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?"

Comments

Our uni loves commercialware

[commie_pig]

Well, I wish I could tell you what would work. It's strange, but our university opts for commercial apps every single time.

We use a tool (which might sound familiar) called WebCT, which is commercial - it provides notes & discussion boards for every subject a student takes. Actually though, the lecturers have to use it for the students to get any benefit, and many don't! It's a shame, and so I cannot imagine most lecturers taking their time to master your system (however appealing it might be).

It's amazing, we even use Outlook Exchange servers, when there are so many other excellent O/S alternatives.

In a way, it seems that the bureaucracies prefer commercial stuff.

So my bit of pessimism is that it will take a lot of arm twisting to get people to use educational software :(. What a bummer.

However, it sounds very interesting, so you should please push forward! Good luck!