The pitch that keeps landing on my desk

A few years back I got a call from an institution that had just signed off on moving away from Moodle.

They were excited. Genuinely excited, the way people get when someone finally promises them an easy life. The new platform was cloud based, slick, “no IT overhead,” and the sales deck had more white space than actual features. Nobody on the project team had to touch a server again. Sounded brilliant.

Eighteen months later I got another call. Same institution.

Turns out the platform that removed all the complexity also removed all the control. They wanted a custom assessment workflow for one faculty. Not possible on the plan they were on. They wanted to integrate a research tool their science department had used for a decade. Also not possible, or possible for an eye watering annual fee that hadn’t been in the original pitch. They wanted to own their own student data in a format they could actually migrate. That one made the vendor go very quiet.

So they came back to Moodle. Except now they were rebuilding what they’d already had, plus paying for the migration twice.

That’s it. That’s the whole story, really.

What I have learnt is that simple and easy are not the same thing

Everyone selling you a proprietary LMS right now is selling you easy. Fewer decisions, fewer people needed, less to manage. And to be fair, in year one, that’s true.

But is it?

Easy in year one and easy in year five are two completely different questions, and almost nobody buying a platform is asking the second one out loud.

Open source, done properly, with real expert support behind it, is the opposite trade. You take on more complexity up front. You need people who actually understand the system, not just people who can log a support ticket. But what you get in return is a platform that bends to your institution instead of the other way around.

The driving lesson version of this

Think about the first time you got behind the wheel of a car.

There was a steering wheel you didn’t quite trust yet, pedals in the wrong order in your head, and everything felt foreign. It would have been so much easier if someone else just drove you everywhere. For a while, that probably felt like the better deal.

But you didn’t stay in the passenger seat, because the whole point of learning to drive is that eventually you want to go somewhere nobody else planned for you. A proprietary LMS is the passenger seat. Comfortable, low effort, and someone else decides the route. Open source is learning to drive. Harder at the start. But you’re the one who decides where the institution actually goes.

Why “closed but simple” has a ceiling and you won’t see it until you hit it

Here’s the pattern I see over and over with large institutions.

A closed platform is built to serve the average customer, because that’s what scales for the vendor. Your faculty of engineering doesn’t want the average solution. Your accessibility requirements aren’t average. Your research data policies, your integrations with the library system, your fifteen year old assessment records that legal says you must be able to produce on demand, none of that is average.

With a proprietary system, you rent access to whatever the vendor has decided the average institution needs this quarter. You don’t own the roadmap. You don’t own the data model. You definitely don’t own the exit.

With open source plus proper support, you own all three. The complexity you’re taking on isn’t wasted effort, it’s the cost of actually owning your own platform instead of leasing someone else’s decisions.

It’s not about the software

And here’s the bit that took me a while to get my head around. This was never really a software decision in the first place.

It’s a control decision. A data decision. A ten year decision dressed up as a procurement decision.

Institutions that switch to “simple” are usually optimising for the next twelve months, a smaller IT team, a shorter onboarding, a nicer sales deck for the board. Institutions that stick with open source, or come back to it, are usually the ones that have already been burned once by discovering their platform’s ceiling at exactly the wrong moment, mid semester, mid audit, mid accreditation review.

You don’t find out where the ceiling is until you jump. And by then you’ve already signed a three year contract.

What this means for you if you’re the one being pitched right now

If someone in your organisation is currently being sold the “just switch to something easier” story, ask them one question before anything else gets signed.

What happens the day we need something the platform wasn’t built to do?

If the honest answer is “we’d have to wait for the vendor’s roadmap” or “that’s an enterprise add on,” you’re not buying simplicity. You’re buying a ceiling, and you just don’t know the height yet.

Open source with expert support costs more attention up front. No argument there. But for a large institution with real complexity, real compliance requirements and a data set that’s going to outlive whatever platform is trendy this year, that upfront cost isn’t the expensive option.

It’s the cheap one. You just don’t see the bill for the other choice until later.

The platforms that bend to you are worth more than the ones that make you feel comfortable for a year and then quietly decide what you’re allowed to do.

Open source LMS for institutions

Why Open Source LMS Is Still Worth the Complexity for Large Institutions