Community, Community, Community. Social Networks, Social Contructivism people have knowledge and knowledge is power. Who better to leverage that knowledge and Community than Open Source ? Moodle has worldwide community build by teachers and educators for teachers and educators. There is no “hardware abstraction” layer you have to go through. The people who are programming this thing are teachers and educators for the most part.

Frankly what you have here is the revenge of the “right brainers”. The day is pretty much gone where you have dominant “left brained” people dictating to the rest of us “right brainers” how it has to be done on a computer.

It’s a great day. The next billionare will be less like Bill Gates and more like Dostoevsky or Abai or Vincent Van Gogh.

Full disclosure: I’m a faculty member at DA.

(huh, it’d be a good idea to have this textarea cut off at the post character limit . . . if I hadn’t copied my post before submitting, I would have been very annoyed that half of it disappeared . . .

The initial setup time for *any* new system can be large, just because of the switchover cost . . . but people only seem to complain about the open source ones - a strong perception bias going in, because they think open source must be complicated. >.

How many hours of your life have you wasted talking to tech support ?
Trust me, reading a man page, browsing a mailing list archive or forum is a lot less stressful, usually faster, and more likely to get me a decent answer. And I know exactly what my time costs my employer….

“vastly improve our educational system”
Technology will NEVER do that by itself - it’s still the job of the educator, but having better tools to do that job certainly helps.