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OSS Not Ready for Prime Time in Education?
cel4145 writes "Inside Higher Ed reports that the Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness has released a new study, The State of Open Source Software. Is it true that open source is 'not quite ready for prime time' in education? Or, as I suspect, is the study just another proprietary software vendor funded report for discouraging the adoption of open source software?" From the article: "Lack of vendor support is one of the largest hurdles limiting the adoption of open source in higher education, Abel said. 'The biggest thing is it takes more physical labor to implement open source because it isn't pre-packaged,' Abel said. "You have to have software developers that can make this stuff work.'" Are the staffing issues associated with OSS enough to outweigh the benefits?
From the page from A-HEC's website cited in the summary, the title reads:Glancing further down the page, we see this gem:So we are to subscribe to the The Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness Alliance?
A-HEC might want to get all their ducks in a row before lecturing to us about 'higher education'...
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
"Lack of vendor support is one of the largest hurdles limiting the adoption of open source in higher education"
Many FOSS applications have thriving communities which offer 'vendor support'. If you compare the vendor support you get from say Microsoft, where you find a bug and it takes months to get an update released to a FOSS app where you can report a bug and potentially get a hotfix in a matter of hours i know which level of support I would choose.
By adopting FOSS you can basically shift costs from the licensing fees you would pay on a closed source application where you are paying for support calls/vendor updates/etc to paying someone in-house capable of maintaing the applications by developing/updating/upgrading the software themselves.
'The biggest thing is it takes more physical labor to implement open source because it isn't pre-packaged,'
Well you saved on the purchase and licensing costs, there's no such thing as a free lunch.
Just don't create a file called -rf.
K-12 teachers are underpaid, and generally lack a lot of computer skills that are necessary to make free-OSS work. Few initiatives exist to get the message out to teachers that there's both remediation software as well as technical skills development source trees available for use, with a few exceptions.
School systems by either OS X or XP these days, and aren't very compelled to get Linux or OSS alternatives for many reasons, including lack of knowledge of what's available, belief that support doesn't exist, fears of application cracks (like they don't exist elsewhere, eh?), and basic fundamental experience with OSS apps and environments in general.
This changes as a younger generation replaces older teachers, but it will take time for educators to get smart on what OSS is, and how to use it effectively for both skills and remediation.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
This is not meant to be a troll, but submitter -- time to look in the FUD mirror.
As a Mac zealot myself, I recognize in your 'I suspect...' statement the painful sort of denial of the obvious of which we are always accused.
I always tell people, who ask how I could possibly be an atheist, to go to church just once and think about everything that is said as if there is no God, and to realize how silly and contradictory it sounds. I'd suggest the same to you with this article. Go back and read it as though you aren't an OSS champion. See if it holds logical water (so to speak).
go get it
'The biggest thing is it takes more physical labor to implement open source because it isn't pre-packaged,' Abel said.
Isn't the whole point of college the fact that everyone there is looking for work?
Next on Slashdot: Wooden bats doomed in baseball because they require pro athletes to practice.
"Are the staffing issues associated with OSS enough to outweigh the benefits?"
Let me play devil's advocate, since I do support OSS.
Please keep in mind that many corporations offer their products at a substantial discount to Educational Institution. For example. I work for a hardware (not as in PCs) that offers a minimum discount of 25% and up to 50% depending on proudct line to any educational institution. Our support model is the same. An application engineer will come out and help students/factility or they can call our call-center.
So, from an education point of view, what are the these benefits that OSS offers which need to be out weighed?
They don't trust the Kids to fix the problem with the systems. The teachers and Computer Illerate. And the reason the IT Staff is working for the School is because no one else will hire them. So you need 3rd part support to keep things somewhat running. Sure there are some school districts out there that have a good IT policy and OSS software would work great with them. But most that I have seem have no Idea what the C O M P U T E R thing is and really what to do with it.
Odly enough the school offered better computer classes back in the late 80s then they do now.
OSS is fine for education if you have some people who understand it just a little. But most schools compter literate and IT staff means you can reinstall an OS when it crashes and add a Cat 5 cord to the switch.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Moodle is an open source course management system. It competes directly with WebCT. Lots of Unis use it. For the things I've tried it for, it is just as good as WebCT. So, yes, open source is ready for the big time.
moodle.org
At my alma mater, the IT people implemented a RHEL lab for the CS majors. They didn't actually disable any of the "no no" services like SSH, and each of the lab's PCs had an IP address that was visible outside of the university. Anyone could have opened a remote connection to these machines.
Open source stuff only takes a lot more time and money to implement if your IT people just don't know what they're doing. I'm not a sysadmin, but I doubt that it's anything other than the golden rule of "you get what you pay for."
On this story without actually reading the report. And it requires a fairly hefty fee ($1-$3.5k USD)for a login in order to download the report.
What is "Education" supposed to be anyway?
Primary school kids may be too young to do operating systems, (...although a smart 3rd grader can certainly downloard & install OpenOffice with a little supervision ...) but middle schoolers can definitely install OS's with a little supervision, and high-schoolers should be able to keep the computers running in the school district's kindergartens.
Not every kid will have the desire, but if only 5% of your highschoolers have an interest in technology: problem solved!
Any school district that is paying for its office software is wasting Our Money! and if they are not using this opportunity to train up kids to run computer system, that's a waste too.
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
I suspect they are responsible for the lack of good shows on TV, also.
When I install commercial software I would generally rather go
to have a tooth pulled than phone the company that wrote it.
They will wait on hold, uninstall, reinstall before even starting
on any actual problem. There will be a large number of reboots.
Open source stuff, installs, usually without any reboot, If I do need
help there is usually better documentation than the commercial stuff
provides, and practical help is much easier to get if I should need it.
The source code is, after all, available; even if I'm not an expert at
a new (to me) piece of software, there seem to be many people who know
it more intimately than it is possible to know closed source software.
They are generally very, very helpful.
I've only been reading about the exact same crap for the past few years on slashdot. Is there anything more to this site than "is open source software ready yet?" Duplicate stories of stuff actually worth talking about is one thing, but hasn't this topic been covered way too many times for even moderately interesting discussion?
From what I've read so far, the article seems fair and well thought out (spelling and grammer aside... lol). Seriously though, I'm not getting an anti-oss feeling from it at all. So, is the submitter a zealot or what?
"Are the staffing issues associated with OSS enough to outweigh the benefits?"
Proprietry software made it easy enough, with money, to staff your establishment with idiots and still have complex IT.
Fine for Joe User and Johnny Corporate. Of course it is always breaking and delivers poor results, but you can pay the vendor to fix it, and hell everybody expects companies to have crap IT departments full of stuff that never works.
Open source, ironically developed in HE establishments, as high quality software, is now an option these people can't afford to employ. In the old days you relied on students and staff being of high intelligence to work the computers,
which is sad reflection of educational standards where universities cant get the 'academic' staff to run 'academic' software any more. Kinda paradoxical.
Oh, and don't forget that all the high up administrators for the districts are usually old. They don't even like computers let alone wanna use anything that doesn't have Windows or Pentium4 on it. If OSS software is to take hold in education, people familiar with OSS software and techs well voiced in OSS software need to be put in place. This just won't happen for a long while.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
Linux: Needs an administrator with at least 2^8 functioning brain cells.
