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Agree that all of the applications are requiring more implementation time and effort than is ideal. However, generally is does not require a Java programmer to implement Blackboard or WebCT. Having worked with a couple hundred institutions in implementing and managing course management systems I can assure you that. The primary need for integration is with the student information system and that is becoming more plug and play.

Clearly applications like Blackboard and WebCT which have been deployed at thousands of instiutions which have been counting on 24x7 access for 4-5 years now are more shrink-wrapped and tested than Sakai which has been deployed at perhaps a dozen or so Institutions. Moodle, on the other hand, you could argue has been more widely deployed certainly than Sakai and may be rivaling the commercial products. Also, Moodle strikes me as an open source app that is much more oriented toward installation and use by knowledgable end-users - guys like me who don't program anymore but can install a database and something like pHpBB.

In higher ed open source, the two very different directions that a Moodle and a Sakai come from are very interesting. Moodle is more like what we all think of as open source - go to the web site, download it, install it, get updates, etc. Sakai and others that I refer to as "grant funded" initiatives are more closed in that an institution or vendor has to pay $10000 to the Sakai foundation to participate, get access, etc. This model has been called "community source". Some think this is the right model for a community like higher ed with special needs. I have no opinion. Let's wait and see what comes out of it.

I write more on the background for higher ed open source in the online report at:

http://www.a-hec.org/research/in-depth_articles/op en_source0505/open_source0505_toc.html

Clarification is needed on the much bandied about quote, "It's not quite ready for prime time," First, is says "not quite" as opposed to "not". Second, those words are not in my report anywhere. Third, the reporter at Inside Higher Ed probably shouldn't have even had quotes around that because he is actually attributing it simultaneously to both me and Kenneth Green, founding director of the Campus Computing Project, which studies the role of technology in higher education (who according to the article "calls the mindset regarding open source "affirmative ambivalence." Chief information officers are confident the software will be a part of the future but are still taking a wait-and-see approach"). I don't recall saying anything about "prime time" in my conversations with the reporter. He decided to lump me into the attribution for that phrase that may have come from Casey Green - I have no way to know.

In the Inside Higher Ed article it says, "Rob Abel, founder of the Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness and chief executive of IMS Global Learning Consortium, shared Green's view. "There's a lot of considering, but commitment isn't very high," he said." I do remember saying that (or something close to it). Again, this is referring to the higher ed specific applications which the data from the surveys clearly indicated that there are very high percentages of schools considering/evaluating them but relatively few are adopting as their primary application at this point. I stand by that point because the data clearly indicates it.

As mentioned in some of my other comments on this site it is very early days and lack of adoption now does not mean there is any conclusion. The main reason for doing the study was to identify what are the obstacles so that they could be addressed. My personal perspective is that higher ed can benefit greatly from the investments in both the commercial and open source products and I'd like to see that happen - more innovation, adoption, and learning.

To get involved in A-HEC or even support it, you can make an individual donation at:

http://www.a-hec.org/sponsor.html

Agree that all of the applications are requiring more implementation time and effort than is ideal. However, generally is does not require a Java programmer to implement Blackboard or WebCT. Having worked with a couple hundred institutions in implementing and managing course management systems I can assure you that. The primary need for integration is with the student information system and that is becoming more plug and play.

Clearly applications like Blackboard and WebCT which have been deployed at thousands of instiutions which have been counting on 24x7 access for 4-5 years now are more shrink-wrapped and tested than Sakai which has been deployed at perhaps a dozen or so Institutions. Moodle, on the other hand, you could argue has been more widely deployed certainly than Sakai and may be rivaling the commercial products. Also, Moodle strikes me as an open source app that is much more oriented toward installation and use by knowledgable end-users - guys like me who don't program anymore but can install a database and something like pHpBB.

In higher ed open source, the two very different directions that a Moodle and a Sakai come from are very interesting. Moodle is more like what we all think of as open source - go to the web site, download it, install it, get updates, etc. Sakai and others that I refer to as "grant funded" initiatives are more closed in that an institution or vendor has to pay $10000 to the Sakai foundation to participate, get access, etc. This model has been called "community source". Some think this is the right model for a community like higher ed with special needs. I have no opinion. Let's wait and see what comes out of it.

