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by reemrevnivek 5382 days ago
After seeing that figure, I'll be writing a letter to my current university asking them to ditch BB for a different service. What options should I suggest?

For those who don't want to click the bit.ly link, The 5-year contract is for $4,228,812.50 and can be seen at http://wwe1.osc.state.ny.us/transparency/contracts/contractt...

2 comments

That's not too unusual, unfortunately, and not entirely the fault of one side. Selling to a system like CUNY, and the kinds of reporting, maintenance, and support requirements they have of these kinds of contracts, is hardly worth it unless you get big money. Maybe $1m/yr isn't the minimum for it to be worth it, but if you sell one of these big systems as a hosted enterprise solution and you're only getting $100k/yr, you'll have trouble breaking even. Just the trips out to meet with the various IT Strategy Boards and Educational Technology Review Panels and whatever will cost you $10k in travel, as one cost among many, and then there's some liability insurance to protect against things like security holes leaking grades, etc.
I haven't looked into other options that much, but I know they're switching to something called Canvas: http://www.instructure.com/