http://daily.stanford.edu/tempo?page=content
&id=12840&repository=0001_article
Via Ray Schroeder comes this article from Stanford outlining the possible future of the CourseWork project and stating a possible $730K a year price tag to keep it going. This seems unlikely, but probably shouldn’t be discounted out of hand. – SWL
The price tag does not surprise me… but I’d like to see it unpacked.
The cost of any enterprise system it entails people (user tech support, application support, system admin, not to count instructional designers and other pedagogical support and that is before adding software developers in to make sure the product gets better) plus operations (hardware maintenance, networking, data centre…) all kind of things that are not accounted for in many of these calculations… its probably an underestimate.
Yup, thats before license costs..
It may also reflect whether Stanford funds IT — is it cost recovery, or core?
The University of Florida CMS Decision Report, http://at.ufl.edu/~cmsag/cms_recommendation.pdf (recommendation), does a really good job of outlining considerations fore an enterprise e-learning system. Its an eye opener for planners… I highly recommend that!
Cheers,
Michelle
Michelle, you’re right in pointing out that the article isn’t very clear what one gets for the $730K and that it could in fact be a low estimate if it didn’t include all sorts of human resource costs. I had assumed this to simple be the cost of maintaining the codebase, which for what it is struck me as prett high, but I was likely incorrect in that assumption and it likely includes at least some admin costs. Thanks for highlighting that Florida report again – you’re right that it contains some valuable analysis, though amount of FTEs they were allocating to their CMS support made me wish I had worked in Florida back when I was a CMS admin! Cheers, Scott.