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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?"
See the previous article about "Gangs Extort Companies With DDoS Attacks" for tips on increasing enthousiasm for your product almost as if by magic.
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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!
"I hate people who fabricate unintelligent quotes to add to their work seemingly by some 'anon' sage" -- anon
OK, I'll take a stab at it:
1. Give the software itself away. I mean give it away like AOL gives away sign-up CD's. (OK, not nearly so spammy as that but you get the idea.) Only charge by billable credits. In other words, regardless of grade, dropped class, whatever, if the school charges a student for 3 credits of distance learning, you get 3 very small units of payment. This allows the school to bring the system up and use it with less risk. They only pay you after it generates revenue. They only pay for it if they use it. In return, you get paid for a LONG time. Schools have been quite happy with the subscription model for a long time now.
2. Seek out schools that do not currently have a decent solution in place. There are many.
3. Seek out the administration, they're the ones who sign Purchase Orders.
4. Make sure 'Open Source' isn't the only great feature. Or even the only 1 of 3. Toe-to-toe with Blackboard isn't really enough. Also, the primary feature is not "Open Source", it's that "Students and professors can build on it in and out of the classroom. They can add as many features as they can dream of." So it's "Much better than Blackboard."
5. Get buy in, via references at least, partnership at best, with well known, highly respected professors. (timely non-O/S example) Your ultimate marketing goal is to get professors to want it, and ask for it by name. Easier said than done, but there are some O/S enthusiastic professors out there. Find them.
6. Don't preach O/S to anybody who doesn't already get it and love it. You don't see a car salesman explaining torque or automotive industry practices to a soccer mom customer.
7. Write a manual in textbook style. Make it good. Allow the school to copy it and sell it at cost. Now they can make migration to your system a student project. Free labor is a good thing. Having your labor pay you per credit hour is even better! This concept doesn't end with migration. This might be the only time you mention O/S to the administrators who make the final decision and sign the P/O. This is where O/S saves the school the most obvious and significant money.
Good luck.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
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.