Windows: Needs an administrator with experience in practicing voodoo.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
Open Source is a development model with specific licensing requirements, and as such it seems ridiculous to evaluate its suitabilty for "Prime Time" You might just as well pick a selection of random Closed Source software and evaluate the how suitable these are for "Prime Time"
...
A bunch of developers is a bunch of developers it makes no difference whether the product they work on is Open Source or Closed Source. I dont see how development model can be evaluated in this way. What counts is the end product. There are plenty of examples of Open Source and Closed Source products and solutions being used successfully every day. There are also plenty of examples of Open Source and Closed Source products and solutions not in use due to inadequacy, incompleteness or just poor implementation.
Nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Research body funded almost entirely by manufacturers of expensive educational software comes down heavily against free alternatives to expensive educational software.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
As a CS professor at a large university I run into many roadblocks in getting open source alternatives considered. Our administration only wants to buy commercial products and spend millions because they think they will get better support. They equate open source with having to do their own support and not getting the professional help they need. To overcome these misconceptions, the open source community needs to do a better job educated these institutions in the support models for OSS. In particular, these institutions need to be open to hiring outside consultants to provide the necessary training and support that they are used to. For most large open source projects, its not hard to find consultanting groups that can provide the help you need. And hopefully, with some of the money they save, they can contribute to the foundations funding the OSS projects they use.
Of course vendor support and/or getting a complete package is a big part of the picture.
A lot of teachers have to do their own IT work. In my school, there was an IT supported computer lab (with about 20 three-year-old PCs). If there was a problem in the lab, you either fixed it yourself, or waited three or four days until one of the IT guys from the district office could come out and troubleshoot. This means that something that's familiar (Windows, Office, etc) is a better bet for a lot of teachers, because it's a lot easier to figure out how to resolve a problem with something you're already familiar with. Printing is a good example; if the printer went on the fritz, I already knew the five Windows-centric things to try. If the computers had been running Linux, I'd have had no idea (at that point) where to start.
Another issue is that most teachers aren't geeks, so they want a "just works" system. They don't want to have to fiddle around to get things working--they want to insert the Oklahoma Trail CD and have the students playing the game. Right or wrong, there's a perception that "other" operating systems are more complicated. When you're at school eight hours, then at home grading and planning for a couple hours, and commuting thirty minutes a day, you just don't want to add anything else that takes time.
Both of these issues mean that teachers believe that OSS isn't "ready" for educational use. Of course, a lot of that is perception. Remember that most non-techies are a few years behind the curve, so a lot of them don't know about Linux distros like Ubuntu or about OSS programs like Open Office.
Finally, there isn't really a lot of appealing software out there (OSS or closed source) for educational use. Indeed, there isn't really a strong argument to be made in favor of using computers in the classroom in the first place. In my opinion (which is based on three years of teaching experience), a lot of computer use in classrooms is misdirected--it's generally intended to be used as a reward or an activity to keep part of the class quiet while the rest of the students do something else. It's not that OSS isn't ready for education, it's that educators haven't yet worked out how to fit computers into education in an effective way.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
"You have to have software developers that can make this stuff work."
Or a bunch of clever kids, which are in ample supply in the classroom. Just b/c the average idiot teacher can't do it doesn't mean it can't be done. Even my own highschool, poorest in the county, was able to handle two DEC workstations I won in a contest, b/c they let my team and I admin them. To his credit, one of the teachers involved was also a hacker capable admining them as well.
This reminds me of a recent Air Force recruiting commercial, where the cop car pulls up to a bunch of teen guys loitering on the sidewalk at night and flashes its lights. A guy comes over to the car and the cop in the passenger seat says, somewhat embarrassed, 'It's broken again', and gestures at the laptop computer. The kid smugly says, 'reboot with F8 into safe mode', as if he's a master hacker.
I could take hours deconstructing that commercial, but in a nutshell: yes kids are fearless with technology and hence learn it faster, but rebooting Windows does not a hacker make, nor is it something to even be smug about, yet whoever made and approved that commercial (presumably adults) thought it was and had no idea what real l33t skillz are.
Essentially, if you want kids to really learn technology, give them Linux, BSD, or something else free and OSS, and let them figure it out. Have two sections to your lab - stable and experimental. Stable for internet and office apps, and experimental for reinstalling OS's, playing with Xen, and the like. With Linux it couldn't be cheaper, especially if you can get donations of old computers. Unfortunately too many in education don't seem to realize this, they've drunk the M$ koolaid...
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
It seems that everything is subject to the tyranny of the bell-shaped curve. Institutes of higher education that have smart and effective leadership and staffing will weigh all of their options carefully and deploy a mix of OSS and proprietary software appropriate to their environment. But the bell-shaped curve tells us that it is likely that places like this are few in number. Most of what we'll see will be in the big bump in the middle and will be heavily influenced by marketing and FUD to "play it safe" and get locked into particular vendors, even when it doesn't really make sense with respect to their available resources and goals. But at least with a single vendor, you always have someone to blame/sue. I'm sure that even within Microsoft, for example, there are people who realize that the Microsoft solution is not always the most appropriate. But since they are not in the business of selling other people's products or promoting OSS, when appropriate, they can only sell/push their own branded solutions.
So in the end, to make the best use of all that's available, you have to be smart, very smart. And sadly, above average smartness is in short supply.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
I'm not sure I see a valid basis for the staffing issue. Almost anyone who has used Open Source software can tell you that, yes, it's not always a snap to install. They will also tell you that in most cases there are at least a few places to get support, and that these are not completely untested programs. If you have a problem with getting it installed, a Google search and a forum search will oft times get you the answer you're looking for. Yes, it takes a person to take the time to do it, and said person must know where to look, but I don't see that as a show stopper inherently.
As far as anyone having to be a developer to deploy OSS software; This seems like a farse to me. Lord knows the majority of those who use these types of programs might be a bit on the computer literate side, but to call them developers seems like a stretch to me. I know and have known plenty of people capable of installing, troubleshooting, and maintaining an installed app without knowing a thing about programming. After all, people don't have to be MCSE's to run Windows. It seems unreasonable to lump those capable of maintaining an installed app under the title of "developers".
In the end these types of questions are about money. How much, if any, are you saving or losing to make said business/organization move? If you go with an OSS app over a commercial one, yes, you have to have the support infastructure, but this is a cost you incrue regardless of which type of software you choose. You either save enough money on the licensing/support to justify the move, or you do not. In the end, people are cheaper than licenses.
I'm not a software developer and I've been getting this stuff to work just fine.
Most schools in the U.S. are run autonomously. Typically there's a "technology" instructor, or maybe a single sysadmin split among two or three schools, or some combination.
Schools are subject to school boards and parents. Parents are hypersensitive about little Janie and Johnny getting behind, and they don't want anything that means Janie or Johnny won't have the most popular thing. The system is extremely risk-intolerant, ruled by the LCD. Individual parents may be smart, but get them together and you can't tell.
Until there is a local company to promise support and a turnkey solution at a significant cost savings, coupled with a good marketing campaign to tell parents that it's okay, that Johnny and Janie will be better off with OSS, schools will continue to be breeding grounds for the Microsoft plague.
sigs, as if you care.
