Unit 7 Sticker Shock

I work for a community college, not a major research university that demands high tuition from its students, but an institution that is trying to provide an “affordable” education to students who otherwise wouldn’t be able to attend college at all. The faculty’s emphasis is on teaching rather than research, so a digital collection that makes the most sense for us is to have is a learning object repository. I have begun to investigate what is available  in software platforms for a LOR, and in the past two weeks I have spoken to two commercial providers.

The first company I contacted was Equella. It runs the state’s learning object repository, Orange Grove, and appeared very suitable for what my campus would like to do. At present, we have no learning objects, just the dream of creating them. The campus has approximately 10,000 students and, if things take off, the repository would hopefully expand to include the three other campuses in our college system. As I talked to the representative, it became clear that Equella is not scalable down, but is a complete content management system, able to integrate the library management systems, student registration, provide a repository and multiple other things. After a one-time installation ($125,000) and consultation fees ($25,000), the yearly license would be approximately $80,000 a year. Suspicious because Equella is part of the Pearson publishing company, it seemed exorbitant to me.

So I read some other reviews and came across Telescope from North Plains. It advertises itself as scalable and affordable, with an emphasis on digital assets management (DAM) specifically of video and audio files. Speaking with a very nice representative who admitted that funding is often a problem with educational institutions, he was able to lower the yearly license fee down to $100,000 a year. (Gasp) Or we could purchase the software ($150,000), store all files on our own server, and pay a yearly maintenance fee of $30,000 a year. (What a bargain).

I guess I’m naïve; I don’t have much experience with budgets. I really don’t have anything to compare these prices to but our annual book budget of $50,000. But suddenly the open source products—DSpace, Drupal and others we will be looking at in this course are looking very attractive from a financial perspective.