I write more on the background for higher ed open source in the online report at:

http://www.a-hec.org/research/in-depth_articles/op en_source0505/open_source0505_toc.html

Clarification is needed on the much bandied about quote, "It's not quite ready for prime time," First, is says "not quite" as opposed to "not". Second, those words are not in my report anywhere. Third, the reporter at Inside Higher Ed probably shouldn't have even had quotes around that because he is actually attributing it simultaneously to both me and Kenneth Green, founding director of the Campus Computing Project, which studies the role of technology in higher education (who according to the article "calls the mindset regarding open source "affirmative ambivalence." Chief information officers are confident the software will be a part of the future but are still taking a wait-and-see approach"). I don't recall saying anything about "prime time" in my conversations with the reporter. He decided to lump me into the attribution for that phrase that may have come from Casey Green - I have no way to know.

In the Inside Higher Ed article it says, "Rob Abel, founder of the Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness and chief executive of IMS Global Learning Consortium, shared Green's view. "There's a lot of considering, but commitment isn't very high," he said." I do remember saying that (or something close to it). Again, this is referring to the higher ed specific applications which the data from the surveys clearly indicated that there are very high percentages of schools considering/evaluating them but relatively few are adopting as their primary application at this point. I stand by that point because the data clearly indicates it.

As mentioned in some of my other comments on this site it is very early days and lack of adoption now does not mean there is any conclusion. The main reason for doing the study was to identify what are the obstacles so that they could be addressed. My personal perspective is that higher ed can benefit greatly from the investments in both the commercial and open source products and I'd like to see that happen - more innovation, adoption, and learning.

To get involved in A-HEC or even support it, you can make an individual donation at:

http://www.a-hec.org/sponsor.html

I used to work in ET (Educational Technology) for a public university in Texas. We used a major commercial course management system. The software was certainly pre-packaged, but given that it's not the only application we used on campus (we had registration systems, authentication systems, assessment software, but also blogs, videoconferencing, gradebooks), we inevitably had to do some custom configuration. I'd be willing to bet that any university IT department worth its salt strives towards at least *some* level of integration between its apps, if for no other reason to keep the students from calling their intstructors with confusions, and in turn having the instructors call IT. We also didn't want to have to upload a data file every day to populate the course lists and rosters.

We had good sysadmins and custom-app staff around anyway, so we used them to adjust the system to do what we needed. We repeatedly came upon "unsupported" customization needs. The APIs didn't do what we wanted. The version of the system that we licensed wasn't extensible enough.

That system cost us somewhere in the neighborhood of $65,000 a year. The one with a more flexible extension API cost (IIRC) about twice that. And it still didn't do what we wanted out of the box, nor did the APIs exist to do some of the advanced integration we wanted to do.

We stopped, took a look around, and found the open-source Sakai Project (http://www.sakaiproject.org./ We took our $130K per year license fee and hired a programmer with half of it, paid $10K/year for project partnership (revision control & forums access, plus project input), and after a year of development (or so I hear, I've since left), had a system that does exactly what we needed, was more flexible, had a better support structure (talk to the developer directly!), and cost about half as much to run each year. Plus, we had a good programmer on staff who could work on other projects too.

On a related note, http://www.a-hec.org/open%20source%20030106%20clar ifications.html explains who the study funding came from (Sun, Unicon, and SCT). They're all course management systems vendors, and one of them actually distributes/supports Sakai commercially. It also mentions the BlackBoard/WebCT merger (the two most-important course management software companies) specifically as a compelling reason that universities are considering open source.

I also can't help but point out - Open Source basically started in universities, and the internet is based on that software. If it isn't ready for prime time, it's a little too late to turn back.

Research body funded almost entirely by manufacturers of expensive educational software comes down heavily against free alternatives to expensive educational software.

A-HEC Thwe State of Open Source Software in Higher Education

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