Blackboard vs. Moodle and Campus Politics

Linda in My FRN class said:

But I was amazed at the sites people had found: chemistry simulations, Merlot (learning objects, not the wine unfortunately), PRIMO (a great resource for our librarians), Bubbl.us (cognitive mapping site which some of my right-brain students would just love), and finally Moodle, open source software that does what Blackboard does and more but for less, in fact for free. My thought is that if we decided to switch over, we could make the argument that we should spend the money we now spend on a site license for faculty training, so that maybe our faculty would actually use it. Plus, the whole open source concept is much more palatable than the commercialization of WebCT/Blackboard. I doubt, however, that our IT department will have the staff or the inclination to change, and I wonder about faculty response too, since they keep saying there's no use to be trained in WebCT because the university will stop supporting it, and this move would likely be used as proof.

I thought this was absoulutely perfect. She voiced all of my concerns about Blackboard and changing to a more affordable product like Moodle. I can't even get excited about Moodle because I truly believe that if I initiated a change like this I would loose the support of the administration and the faculty who have actually tried to use Blackboard. But it is extremely attractive given its costs and if they actually did redirect the money to training it would be great. I just don't think it would happen.