ritter,
Yikes, Mr. Penny's comment was indeed stuck in our fairly-aggressive comment moderation system. We get lots of spam. It's now approved, and we sent him a reply--similar to what I wrote here--via email.


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In reply to Michael Penney

Re: Nuvvo vs. Moodle

per Samuli Karevaara,
I think Wikipedia is also a nice testament to the scalability of PHP, both in the server setting complexity (current total of 171 servers), amount of data and usage load (among the busiest sites on the whole web, thousands of hits per second on peak hours).

It has other things such as squid proxies helping with the load, but naturally similar configurations can be used with other PHP applications as well.
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In reply to Samuli Karevaara

Re: Nuvvo vs. Moodle

per dave cormier,
The problem is there are still a large number of 'reputable' consultants who will tell these people that LAMP is small-time. It fits with the myth of the enterprise solution... that big organizations need big software. But with the gobs of money that is spent on marketing, the need for those consultants to fit in so that they can get the big gigs, and the requirements of 'in-kind' and 'infrastructure' funding, it's not real suprising to still hear people talk about the need for the expensive proprietary solutions...
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In reply to David Scotson

Re: Nuvvo vs. Moodle

per Dave Ritter,
Dave from the Nuvvo Team here. Wanted to answer some of your questions regarding our Moodle vs. Nuvvo document.

We think Nuvvo and Moodle do different things for different sets of users, and we produced our document to clarify the differences between Nuvvo and Moodle, not to be negative about a software initiative that we admire. We wish Moodle and its users only the best.

We chose to write our application in Enterprise Java and not PHP, so obviously we have our preference. But it's a debate that has many sides, and engaging in those sorts of debates within that document was extraneous to our goal, which was simply to contrast the two software systems and point out the ways in which Nuvvo may work in some situations. After having received feedback on it, we've amended the document to correct any passages that seemed more negative than we'd intended them to be.

I hope that helps to set the record straight. I'll check back here if anyone has any other thoughts or questions.
 
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