Open-source learning platforms helped build digital education. For two decades they gave institutions a way to run virtual learning without a licence fee, back when the commercial options were out of reach for most.
Over the years, the biggest question facing institutions has changed, though.
It used to be “what does it cost to adopt a platform?” Now it’s “what does it cost to run one, year after year, as it becomes core to how we teach?”
The paradox of free
When the software is free, it’s easy to assume the operation is cheap. It rarely is.
Running a learning platform at institutional scale means:
- hosting
- administration
- ongoing maintenance
- user support
- security monitoring
- integration with your student systems
Most of that cost sits in human capital, not technology.
By D2L’s analysis, across a five-year period staffing makes up around 62% of the total cost of ownership for a self-hosted open-source platform. Setup and customisation add roughly a quarter. The software itself comes to about 6%.
So the part you pay nothing for is the small part. The expensive part is the team keeping it running, and that grows as your digital provision grows.
The core of the digital learning experience
Across the UK and EMEA, this shift is clearly visible. HESA data for 2024/25 shows that the number of UK undergraduates studying from home remains significantly above pre-pandemic levels, even as it has eased from its 2021/22 peak — and beyond the Open University, online undergraduate enrolments at other UK institutions have been growing steadily.
This expansion reinforces the central role of digital platforms in widening access to higher education — and raises the stakes for getting the underlying infrastructure right. Universities are operating in an environment of increasing financial pressure, rising cybersecurity threats and growing expectations for flexible learning. Resilience in that environment means more than staying online. It means the institution can keep innovating without operational complexity increasing every year.
That’s worth testing against a few questions:
- Can we keep delivering learning through a cyber incident?
- How much does continuity depend on a small number of specialist staff?
- Can digital provision scale without operational overhead scaling with it?
- Can we adopt new capabilities, AI included, quickly and securely?
- How fast can we recover from a disruption?
- Is the technology estate getting easier or harder to manage over time?
What you’re actually carrying is risk
When a platform is this critical, but its upkeep is shared across internal teams, hosting providers and plugin developers, accountability gets hard to track. When something goes wrong, who owns it?
The same fragility sits with your people. A lot of what keeps the platform running lives with a handful of specialists, and replacing one can take three to six months.
It sits in security too. The NIST National Vulnerability Database, a public and independent source, lists 580 documented vulnerabilities for Moodle and one for Brightspace. Open code is visible code, and visibility cuts both ways.
Regardless of how vulnerabilities arise, someone in your institution is responsible for identifying, assessing, testing and deploying fixes. A managed SaaS model shifts much of that operational burden away from internal teams.
From line item to strategic asset
None of this is an argument against open source, which has earned its place in education. For many institutions it was the only call, and it widened access to digital learning enormously. However, it’s important to understand that free to acquire and free to own are not the same.
The institutions that treat their learning platform as a strategic asset, rather than a cost to keep down, tend to get more back from it.
Our research team have been using Brightspace data the last two or three academic years to run our level four retention programme, which has already saved over a million pounds in retained fees, and a lot of that is based on Brightspace data.Mary Cornelius Educational Development and Innovation Manager, University of Suffolk
The question for the board
For a CIO, COO or director of digital strategy, the learning platform has become a governance question as much as a technology one.
How resilient is the institution’s critical learning infrastructure?
Is this operating model sustainable as online education continues to grow?
And, perhaps more importantly: to what extent does the institution want to focus its resources on operating the technology, or on innovating the educational experience?
So here is the plain version of it. If you added up the total cost of your learning platform, the salaries and the security vulnerabilities you’re exposing yourself to together, would “free” still be the word you’d use for it?
See what your model really costs. Our ROI calculator helps you surface what sits beneath the licence line, from infrastructure and staffing to the cost of staying where you are.
Written by:
