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How Would You Promote an O/S Education System?
mgkimsal2 asks: "We've put together a distance learning system for a college and the system is being released under an open source license. Given the budget we had, it was a decent sized system with enough features to go toe-to-toe with Blackboard in many situations. The biggest problem we're having right now is trying to find the appropriate people at colleges/universities. How do you go about reaching decision makers on something like this when the primary benefits of it is its open source nature? Cost/freedom are great, but many schools wouldn't be getting anything they don't already have, and would also have to go through the pain of migration. In a perfect world this becomes something that other schools could contribute to and build on, but getting that kind of buy-in seems relatively difficult. What types of academic positions would Slashdot readers recommend approaching (Deans? Presidents? Webmasters? Teachers? IT People?) What types of approaches might work best? Better yet, what's worked with -your- school to get them to adopt an Open Source Education System?"
It really depends on your marketing tactics. There are typically two different ways OSS can be marketed:
One: Trickle up. Whereby professors, students, etc would download your software, play with it, and may create a buzz
Two: Trickle down. The decision makers are notified, showed the system and make a decision to use the system.
Typically I think you should approach the trickle down method if you are looking for people to adopt the system quickly. Going witht the trickle up method is great if you have 2 - 3 years for the word to get out about it.
Several people have stated that their Universities or Colleges only purchase commercial software. I assume you from your wording that you are in fact representing a company. You probably obviously want to make money so there IS a commercial aspect to using the system. I think people would have more benefits of using your system than others since there is a commercial backing and it is still open source. Other companies that have done this that come to mind are MySQL and Zope. How profitable they are I don't know, but that is essentially your model with this.
-Z
"With enough memory and hard drive space, anything in life is possible!"
I'm slightly confused by your question. Are you talking about an open-source e-learning solution with the source-code readily available for anyone to tinker with. Or are you talking about a resuable learning object that could be used with any LMS (Learning Management System) like SCORM (Shareable Content Object Reference Model) which is rapidly becoming a standard for e-learning on the scale of the w3c specifications for HTML. (Though these specs can't be ignored so easily as pages written for it won't work in compliant LMS's).</rambing half-cut crap>
One way: when you post something to Slashdot, reach the many, many faculty and graduate students who read it by including a URL. Two others:
I regularly read all of these sites looking for courseware news. I know other folks who do the same.
cbd.