Oh... they meant like college and stuff didn't they? nm
Know what TCO studies and IT White Papers remind me of? Expert Witnesses in courtrooms. The prosecution and plaintiff attorneys will both bring in highly qualified experts in a given field to testify on something. Remarkable that these expert witnesses agree exactly with thier side on the issue. You can get an expert witness to testify on your behalf in just about any area, as long as the price (or agenda) is right. Same thing with these reports and TCO studies. They always exactly reflect the views of their sponsors.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
The article summary (can't read the entire article without subscribing) is addressing concerns that open source can not fill the business specific software requirements for higher education institutions (curriculum management, etc). This is not talking about web servers, word processors or other generic software systems. This open source limitation is true in many industries.
Most open source developers do not have the business expertise to attack vertical software markets, nor do many of the people who know the business requirements have the software development expertise (or time) to actually code a working project that could compete with commercial offerings.
This is where software businesses will always be required. Someone needs to pay the people with the business expertise to work with people having the development expertise to actually produce products that meet the needs of specific customers.
If an existing product were open sourced, modifying and maintaining would be possible. But getting to that initial state for vertical market software is very difficult.
Well, here I am working in schools. Our elementary school labs are almost entirely linux. The kids actually quite like it, the teachers sometimes don't... or at least the older teachers. Now why is that... because people seem to dislike change at older ages.
Last time I setup a basic Open-Source lab (Abiword, OpenOffice, Firefox, GIMP, etc) the kids had figured out tricks that I hadn't even touched. They had gorgeous Impress (Openoffice program similar to Powerpoint) presentations, and were happily playing with penguin games. In fact, if there's anything the kids love about linux most it's the penguins... they draw penguin pictures, have stuffed penguin toys, play penguin games, etc. Of course OSS isn't just about Linux, there's BSD (which we also use) and even windows OSS applications as well (the aforementioned Impress was actually the windows version).
Going back to the games, it seems that in the OS world games are often more "wholesome" than many of the windows components. Of course, part of this is probably due to the fact that many popular linux games are based on old classics (Frozen-Bubble, SuperTux, Pingus == Arcade Bubble Game, Mario, Lemmings)... but that does tend to make it overall kid and/or educational-environment friendly.
(I am not one to speculate, but it wouldn't surprise me if something furtive was in play. *COUGH*Microsoft*COUGH*)
More involvement is better, and teachers, curriculum people, and others need to get that message. Don't be bashful.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Having looked at some OS solutions for higher education, one of the big problems is lack of good, well-written documentation & online help. It's fine to say "post to a discussion forum and you'll get help" but by and large users want to click "help" and get an answer from the online help - And preferably an answer written by a skilled technical writer who thoroughly understands the application.
I have been, and the wages you see are a median that's not broadly reflected. We/they work long hours, with a wide variety of students, some willing, some incapable of learning. So much for pimping teachers.
I'll agree that computer skills need to evolve in teachers; and various academic disciplines are slowly (but surely) evolving standards for skills and remediation. It takes time, and someone that gives a sh*t without much penuniary interest to do the grunt work. It takes all of the things that makes OSS successful, including creativity, and collaboration.
But it's not this year. And it's going to take time. In the end, OSS wins for the same reason that it will in other segments.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
The Education Suite of the K Desktop Environment (KDE) has made great strides in providing high-quality educational software for schoolchildren aged 3 to 18. The educational applications range from ones that teach vocabulary and foreign languages to math, physics, chemistry, astronomy and computer programming.
This goes to show that the educational sector is considered a high priority by many KDE developers, which is good because contracts with educational institutions account for a great percentage of software revenue. And of course, they have the satisfaction of making the kids (and consequently our future society) smarter, better informed, and more ready to tackle the challenges they'll face.
For our district's 2 Terabytes of nightly backup requirement. No commercial product could do it. But RSYNC with SSH does it securely and it works. The commercial product enterprise solutions all have widely-publicized security holes that are a bear to work close when you have hundreds of servers. So in this case shrink wrapped is not ready for education.
Moderation in All Things... Especially Moderation - gurutc
I know someone working in k-3 education and they have been given a number of nice computers to use for testing and education purposes. I hear daily stories of horror issues that just drive the teachers crazy. These are Mac's they've been given suprisingly enough. They have no staff trained to use them, and whoever set them up got clever by putting the Dock in a non-standard place with hiding turned on and all sorts of other special customizations.
The programs they're supposed to use are pretty basic "multiple choice question/answer" testing programs with data files the teachers either get from the home office or make up themselves. But the teachers don't know how to work the computers so basically they let the students free on them to play games and do anything that a non-admin user can do under Mac OS X if there isn't a data file for testing the particular student.
Open Source at this level would have a pretty low set of standards to achieve. The multiple choice testing programs are trivial. Adding some typical games for the K-3rd grade crowd and you could functionally replace what the machines are used for today. If you could make the machines be trivial to set up, then your only obstacles would be political and financial.
K-12 teachers are underpaid, and generally lack a lot of computer skills that are necessary to make free-OSS work.
We're not talking about K-12, we're talking about Higher-Education, ie College.As one of the admins for my the Engineering College at my university, I have these comments:
We have a handful of professors who refuse to run windows. We have more faculty that are involved in research projects with undergraduate students they found was more productive on linux. We have deployed group workstations for them.
We've also had a number of faculty, as well as students, requesting that we install linux and dual-boot the cluster machines. We've already nailed down the process of adding linux workstations to our windows domains allowing a roaming home-dir as well as access to the same shared drives and personal storage users have access to when they log into WinXP. We will be converting our labs starting spring break to a dual-boot WinXP/Ubuntu combo.
On our back end, all of our servers except a web server running an app that requires IIS and the domain controllers run Gentoo linux.
Unfortunately, much of the software we deploy and will not run on linux, or only exists on the linux platform in professional versions, while we can deploy cheap/free student copies for windows. We've been installing OSS windows software whenever possible including OpenOffice for some time and I've seen many students using it even though MS Word is installed.
The rest of the university is an entirely different story, however. They are a Dell/Windows shop and will remain as such. I used to work support for them and I'm not sure I'd want to some english professor who only uses a computer because typewriters are out of style* that he has to use OpenOffice on linux rather than the MS Word on Windows that he's been familiar with for some time. Hell, I wouldn't even want to tell our engineering professors that they have to use linux, now. Linux is a viable option in higher education, and we use it extensively. However, as an alternative it's not there yet. I hope to think that by providing this option we will help push some of the students to dual boot their own computers and give it a closer look.
*This is a grossly unfair stereotype. I'm sure there are english professors who would love to have linux. However I included it because it sounded good and I know this man. He's gets very ornary when computers come up and basically said the above.
I guess, I'm wondering what the alternative is to OSS at least in the CS field? Since Microsoft and other closed source companies don't publish their source, how can you study it? At my school, we studied Minix (which is open source). I suppose it would be interesting to have studied Windows, but since we can't view the source, so there's not much to study.
No Sigs!
'The biggest thing is it takes more physical labor to implement open source because it isn't pre-packaged,' Abel said. "You have to have software developers that can make this stuff work.'
That's complete bollocks. a) There's plenty of pre-packaged OSS you can buy in a box, b) When it's not available to buy in a box, you can usually download it in package format, ready to run, and c) even if you needed somebody to set it up for you, you'd need an admin not a programmer.
