$700,000 CourseWork
23Jan04
Well, as some of you were similarly shocked, the Daily reported that a) CourseWork has lost its annual funding b) Stanford is seeking departamental help to continue this high-cost courseware project and 3) the annual costs for maintenance alone exceed $700,000. I have not used the CCNet coureware, but free is always good.
From the Daily:
Since CourseWork’s inception two years ago, faculty members have had free access to the service due to the Mellon Foundation’s grant, which amounted to $500,000 over a two-year period. However, the termination of the grant earlier this year has prompted the University to ask departments to consider sharing annual costs, which Academic Computing has estimated at $730,000 per year for maintenance alone.
That is insane. It’s vestiges of the dotcom days coming back to haunt us.
Give ISIS a weekend in Monterey and we’ll hack something that’s better than that…
very, very, very interesting article. These are all the same players who will determine the fate of annual funding for E@S…so far we’re in good shape but let’s cross our fingers over the next four months…and continue to prove that what we’re architecting is valuable to students. One obvious takeaway is to keep it simple, streamline things and make a manageable set of features. As coursework started to support foreign languages, video streaming, disability access, etc. the budget started to balloon. KISS
As if the list of things to do isn’t too long already… We might want to at least do some thinking about this ahead of time–what’s our annual upkeep cost for ISIS, and how can we minimize it?
Annual cost of E@S is pretty high too, as budgeted. That’s what “professionalism” gets you.