The Costs of FreELearning
In today’s world of eLearning, numerous products are available to meet the needs of online education. Many of these products are available on the Internet for free. Naturally, whenever purchasing an eLearning platform is discussed, a question that always arises is “why don’t we just use a free program?” This is an important question and it is one that anyone considering an eLearning endeavor should ask. The issue really boils down to cost. However, the answer is not as obvious as it may seem…
On the surface, open source or free eLearning software may seem like the obvious choice, after all it is “free.” But is it truly free? To understand this question, we will divide the process of using an eCommerce platform into a few key steps: setup, use, and maintenance. Along the way we will compare free and commercial offerings to understand which is truly more expensive. To wrap things up, we’ll take a look at my personal experiences with installing one particular, and very popular, free eLearning platform, Moodle.
Setup
Many, though not all, commercial eLearning products have some kind of initial or setup fee. On the surface, this would clearly seem to cost more than the free alternatives. However, one needs to delve deeper. For example, who will setup the eLearning platform? If it is a free piece of software, you really have only two options, either someone in your organization or someone you pay to do it for you. Many schools, especially high schools, do not necessarily have the technical expertise to setup a SQL server or properly configure a firewall to allow an HTTP pass-through (if that sentence sounded like Greek to you, then you understand exactly what I mean). Therefore, you need to either spend the time to obtain this expertise or pay someone else who already has the expertise. In either case, you are spending time and money on this free product.
Once you decide who will setup the platform, the next question is where it will be run? You can either host it yourself on a machine at your school, or you can pay someone else to host it for you (there are numerous companies that exist simply to provide hosting for free eLearning platforms). If you run it yourself you may also incur cost because your Internet connection and server need some upgrading to keep up with the demands an eLearning system can place on your computer resources. If you’ve made it this far, you can already see you will pay something to setup your “free” eLearning system. But, depending on what your choices are, these may wind up just being setup costs. With a commercial product, you don’t just pay up front, you continue to pay for as long as you use the product. It would seem as though free software is still much cheaper. But once again, we must keep on digging deeper.
Use
Free eLearning packages often include more features than you can possibly imagine. Generally, their features far outnumber the feature sets of commercial products. This might seem like a great thing, however, in many cases it can wind up costing your users a lot of time. Free eLearning software generally takes the approach of trying to please everyone. They do this by adding a multitude of features. However, for the most part, you neither want nor care about most of these features. Just as a few examples, some include the ability to conduct polls, use “smilies” during chat sessions, the ability to setup custom “wikis,” etc. As a result, they wind up getting in the way, causing clutter that reduces the ease of use of the program and costing your users time. However, even if you do wind up finding the product with the perfect feature set, there is still the problem of support.
While most free eLearning software provide support (and in some cases very good support), they are generally there to provide support to the administrators of the system, not so much the teachers and students that are using the software. As a result, when a question arises, it is your staff that must field it. This requires you to have an on-site support person for students and teachers to contact. If you do not wish to take that approach, many companies exist that provide support contracts for free eLearning platforms, but these contracts cost money. Yet again, the free eLearning software turns out to be not so free.
Maintenance
The final area to understand is maintenance. eLearning software is constantly evolving. Problems are being fixed and new features are being added. To take advantage of these new features and fixes, you must be running the latest versions of the software. Naturally, these programs do not install themselves; someone must do it. This may seem easy enough, but that’s not always the case. Upgrading software is not always as simple as clicking the “Update” button. Sometimes, you may need to make database modifications, or actually change the coding manually (again, if it sounds like Greek, you understand the problem). Additionally, there are always risks involved. It is possible that something could go wrong and your database is cleared, or the program no longer functions properly after the upgrade. Yet again, you either need an expert on staff or you need to pay someone (probably through a hosting company) to maintain your system for you.