If the "biggest thing" is complete nonsense, then I guess OSS is ready for prime time in education.
PS: Since when is "education" one field? Are the needs of ten year-olds the same as the needs of graduate students? No? Then why on earth would you lump them together?
The article is obvoius an M$ (or M$ like) funded.
F/OSS is a great oportunity in both higher education and lower education, and Microsoft is beging to seeing a threat from linux especially in poor countries where M$ is starting to no longer be the one and only way.
No matter what they say, but advanced programming can be learned better on an operating system of which sources you have access to.
Otherwise everybody will learn to program using only APIs.
The most important thing in a good education is not having a pointy-haired teacher (and even more important not having a pointy-haired principal).
Who cares about higher education? Higher education is teaming with students who are plenty capable of supporting themselves. I believe it was just such a student who kicked off this whole Linux thing.
What about secondary and primary education? Are the support costs too high for them? Let's take a peek...
When Mavis Beacon doesn't work, youi call... ummm.... hmph, I don't know. Who do you call? Oh well, nevermind.
When your printer isn't working, you call... ummm.... I don't know.
When your grade-tracking software corrupts a bunch of data you call... ummm... There's a phone number here for the School District IT office. They are located about 50 miles away from here. Maybe they can send somebody over. Or maybe they have a support number with the vendor, or maybe.... You're toast. You will have to re-install (or wait for the IT expert to drive over here and re-install) then re-enter all your data.
Support contracts cost a lot of money and very very rarely save you any work. The cheapest support policy for education is to Ghost an image, and do regular data backups. Then any problem whatsoever is a 15 minute Ghost session and a 30 minute data restore. Much much cheaper than any vendor support contract, and usually a much quicker and more stable fix.
That solution works equally well for Windows, Linux, DOS, or whatever.
you cannot set up a lab (10-30 computers or so) let kids use it and expect things to hum along smoothly with either the microsoft offering or the apple offering. so who is ready for prime time?
Simple answer: NO. There are staffing issues with any computer infrastructure. Those issues have more to do with how well the thing is managed than why software or platform it is based on. There is no reason why F/OSS can't be just as efficient to manage as proprietary software.
To really see what this report is about, just look at the funders: http://www.imsglobal.org/members.html. It is a who's who of commercial educational software vendors, including Blackboard, WebCT, and, yes, Microsoft. That is all you need to know about this report.
I may not have much experience in higher eduaction tech support, but in high schools tech support is almost non-existant. The tech at the school currently is much better then the last 3 or 4 techs - she actually knows what a Subnet is.
The problem with OSS in schools (or at least in high schools) is that the administation doesn't think about support and maintanence for computers. Most simply think that you buy a set of new computers and thats it. OSS is probably not the easiest set of tools to set up or use. Yes you can argue that there are some really easy tools, but lets face it, try finding a decent OSS grading program. (if you do, let me know!)
Lastly, there are lots of politics. We buy computers from x company and we get money for sports. Stuff like this goes on way too much. I know there was a push to move to xp cuz there was some funding tied to that (ironically they blocked windows update for a while...). Also it seems that they have blocked various sites like wikipedia, getfirefox, etc. Also the firewall they set up really makes it difficult to download linux updates (grrrr....). To make it worse, a chunk of admins don't like it when you know things that they obviously do not, especially tech related. So suggesting to use x product or y operating system runs you the risk of them making your life miserable (fund cuts, being moved to a closet for an office, assigned impossible tasks so they can try to get rid of you - not kidding).
Anyways I really hope to see OSS in the classrooms someday, but it would require a lot of people leaving first.No Software. I can't buy Kid Pix 3, or Clifford, or Jumpstart Kindergarteners for Linux. Sure, tux paint is similar, but there aren't any other choices.
Admining a network of Linux boxes would be a hell of a lot easier that Windblows - but with out the software, it's an exercise in futility.
And, by and large, this is where the whole OSS stuff falls completely flat - Educational software just isn't as cool for the Uber Geeks to write as yet another bit torrent clone.
Damn shame more college students didn't have kids - perhaps they'd write something worthwhile.
One note - thumbs up to New Breed Software - glad they're capitalizing on this market ( http://www.newbreedsoftware.com/ )
Teachers are underpaid because the money goes to big IT companies and others. If just a few schools invested their IT budgets in Free Software development/sponsorship, then every other school would get the features they need for FREE, forever.
I work as support staff for my instituion's moodle http://www.moodle.org/ installation. While the software does have some bugs, it has generally served our purposes. Our other LMS that we are phasing out is a propritary system, and their management has us basically under mafia style control on our contract. They demand thousands for the simplest of fixes. Having a LMS that is community supported and open source has allowed us to not only fix many of our own problems, but taylor our system to our specific needs.
And the reason the IT Staff is working for the School is because no one else will hire them.
This is just plain wrong. A good friend of mine left a job not that long ago in the private sector to to go work in a University's IT department. He did it because the work environment is a lot better. It has nothing to do with his talents.
Most of the people that I've known who worked in University IT deparments did so because:
1) They like the environment better than the private sector.
2) Job stability
3) Just graduated from said university and are getting work experience
Arguably the people I've met in University IT departments are more skilled because they get more flexibility to experiment and try different things. In private IT, you tend to get pigeonholed into what they need most whereas a University tends to favor more jack of all trades work.
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I have been involved with the schoolboard in the town I last lived in, from 02-04 and I made one of my top "issues" to try and get district IT costs down and get long-term-viable stuff in place ... when it came budget time, I presented data which showed very large substantial savings by moving to a F/OSS software base: not throwing away those pentium2s and using them as linux desktops or distcc nodes or SOMETHING, adoption of OpenOffice for internal documentation rather than upgrading the whole district (several thousand "seats") to MS Office 2003, and so on. The savings was very substantial but in the end was less than 5% of the total operating budget for the district. Simply put, nobody cared enough to vote down the budget because of it and oh boy did the MCSE they hired as a "district IT admin" know it ... he came to the budget meeting armed with 2 or 3 FUD one-liners that any of the computer-literate kids in the school could have debunked, talked-up the "strong" relationship with dell (another beast entirely... hows a 60% return/defect rate within 6 months?) customer support, and made anecdotal comments about how MS "always" offers discounts of "at least 80%" whenever educational institutions ask for it ... needless to say, the budget was passed, no discounts were asked for or recieved, the multimillion dollar IT side-grades to office 2k3 and overpriced dell optiplexes went ahead full steam .... and nobody gave a crap ...
.... im sure his contract was renewed without debate ...
So I guess the end point is, unless a strong majority of the people making the decisions are more tech-savvy, having some of us there makes zero impact.
I found out that after I left, the district MCSE submitted a 4 page draft to the school board explaining essentially that everything I submitted was an LSD trip, this strange thing called "Linix" was more of a student experiment than a legit operating system, that openoffice was tied to "The KING of all proprietary vendors, Sun Microsystems" and was a threat to intellectual property rights of the students (?!?!?! WHAT !?)
Heaven forbid any of these companies would have to take their gravy train product line and port it to another platform. *shudder* That would mean actually working for living! What are you, a Democrat? I bet you don't even have a gardener, do you?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
For what it's worth, at my wife's school, they're using some new whiz-bang Windows based testing software that's supposed to automate the taking and grading of some types of testing. Worked fine on the first server but when they moved the system to a new server (should have been no big deal), fails totally. Login, pull up a test, enter result #1, lights out on the entire system.
