The Chancellor has announced The Department of Education will have to make savings of £670m.  Although school budgets will be protected until 2011, George Osbourne has made it clear that schools are now expected to become more efficient.

Schools are increasingly finding cost cutting solutions through the innovative use of technology.  The VLE offers many alternatives to traditional teaching practices that can save vital budget.

The Guardian recently reported on Sawtry Community College’s aims to save up to 20% of the school’s budget over the next year, basing the bulk of their savings on technology.  One solution is the innovative use of their VLE – their science department are saving £1000 a quarter on paper, laser cartridges and running costs by scanning resources into their VLE rather than laser printing and photocopying.

In the same report the Guardian referenced the Carbon Trust, a government funded, not-for-profit company, who’s research found ICT to be one area where UK schools could definitely cut costs.

The big decision facing schools is which VLE to go with, and with cost cutting being at the forefront of every decision makers mind surely Moodle is the obvious choice.

I recently wrote a blog post on the University of North Carolina’s study into the best VLE for them.  At the time they where using Blackboard, but found, “the University would realise a cost savings of 52% in year 2011-2012 by switching to Moodle as the standard University Learning Management System.”

Schools and Universities could make huge savings by switching to Open Source Software.  Both Moodle and commercial platforms require budget for hosting, support, training and content.  The difference is with Moodle there is no licence fee to pay.  By choosing Moodle schools can eliminate the cost of the annual licence fee, which when all things considered is an unnecessary cost.

Moodle is highly customisable, can be themed to suit a school’s branding and comes with a lot of standard features that are not available in commercial platforms.  Not only that but there is an international team of enthusiastic Moodle experts on hand to assist meaning a lot of the necessary costs can be brought inhouse.

As budgets tighten and efficiency becomes even more important schools that need to cut costs without making any of the sacrifices could do a whole lot worse than look to Moodle.

For more information on our services click on one of the following links Moodle Hosting, Moodle Training, Moodle Support, Moodle Themes and Moodle Development.