Total Cost of Services (TCS) von Learning Management-Systemen

Abstract

The broad adoption of e-learning platforms calls for a closer look at the economic efficiency and the total cost of ownership (TCO) of these technical tools. In the face of service-oriented architectures (SOA) and the increasing integration of learning management systems with other information systems, new methods for the calculation of system related costs are necessary. We propose to focus on the total costs of services (TCS) of e-learning platforms, which underline the relevance of e-learning services as primary calculation objects. Basically, service-oriented cost analysis for e-learning-platforms can be realized following the IT infrastructure library (ITIL). ITIL provides a generic framework for tactical and operational IT services, which can be adopted for the domain of e-learning. We show that this approach can be realized using tco-tool, a publicly available open source product.