They've been fighting the problem for at least a week.
Don't know the details but even if it's something simple like a config setting, seems like closed source isn't guaranteed to work out of box either.
Open source needs a means to hook those in Academia who know little about it.
The Software for Starving Students project can fill that need on Windows & Mac.
http://mirror.softwarefor.org/
If you have in mind that the purpose of education is to enrich the education providers, then you should stick with commercial software.
If you have in mind the the purpose of education is to enable those being educated to be self-sufficient in all respects, then you should aim for free software; and you should view non-free software as a stepping-stone to 'free'
The commercial providers will move on to other things; in this case, doing whatever will really support the school districts and the teachers in what they want to do. Probably, some kind of 'education services'.
School districts will have just as much money to spend as they do now; but instead of 'licence fees' it could be spent on something more productive.
There are lots of Swedish municipalities that are looking at running their entire school systems on Linux. Two of them that are already doing this are Motala and Eksjö. I am sure that if you google for them, you can find lots of info about them, but here is a reference page from Cendio, the vendor that helped them do it.
What works is when there is sort of an open source "fact community" around an educational project that can use a common interface to do the "educational packaging" without racking up the costs of content experts, etc.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
I call FUD on this article.
First of all, they call OSS a "new" technology. I know of several well-respected universities that have been using nothing but linux (for student lab workstations) in CS dept for at least 6 or 7 years. They are trying to promote the idea that since there are few commercial vendors that sell linux, and since it's such a "new" technology, that adoption of linux is a risk. I call FUD on this. Considering that linux _HAS_ been working in higher ed for some time, there is not alot of substance to this article.
From what I know from talking to profs and students is that they were all glad to work on a system that is widely known in business. In this specific instance, they were replacing aged HP-UX machines with linux on intel. Everyone seemed pleased: less licensing and hardware costs, more power on the workstations, and the ability for the students to run the same OS on their personal machines as the machines in the labs. Worked out for everyone. So I don't really see what the point of this article was, besides spreading FUD. All other things considered, linux is really the OS for CS depts. Linux would work in any dept; with availability of source, it's really a no-brainer for CS (unless you are *BSD user, then that's great, too).
And being used at a number of US institutions (San Francisco State University, Humboldt State University, etc.) and worldwide, with large installations in New Zealand (NZVLE 45,000 students), a number of 10-20,000 student installations in Spain and France, the Open University of the UK is building out for 160,000 students next year, etc.
In fact the install base of Moodle rivals Blackboard/WebCT:
More http://www.moodle.org/stats
What people say about it
I used to work Information Technology at a higher education institution that used tons of open source software... Qmail, Vpopmail, EZMLM, Apache, Bind, Samba, RequestTracker, MySQL, PHP, etc., etc. At least 20 of the 30 servers at the time were running Linux. Making comments that the "IT people at colleges are there because noone else will hire them", is completely absurd. Also, many of the founded arguments against OSS here are being geared towards K-12. The article clearly states "Higher Education". I assumed people that post here were intelligent enough to realize these things.
Bottom line is, OSS is ready for people that are intelligent enough to implement it. The implementation is the only thing hard about it. The UI for many OS applications is even better out of the box than commercial, after it has been deployed correctly.
Hi All- I've read the comments with extreme interest and wanted to share a bit more on the report. First, this study is only about higher education - nothing to do with schools, K-12, etc. Secoond, it broke open source into two categories:infrastructure area (Linux, Apache, etc.) and higher ed specific applications (course management systems, finance systems, etc.). I seen many comments that it is negative but the report itself is not negative at all. I think that is the impression from the Inside Higher Ed article that interviewed many other sources. But, the overall message is not negative. In the infrastructure area (Linux, Apache, etc.) open source is doing very well in higher ed. The application area (course management systems, finance systems, etc.) is where there is no tremendous interest but not a lot of fruit yet. That doesn't mean there won't be - long way to go. Second, the study was funded by Sun Microsystems, Unicon, and SCT. While commercial companies all three have been leaders in promoting and implementing open source in higher education. Third, the study was conducted from day 1 under the auspices that only those who participated in the research and the sponsors would receive the full report. That's how we attract support and involvement. If we made it all available for free no one would see why they should pay or participate (I know because I've tried it that way). Fourth, IMS has had no involvement - other than me. We're making the A-HEC research a benefit of IMS membership starting with this and in the future. Fifth, IMS is not just commercial vendors - far from it. Members include open University, Stanford, Michigan, Indiana, MIT, etc. Sixth, I wrote the report and the sponsors helped make minor editorial comments. So, it is my work and I don't perceive myself as biased but then does anybody? Finally, those that have actually read the report from the higher ed open source community have so far commented that it is on target. I think if anything it is very hopeful about the future but giving statistically valid accounting of the current situtation. If at some point in the future this research track becomes well enough subsidized that I can afford to open it up to the whole world I will. That may happen under the IMS umbrella. I certainly hope so. You won't find Gartner, Eduventures, or even Educause providing as much open info on teir web sites as A-HEC has published - and we are much less funded. Thanks for your interest in this, Rob
In my experience of secondary education in the UK, the lack of support is a key issue in holding back the acceptance of FLOSS in schools. Not the kind of join-a-mailing-list-and-ask support at which most FLOSS packages excel (I find Debian especially good for that) but a different kind of support which is harder for individual package developers to put in place. From what I see, most hard-pressed teachers and heads want someone they can ring and to whom they can, essentially, say "I want to buy one of those" whilst they point to a solution that someone else is already running. The next problem for them is "if I buy that, where can I get a technician to run it?"
They don't want to roll-their-own FLOSS implemenation, they just want stuff that works and needs no wizard to keep it running.
Most schools in the UK can't even pay enough to get good *windows* support technicians, let alone get support for a GNU/Linux guru.
As more are brave enough to go ahead anyhow, the situation will ease but this is a classic symptom of a technically-led young sub-industry - infrastructure like support services will only develop when an emerging pool of early adopters grows to sufficient size.
Because of that, and because of the need for a recognised brand in this area, I have worked on solving some of those issues through Cutter which does provide a pre-packaged and commercially supported 'solution' for shools. Others will probably do so as well. Mostly it's a matter of time but nobody should really be surprised by that finding.
As a server OS, Linux is just fine. Its reliable, secure, robust, scalable and all those things a server needs to be. The desktop is another story. It's still a geek thing and just not ready for the desktop anywhere else. Sorry folks, I like using it on both myself, but it still has a long way to go before mom & pop can use it like Windows or Mac. Those who think otherwise are just fooling themseleves.
I was just remembering what I was programming/messing around with at home while in high school and college and it turns out most of it was free stuff, gleaned from BBS's and programming magazines. All of it was open and free. I came from the Commodore camp and always had a thriving SIG community. On Amiga there was a complete series of freeware and open code (can't recall the name but I think it was called Freddy Fish?) that came out every month or something like that.
So I would be taking classes and learning about Microsoft C and GW-Basic. I learned how to use DOS, Lotus 123, and all those old school 80x25/50 vid mode apps. Meanwhile at home I was coding 8502 assembler from magazine examples and learning everything about raster interupts and "cool" assembler code from euro demo groups and the coder underground. Even with the Amiga I was still using mostly free stuff.
