I think for us the ownership part of DoOO is largely about owning your data. When a student leaves UMW and DoOO they can take every single thing they’ve created with them. That’s not necessarily the case with other systems. Some ePortfolio systems that schools are adopting lock students into using that proprietary system (at a cost) if they want to keep it after graduation. In many LMSs, once the professor unpublishes or deletes a course, students can no longer access their contributions.

At any time, on DoOO or RH you can download a full backup of your site and keep it on hand. If anything ever happened to those systems, you could rebuild fairly easily.

Ownership is also about having full control over what appears at that domain — how it looks, what it says, when it disappears.

You’re right however, that while a student is at our University *we* are the ones paying for their domain and hosting, so do they really “own” it? I think so for the reasons I’ve mentioned above. And when a student graduates, if they want to continue to own it, they’ll have to figure out how to pay for it on their own. Ownership comes at a cost (for us and them).

The credit card thing is an issue. How do young people in Egypt pay for other things that are purchased online?