TESC Rant (new website, new email, more frustration)

[scorched]

I will only jump in because in case you have never seen what blackboard cost, then I think it might shock you. And I know all of us are looking for bargains, but technology isn't cheap.
Having consulted many universities that use BB, the average yearly cost including hw, sw, admin, maintenance, etc. is over $500K.
And the major ones are paying in excess of $1M a year. So take the number of students taking online classes and divide that up, it will show you why they charge technology fees.

Sure BB will offer some really small versions for under 50K, and offer "Cloud" hosted versions, but the licenses average to the tune of close to half of that 500k around 250K.
The D2L and Moodle are significantly lower cost from the SW perspective, but still require people to run and the hw it runs on, and even in moodles case it is suggested to have a support contract.

My sister is a prof, and is constantly complaining about the costs of the online learning suites her college has to buy.

And while I intend to take some course from SL because its cheap, I would rather pay a university for content they created versus SL simply taking mcgraw hills content and re-selling it.