Then I moved to the PC and had a hell of a time finding that information stream, the PC almost was exclusinvely a "money" system. You had to pay to get the apps. These days are absolutely perfect for young people who want to do more than "pwn the CS n00bs" and the OSS world is mostly to thank for that... the net being the other big player.
Many kids are online, and many kids belong to sites like myspace, various gaming forums and other SIG venues. Most kids these days online know phpbb2, mambo, etc like nobody's business. Heck I'd bet a good chunk even know MySQL and PHP just because it is so prevelant in their daily lives.
So let the kids decide! Have everyone from elementary to high school chime up about what they want, it's their education afterall. Always blows my mind how, when it comes to education, students are the last to be asked "what do you think?" when they should be the first.
There are only 10 kinds of people in the world. Those that understand binary and those that don't.
Are there any colleges not using Linux, or Apache, or OSS mail servers, DNS servers, FTP servers, etc?
When I go back to visit my old school there are labs with 50 or more linux workstations in almost every building, or every building I walk into anyway.
Think Deeply.
Funny, my wife works in a title company, and has worked a lot in mortgage companies. This means that she sees a LOT of salaries. Teachers do make a good living, and the $44k in the parent quote is right in line with what she sees on a weekly basis. This is not just for teachers that have been doing it for 15 years.
Teachers do not work 10 months a year, and the teacher that works 10 hours a day is very few and far between. (English teachers that must grade essays is likely the exception). Because of the low hours and short work year, it would be far more fair to look at teachers wages in an hourly sense. When you do that, teachers are paid VERY well.
"Are the staffing issues associated with OSS enough to outweigh the benefits?"
I don't see any innate benefit in Linux over Windows, and if you need to hire special staff to implement the Linux solution, it's more expensive. Use the right tool for the job. Quit trying to pound a square peg into a round hole because you like the square peg better.
...not make up silly excuses about the choice of platform for your IT infrastructure.
They didn't actually disable any of the "no no" services like SSH, and each of the lab's PCs had an IP address that was visible outside of the university.
It does seem off to "waste" good public IPs on lab workstations but depending on the era when things were set up that was commonplace. The workstations at my alma mater also had public IPs, but back then Internet meant Telnet, FTP, Gopher, Archie, WAIS and this new-fangled HTTP "Web" thing was the very latest news. IP addresses were in abundance and the university had a whole class B subnet to itself. Subclassing and NAT were not common practice and in fact, a lot of network applications and protocols were not designed to deal with NAT.
I've never heard SSH referred to as a "no no service". Telnet, FTP, SMTP (especially if relaying was not disabled) absolutely...but SSH is encrypted and authenticated and although not risk-free (vulnerabilities in the most common SSH implementation for example) the risk is low enough that the benefits in terms of remote access and administration are worth it (SSH tunneling through a workstation on campus was a great way to get at services that were otherwise not accessible off-campus, ao I could do my labs at home).
Open source stuff only takes a lot more time and money to implement if your IT people just don't know what they're doing.
That is a completely unsubstantiated assertion on your part. You can point to many studies that both support and refute it, depending on the situation studied and the organisation that sponsored the study. In order for your statement to be tru you'd have to modify it as follows: Computer networks only take a lot more time and money to implement if your IT people don't know what they're doing.
I am personally more comfortable with administration in a UNIX or Linux environment than I am with Windows--that is just the skillset I learned in my scholarly and profesional experience. Because of that skillset it would take me far longer to set up a Windows-baseed network that I'd be comfortable with than it would for Linux or BSD...and when it comes to Solaris or HPUX it'd be about the same, so the huge expense of licensing those systems would dwarf any possilbe extra support costs of Linux or BSD.
Basically if you're looking at a major restructuring/upgrade or a new installation and are examining open source then look at your team...if they're all MCSEs with no UNIX or Linux experience then you'll have to eat the cost of training or compare that cost with licensing costs of Windows. If your team has been administering Solaris or HPUX or SCO or whatever UNIX (as is the case with most CS and engineering departments in post-secondary institutions) then the learning curve for changing to Linux or BSD is quite shallow, and the only concern (and one that is becoming less and less relevant) is if specialised applications such as simulators, schematic capture, PLD synthesisers and so on will run on an open platform--in this day and age if they do not, there is often a very good alternative: for example, lower-level statistics labs might use Microsoft Excel, which will not run on Linux without the assistance of WINE, etc. However, GNUmeric runs in Linux and is superior to Excel in this application.
A blanket statement like "not ready for prime time" in higher education indicates to me that the study was not very well put together--there are places where it is more than ready--it is superior.
Looking around, there are quite a few projects that can be considered to be open source, or at least "community source". Have a peak at http://www.kuali.org/comsource/document_view for stories about a few examples including Sakai, Kuali, and uPortal. As these examples indicate, the author's conclusions are at least questionable or misleading.
Being an ex-teacher, and knowing well what they're paid for, and the hours that go in, let me add some things in that aren't otherwise revealed in your anecdotal research.
There are five categories of teachers: aids, those lacking masters or other needed credentials for a 'full license', fully licensed (usually with master degrees), administrators who teach, and special license teachers. In post K-12, there are part-timers, full-timers, tenured, research (e.g. non-teaching but supervisory), administrative, and a slew of small 'other' categories. They all teach, have different skills, and only the top couple of tiers make comparatively decent money.
The hours in a day are variable. Many spend ten or more if they supervise or sponsor clubs or other extra-curricular activities. They often work weekends doing the same thing, often for additional if low pay.
They get a few holidays that the rest of us don't. Most of my summers were spent teaching, or taking classes to stay up in my profession. I didn't get to slack but for a couple of weeks, which is less than my professional peers did. I got a nice holiday break in the winter; that part was good. Others in my profession, do, too.
And, I put up and dealt daily with extraordinary discipline problems, not to count the developmentally disabled and disadvantaged individuals, each with their own circumstances. It's what I was paid for. Today, the problems are more severe and the regulatory/compliance environment problems are exacerbated by parents that don't have time for their children, or let WoW or an Xbox or Family Guy babysit them while they deal with their own stressed out, post-divorce lives. Add in the sociopaths, the drug-enabled, and the litigation prone, and it's a mess. I feel for both students and teachers who are there to learn and teach. It's not easy. Yes, other professions have their stress and they're also crappier jobs, and those that are entirely thankless. But teachers and students are the next generation and embody the hopes of the current ones, and ones past. My hat is off to them, a phase that translates to my respect for their difficult job.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
It is true that projects to cover education-specific needs haven't gotten particularly far, most likely because it's a relatively specialized field that doesn't have too many developers actually in it, and open source developers working on software they aren't planning to use themselves are easily distracted.
For general stuff, projects are generally in the stage of being about as good as closed-source products, but not compellingly better. There's a lot of interest and pilot programs, but relatively little wholesale adoption. The article seems quite positive towards open source to me; it looks like people are starting to expect that open source will be the way to go before long, and this perception makes a big different in short-term direction. People will be asking vendors about Linux versions, and trying to avoid lock-in. If they're making their present plans with the idea that they won't use MS Office 2008, but instead use some version of OpenOffice at that point, they'll be making their current decisions with the migration issues in mind.
