Recently bouncing around a few edublogs are echos of Liz Lawley’s MT Courseware 3.1 is coming:
The announcement about new features in the upcoming MT3.1 release has gotten me excited about revising my courseware for this fall. In particular, the multi-blog option (“A plugin which allows you to include template content from one weblog in any other weblog in your Movable Type install”), the post scheduling, and the improved php/dynamic capability will all make it much easier to create a more robust courseware implementation…
Wahooo! The salvation is here…
Oops, now wait a minute. The “mult-blog” option is just a third party MT plugin that already exists. Actually there were about 4 to choose from at the MT-Plugins site (see multiple blogs from the category view). I use one already in our MT 2.661 Ocotillo multi-blog.
Some of the other new MT 3.1 features sound okay (the pre-publishing or holding publishing until a release date, category hierarchy) but hardly earth shattering to moi.
The biggest irk I got was in seeing what was linked by Liz as the “new education” pricing. Sure $39.95 for unlimited educational use sounds wonderful- except that is for “Professor/Single Classroom”. How many teachers out there in the blog-verse are the admins for their own MT blogs? Three? Five? Fifteen?
And the institutional pricing is based on student head count- 300 students ($299), 100 students($699), …. 3000 students ($1299). Well our system has 240,000 students or 80,000 full time equivalentl. I do not want to extrapolate that. Oh, wait, now I see it is
a license based on the number of students within your department, college or university in a single geographical location. These prices are based on the total number of enrolled students in a department, college or university and not students actually using Movable Type. These licenses permit unlimited usage restricted to the licensed teacher, classroom or school.
Okay, in my geographical location (a central admin office) we have ZERO students. Can I get it for free? I am neither teacher, classroom, nor an entire school. I am a square peg in a dodecahedron shaped hole.
This still seems like an awkward, pigeon holed license structure, and thus I am staying the course still with my totally free MT 2.661.
Yipee.
