Online grads sue USC

[dfrecore]

Access to an LMS is expensive. Blackboard charges $9,000 per year for a department license. The cost for an entire university is usually around six figures per year. Some universities and school districts are spending up to $160,000 per year for Blackboard. 

I've built a course in Canvas and Blackboard. The LMS course has to be built out to match the syllabus, and professors usually create their own syllabi at traditional universities that are not utilizing a company like 2U. Can that one professor use the same syllabus for years? Yes, but that's true for on-campus and online courses. For-profit and non-traditional colleges and universities tend to have cookie cutter courses that are shared by multiple adjuncts. Attending a school that uses 2U is practically attending a for-profit since 2U is providing the curriculum and is a for-profit company. So, yeah, 2U provides cookie cutter courses, and many professors have complained about not having control over what's taught in their courses.

Always wonder the true cost of an LMS. That's wild....its just a CRUD web application. Why can't LMS companies also be disrupted? Got to laugh at the house of cards of this whole system is. Funny/sad.

I don't understand why big universities with robust computer science departments don't just build their own LMS platform in-house. I mean it's just a glorified sandbox web interface...how hard could it be?

I always find it hard to believe how terrible college websites are!  Almost all of them have some sort of Computer degree, and yet their websites are SO bad!  They should be the one industry in which their websites are great...