The latter one is worrying my boss. I support an OS CMS (Dokeos), OS electronic porfolio (OSPI), OS image management system (MDID) and a few others. I'm the only guy here who understands them- everything else here is Windows/IIS other than the portal. What happens when I leave? You put out an ad for "Academic technology person: Blackboard experience" and you'll get dozens of applications. Put one out for Sakai, Moodle or the even more obscure Dokeos and you'll be lucky to get one. You need to get someone who can program, who isn't afraid of unfamiliar code and who can still do the rest of the job.
Can you buy support from someone like RedHat? Sometimes, but a lot of academic stuff is pretty obscure, not used by more than a few dozen schools and highly specialized. We have support for our OSS portal (uPortal) but frankly it sucks- the latest upgrade was a nightmare, managed by paid support people who could barely understand the system. We're still trying to figure out all the details in various places because a key person left suddenly.
At least with a company you have someone to blame. It may not help (I'm fighting a commercial company with utterly worthless support and a badly broken product right now) but I can point the finger at them and say "It's their fault, not ours!"
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
But hey, this is Europe, no idea about the US.
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
"But what if we wanted to draw a higher-quality pool of candidates to teaching? Are we paying too low a price to accomplish that? I argue that the market for teaching has failed--in the sense that we are paying low salaries for low-quality teachers when we would prefer high-quality teachers. This is the result of two main flaws in the market: the difficulty of identifying who will be a good teacher and the reliance on an obsolete conception of the pool of potential teachers." For more, see Education Next.
Penny - plain text accounting
Are the staffing issues associated with OSS enough to outweigh the benefits?
Well, would you rather learn skills you can use for a lifetime, anywhere, in any computing environment; or would you rather learn how to use a proprietary product that you may or may not have access to in the future? Would you rather use and produce data using open formats that you can share with others and use in the future; or would your rather create proprietary documents that you might be completely useless in a few years?
Some math examples. If you are teaching someone how computational numerics, use GNU Octave. Or if you are trying to learn how to use a computer to do statistics, learn R. There will be no barrier whatsoever preventing you from collaborating with whomever you please. These packages are as powerful as anything out there. Your data will be as close to future proof as you can get. What's not to like?
In an educational environment, what feature could any application offer that would be more valuable than allowing you to freely use and share knowledge?
The biggest barrier to entry is that our higher educators themselves need a little education. But certainly they can appreciate the value of learning a few new things once in a while? No?
Interesting, since I work in Higher ed. Hold on while I check Protege which I use to map our enterprise. Oh, I see that over 80% of our logical servers are running Linux, either Debian, Red Hat AS or Cent OS. It appears that we are using typo 3 for our CMS. It also looks like we are using uPortal for our web portal and CAS for our Web ISO. Looks like we're using Nagios for monitoring, plus other open source projects in various areas. I also see heavy dependance and use of PostgreSQL and MySQL.
Let me check what services have given us the most trouble. Oh, I see it's our closed source applications.
But, I guess they know best. So I had better shut all of this down.
Admitadly running a school on FOSS software may be a dounting task, requiering more mere user level knowledge. Unfortunatly in many schools that's all the knowlege that is available, and the fund to hire consultants are either not available or used on lisences.
x -europe.png
lucky for all of us when there are excelent FOSS projects like Debian-Edu/Skolelinux http://www.skolelinux.org/portal/
Skolelinux is a network architecture tailored for use in schools, giving you everything you need from a single cd. And it's designed to be easy and cheap to maintain. something like K12LTSP, but provides the whole architecture. Central authentication, storage, monitoring and maintainance. And it also supports all your current windows computers so your bloodmony isn't wasted
current installations http://www.skolelinux.no/testskoler/map/skolelinu
When it comes to software used in education, shouldn't the students be part of the system? When I was in high school and college the computer systems and other specialised equipment that students used, from glassware to oscilloscopes, from sports equipment to metalworking tools, were maintained by students and staff working together.
That's what computers in education should be all about!
Now if you're talking about the administrative systems, the front- and back- office systems that the students don't have anything to do with, then that's just the old question of software in any office environment. The fact that the office is at a school is irrelevant - it comes down to the competance of your staff and your willingness and ability to cross-train people.
Okay, now that I have you w/ the subject line let me start by saying that there is a very faint point somewhere in the article. I work for a smaller private university and we quite frequently make up for shortcomings in terms of staff hours by relying on vendors for extensive support. In that respect there are probably aspects of our operation where OSS unless stellar vendor support exists would not be considered. That said, we have been using OSS for many years (way before it was "cool" to have open source software) and are quite fond of the products we use. It is probably fair to say that we couldn't do provide as many services as we do w/o OSS, because the money wouldn't be available to do so. - In reality we do what every intelligent business should do when making a software purchasing decision. We compare the benefits and downsides of the various software choices (OSS & commercial) along with what it will cost us to run each option in our environment and given our performance & reliability expectations. We've always found a good argument in one direction or another. In addition, one of the nice things about this environment is that we usually are not afraid to change if the factors change and it is viable to do so. We are actually in the process of transitionning a service from commercial to OSS simply because it is now far more viable and more cost effective to use OSS.
that the article points out is that institutions would rather purchase support than pay support staff. In the end, the people running them prefer to have a contract for blame acceptance than to have a staff to correct (or prevent) blame-forming incidents. It's a choice between Dependency and Self-reliance.
Let's take a look at Higher Education, since that's the topic at hand. Let's assume that the OS of choice, here, is Windows -- and for desktops, it probably will continue to be for some time, as you need affordable on-site Help Desk staff and such isn't widely available yet.
The point of all this is that OSS is extremely useful, and you don't have to use OSS in every single place. Often, the OSS equivalent of a non-free application will be sufficient: sometimes, it won't. But to think that all of OSS requires programmers to get working is inane: all of the above are currently in use by barely-computer-literate teachers in K-12 education and in higher ed. They installed them and use them on their own.
OSS has become so diverse that you can't pick on it as a whole, now. You have to evaluate individual applications and address their problems compared to the problems of the non-free counterparts. Anything else is just FUD.
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
At my kids' school, they use Linux in one "lab" and Windows 95 (you read that right) in another. Somebody donated a bunch of machines with 95 on them and they don't care to upgrade them. I probably don't have to tell you which lab is cheaper to run by an order of magnitude than the other.
Now, it's Win95 so that's not a fair comparison as opposed to XP. But, even so, the other arguments are bunk. The kids learn just fine using Linux, and the lab is much cheaper to run since it's all running off a central server. The individual workstations are basically crap that people have donated over the years.
Maybe it's because this school has an intelligent administrator for the computer labs. I don't know. The bottom line is that it works fine, and he doesn't have to worry about viruses and all the other joys that windows brings.
BTW: all the teachers have powerbooks. He's a Mac guy, too.
Do you have ESP?
I'm sure that's just a coincidence.
I'll agree with the summary article says about the study (I didn't read the original report). We have tried everywhere we can to implement open source solutions. They tend to stick in the datacenter, but on the desktop, there is just too much work involved in getting things to work. We have even had OSS engineers from Sun working with us on one project. We pulled the plug, because it was just too much work. We went with an Apple desktop solution, using their proprietary video player. And trust me. We had lots of hope for Sun and their OSS solution, because it would have meant fewer fat clients and our dream of a minimal management thin client alternative.
