Commercial+Vendor+Collaboration

**AJCU Shared Service Committee - LMS Work Group**

 * Subject: Commercial Vendor - Collaboration**


 * Introduction:** One of the areas in which AJCU members may benefit from in working together surrounds commercial vendors of Course Management Systems (CMS) and related applications and services. While there is always the hope for volume discounts on software licenses, there are several other areas for collaboration which may be more likely to provide significant benefit. The following list is not exhaustive, but represents areas that the team feels are most likely to benefit from improved collaboration.


 * Areas for Potential Collaboration:**


 * __Collective Bargaining for:__**
 * Licenses - the potential exists for members to collectively bargain for discounts on software licenses, but the success of this appoach will most likely vary by vendor and by the number of member institutions that are part of any such agreement. It is most likely that a vendor would be more willing to negotiate a better cost model if they perceived that other member institutions were more likely to adopt their application due to the agreement. This approach has been tried in the past to varying degrees of success. A more unified and publicized approach to any such agreement would increase the likelyhood of success.
 * Support - while most support contracts are part of the overall software contract, the question of separate support contracts potentially come into play with open source solutions. Commercial vendors sell support contracts for applicaations such as Moodle and Sakai that have no software license. Member institutions looking to migrate to such an application would most likely benefit from collaboratively seeking a support contract.
 * Professional Services - this area is probably a bit more difficult to define as the need for professional services are not always known significantly in advance. As there is not always an ongoing plan for consumption of services, vendors may be less likely to provide a discounted rate to the group. The approach here might find some value if the vendor perceived that due to a standing, fixed and discounted rate being in place that member institutions would be more likely to use professional services when the need arose.

__**Sharing Resources:**__ Currently most AJCU member institutions rely primarily on themselves for such things as creating user support documentation and training materials. Occasionally one might come across a timely post of a valuable document on a listserv that saves us from recreating the wheel, but that tends to be the exception vs. the rule. A concerted and organized effort to create and share these types of resources has the potential to produce a big benefit. Organizations would save time if the work was split up and shared and would most likely be able to deliver documentation or other resources that they might otherwise not have the bandwidth to produce.

The biggest challenges with this approach would come in the organization of the work. Members are not all likely on the same version of the same CMS and timelines for upgrades are bound to differ. The best approach here might be to find the newest, most common CMS(s) and begin work around it. Once this was done, new documentation for new versions could be developed collaboratively moving forward. Institutions might even develop areas of expertise where they handled a specific type of documentation or service such as training that they could share.

Following are some potential areas for sharing resources:
 * End user support documentation
 * Faculty
 * Student
 * Technical documentation
 * Backup/restore procedures
 * Server technical settings
 * Load balancer configurations
 * Training
 * In-house developed materials
 * trainers (online/in-person)

__**Application Support****:**__ Another area for potential benefit for AJCU schools is in collaborating on the support of LMS applications. Sharing knowledge and experience in this area can have many benefits such as faster problem resolution because our technical staff are not having to recreate a wheel someone else has already built. While much of this type of collaboration is product/vendor specific, there are also areas where it is not. These would include such discussions as providing support to end users or methodology for integrating with the campus SIS systems.

Some examples of collaboration in application support are:
 * Providing a unified voice to vendor on product issues
 * Listserv for system admins & support techs
 * Collaborative support - troubleshooting


 * Recommendation:** Given the many areas for potential benefit for AJCU institutions from working together surrounding commercial vendors/LMS applications, we recommend that the group evaluate these on the basis of highest impact to select an area or set of areas to begin work developing collaborations. Once these have been decided, then we would look for volunteers for each effort from each campus that would be impacted to initiate the cooperative endeavors.