Worse yet, consider the scenario where you find a serious flaw in the software. You are not a paying customer. In reality, the software makers have no true obligation (other than the goal of providing useful software to everyone) to correct the issue. Therefore, it may come down to you either simply ignoring the issue or paying someone to fix it for you, neither of which is a good solution.
A Hands On Look at Installing Moodle
Many of our customers, and potential customers, ask us the same question you’re wondering if you are reading this article: why should I pay you when I can get the software for free elsewhere? While we tell them essentially the same things previously stated, we also realized that we should investigate some of these free products so that we would be sure to give our customers the best answer. One of the first free eLearning platforms we looked at was Moodle. I will take you through the setup process and the initial login. In many cases, this setup will mirror the experiences of many schools. Do keep in mind that this part of this article is meant to get a bit technical so as to truly show the detailed steps involved.
To begin, we had to choose our test system. Most, though not all, of the schools we have dealt with are running Windows® based systems. So we decided that we should do the same for our testing purposes. We chose to use a Windows® 2000 Server machine. This included Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS) built right in, so we chose to use that as our web server rather than installing another piece of software. Fortunately, we already had a copy of Microsoft SQL Server (Microsoft’s database server) so it seemed as though we were ready to begin installing.
Step 1: Install PHP
PHP was generally designed to be a language for Linux systems. It does work on IIS, however, the Moodle site gives no information on this process. Rather, they explain how to install it on Apache. Yes, you could install Apache on Windows, but, most of the schools we have dealt with already have some kind of web server running, we took the approach that they would more likely wish to install it on their existing server rather than setting up a separate one. After a few hours of digging though the PHP website and some forum posts, we successfully got it running under IIS.
Step 2: Install a database server
As I already said, we had Microsoft SQL Server running on our machine so we thought this step was already done. However, a closer look at the Moodle website revealed that it only works with SQL Server 2005, Microsoft’s newest version. Unfortunately, we were running an earlier edition so we were faced with a decision: upgrade to 2005 or install a free database server such as MySQL. Based on the recommendation of Moodle and the fact that the goal of using Moodle is to save money, we opted for the free MySQL program rather than paying to upgrade SQL Server. After a bit of grappling with the MySQL installer (MySQL is another program that was designed for Linux but works on Windows), we finally got it installed. But, that wasn’t enough. Let’s remember that this database will be used to store student’s grades and other information that is protected by laws such as FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) that require you to do everything possible to keep the information secure. Securing a SQL server is not a trivial task. You need to ensure that permissions are properly set, that no one can access it from outside of your local network, etc. After about a half of day of work, we were reasonably satisfied that our database was secure.
Step 3: Install Moodle
This seemed to be the easiest step of the installation process. Everything went very smoothly and Moodle seemed to be up and running. However, we went to upload a new lesson and everything stopped working. After searching on forums for quite a while, it turns out Moodle uses a very old and somewhat obsolete technique for retrieving files that involves using slashes after a filename. IIS, by default does not support this, nor did our installation of PHP. It took a few hours, but we eventually found a setting in PHP that made everything work fine.
In the end, we did have a working version of Moodle installed. However, we spent 2 days requiring 2 IT professionals to simply get the product installed. After installation, we still had quite a bit of configuration to complete before everything was up and running. Moodle may be free, but the time and effort involved in getting it up and running have their own cost. Not to mention, our staff would now need to monitor Moodle for updates, PHP, MySQL, etc. because any one of these products could have a huge security hole that puts the entire system at risk; when you run it, it’s your responsibility to maintain it.
Conclusion
In the end, there are two options: you either need to have an expert in the product on staff or you need to pay someone else to be your expert. If you have an expert in a free eLearning platform on staff, then perhaps it is the proper solution for you. However, if you need to hire someone to run the system, or pay someone else to run it for you, it’s not really free anymore. In the end, the old saying, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch” rings true. It may seem to be free on the surface, but if you dig a little deeper, you’ll quickly realize that it costs as much, if not more, than a commercial platform.