No, most OSS isn't ready, despite our high hopes for it.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Poor kid doesn't have a Grandma. Sad. I vever paid for a lunch until I was 12 or so.
Also, he's never been to Springfield with its Third Base "Sports Bar" (knifings at night there), "Home of the free lunch."
Well, free snack anyway. You DO have to buy a beer or something (buck and a quarter for a beer, free fish and french fries).
What is it about slashdot that attracts people who live by (false) cliches?
-mcgrew
PS- you don't always get what you pay for, either. You kids today...)
Cut to the heart of the matter; thanks for the insight.
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.
r 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.
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%20cla
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.
From the FWIW department:
.EDUs budget, they like deferring the cost to man hours because their own staff are overtime exempt.
I work at a small private university. We use Open Source solutions up and down the client/server tree.
Some open source solutions work better than others. The larger enterprise type stuff tends to suck the most. The smaller client-end stuff works the best.
Open source operating systems, web browsers, mail clients, office solutions, etc., are very well-supported by the developers and have a high level of quality. They probably owe this to the fact that their products are more accessible to the public and have a wider swath of contributing developers and more feedback. However, OS management solutions for helpdesk, HR, accouting, and student records or other server tend to be a bit more cumbersome to build and implement because they are more specialized and tend to have a smaller group of interested contributers and users. This tends to retard the whole process of development in general--it's just the nature of it. Much of it requires huge efforts to build, test, troubleshoot, and implement.
The trouble with this "enterprise" type stuff is that the closed source alternatives are sometimes not much better (SAP, Remedy, PeopleSoft) and they're VERY expensive. The costs for the alternative OS solutions are measured in man hours. When
I'm not saying the Open Source solutions in higher-ed are bad--it just depends. Some of the OS projects suck just like anything else. Some of the Closed Source ones are good.
It's most important to make the decision based on which is the RIGHT tool for the RIGHT job not economics.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Reading your post, it seems that a lot of that stuff could be web-based. When you develop web-based (for the most part) it doesn't matter if you're running windows of linux.
I'm sure there are not any web-based apps that do what you want, right now. I'm just thinking, that may be the way to go.
I've been tossing the idea around about selling some open source project ideas to my old high school. When it comes to the labor of installation and maintainence that usually comes with open source projects, I see this as the very REASON I would use this in class. Fixing all those little tedious bugs associated with any open source project are a great way to learn how operating systems work.
Open source too much labor for education? FUD.
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
I work in a big company. They don't get much bigger.
Yes, we have a myriad of paper work to fill, auditors to please, red tape to overcome.
But I worked in a University and in a research Insitute as well as systems administrator.
What you are saying is pure ballooney.
Where I work we are exposed to most modern technologies in the IT field.
We work with humble machines like old Sun workstations to the bigest and baddest machines that they are producing from non supported versions of Solaris to Solaris 10. We get a direct line with people *writting* Solaris to fix our problems.
Linux then? What about Red Hat. We are introducing massive amounts of Linux machines including technologies that one would associate only with Google. The machines we use in the x86 arena are many and varied, using Linux, and several incarnations of WIndows.
We use Java, C, C++, C#, Perl, you name it.
And I could carry on.
From a technological point of view my jobs in the educational sector did not even touch the borders of what is done in any company with a biggish infrastructure.
For bunnies sakes, in the eductaional sector we screwed up guys doing calculations that lasted several days because we could not afford fault tolerant systems (and when I say system here I am not refering to a computer). In the private sector it is literally mandatory to design fault tolerance into any systems you make operational. The technical challenges are immensily more complicated for the simple fact that there is more money at stake in the private sector.
I am sure there are very good jobs out there in the educational sector, but I can bet my house against a dime that most guys that started in the educational sector will find hard to move to the private sector because their skill will be more streteched, while the move the other way around tends to be immmensily easier because people in the private sector learn many varied skills (including management and people skills, not often used much in the educational environment).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
So that you know, I was specifically talking about K-12. Although, I suspect that your listing of all the different 'classes' of teachers was to confuse the issue.
"The hours in a day are variable. Many spend ten or more if they supervise or sponsor clubs or other extra-curricular activities. They often work weekends doing the same thing, often for additional if low pay."
Listen to you. You are claiming that when you volunteer, it is somehow your job. You know what? Lots of people are volunteer for lost of good causes. That comment is pure whine, and show a compleat lack of honesty in teachers compensations.
"They get a few holidays that the rest of us don't. Most of my summers were spent teaching, or taking classes to stay up in my profession. I didn't get to slack but for a couple of weeks, which is less than my professional peers did. I got a nice holiday break in the winter; that part was good. Others in my profession, do, too."
I call complete BS. The teaching profession does not change THAT much from year to year. If you teach during summer, you get paid more, yet that isn't counted when teachers start complaining about their "yearly salaries". I have known plenty of teachers that simply did not work during the summer. While I will give a brand new teacher the benefit of the doubt that they have to work all summer to prepare for the next year, after a few years, if you have not gotten a general plan down that works with only minor tweaking, then perhaps you are the problem, not the pay.
"But teachers and students are the next generation and embody the hopes of the current ones, and ones past."
And there is the great half truth. If every person who preformed a perticular profession disappeared, public education teachers would be WAY down the list. Just some professions that are more important:
It amazes me how self rightous teachers can be. They think they are the beginning and the end of civilization. The fact is that most people do not use their public education beyond basic reading, and 4th grade math. Add to that the fact that a huge portion of the population really doesn't get much more of an education than that anyway, irregardless of how many years they actually attend.
To tell you the truth, all the claims about how 'teachers are shaping our youth', so they should be put on a pedestal, comes off more like a threat than anything else.
The Alliance for Higher Education what, now?
I work in higher education, and we mostly prefer to focus on doing what we do really, really well rather than maximizing market share willy-nilly. (There are some exceptions, of course; pointy-haired bosses seem to insinuate themselves into any management structure.)
These people aren't talking like educators or researchers, they're talking like corporatists. I smell a vendor shill.
It is a woman's prerogative to change other people's minds.
Some people think that's a problem--I think it's an advantage. My college is 9 years into its open source 'experiment,' predicated on the premise that a technical environment would attract and retain high quality people, even at a small school with modest salaries. After 9 years, I've got my strongest IT team ever, and the environment is largely based on OSS technologies. Coincidence? I doubt it. BTW, is Windows ready for primetime?
IT Director
This article at LXer.com shows quite nicely where the problems with OSS lies. Read
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http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/54009/index.
As long as OSS doesn't conform to a single set of guidelines it won't be ready for anything and it's time to start to discuss which guidelines should be standardized. It might not be the ones stated in the article but this standardisation is essential for the success of OSS.
It seems this study isn't fully accessable, is there a free link anywhere? I'm most interested in any information about the state of OpenSource und would like to get as many links to infos as possible.
See also http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html
O. Wyss
See http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html
From one of the 27 Moodle partners:
Moodle.com
If you want to do development, then you'll need to hire someone who understands the code, but Moodle runs 'out of the box' if you have someone who knows how to set up a webserver (most of the problems on the Moodle "Installation problems" forum are from folks who don't know how to set up Apache/IIS).
As an aside note, we've gone through two searchs for Blackboard Administrators where I work, neither time did we find someone with BB Admin experience in the search.