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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?
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.
Ofcourse there are no free lunches.
:)
imho they have 2 options
1) choose a packaged software from a company, pay for it's licence and the support sums later
2) choose oss and hire a developer
i'm for option 2, because unlike the licence&support, it starts to change the software in the direction that you really need to, instead of what a salesman of ZYX-gamma company in mind when he first wrote the whitepaper.
there is no real black and white on this issue, sometimes you have to be compatible with others, then you go for 1, sometimes you want to get specific stuff, then better go for 2
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
It might be great to get bug fixes in a matter of hours but no sys admin in there right mind should apply patches that are untested unless they don't mind having hoards of users after wanting to kill them. Vendor patches from Microsoft and OSS companies take longer to be released since they have to guarantee it won't break anything. Compagnies like the safaty of having someone to blame if stuff goes to hell.
I'm a big advocate of OSS and all but applying random patches is just careless and stupid. At least wait until you distro releases it themselves. (Supposing you have a decent distro)
Nic
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.
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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.
exactly what I was thinking too. Not only did I see this report as a sign that OSS was gaining in ED, but also a sign that we should start seeing the schools with good CS departments start building their own software in the near future. And sharing it with the other schools too. There's no competition between schools with regard to who has the better online bookstore, online admission system, etc. Sharing these tools allows each location to spend more on actual education and phyical infrastructure.
OSS can also create something more than 'busy work' for the Junior/Senior/MBA/Doc students while providing them with potential jobs at the Universities later. If Carnegie Mellon built a kick butt online admission system on LAMP, others would/could/should use it and all of a sudden, CM students are experts in this and can become the support structure for the other schools.
In the same sense, I think our local, state, federal governments should be doing the same thing. How silly is it that one cities building permit system is not openly shared with other cities? Proprietary software does not allow this and each city must pay out the nose for custom applications which they'll be told has to be rewritten every 5 years or so...
25% already using OSS and more than another 50% considering it is a big win IMO. The tipping point is getting close.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
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.
What does that leave, exactly?
Or, I could just, you know, decide for myself what is right, based on my experiences and readings, and believe in reality, rather than thousands of year old mythologies because hank told me to.
Or have you only comfort...that stealthy thing that enters the house and guest then becomes host, then master - KG
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!"
It might be great to get bug fixes in a matter of hours but no sys admin in there right mind should apply patches that are untested unless they don't mind having hoards of users after wanting to kill them. Vendor patches from Microsoft and OSS companies take longer to be released since they have to guarantee it won't break anything.
If there is a critical bug preventing me or my users from getting something done, sometime it is worth the risk to apply "untested" patches. Also, a lot of the wait time in getting patches from vendors is NOT due to testing. It is due to company priorities. If you are experiencing a bug that isn't affecting most other users, you're often SOL until the next service pack. And you may not even get the patch then.
Of course, this depends on the size of the company and your relative importance to them. I've personally worked directly with engineers to get a fix for proprietary software and I had a custom build/patch sent to me. But this is rare. To a company like MS, you're an ant.
Compagnies like the safaty of having someone to blame if stuff goes to hell.
This is a tired, stupid argument. Having someone to blame does absolutely nothing but appease the egos of incompetent management and staff. In the end, the stuff has gone to hell. ANd no amount of blame can change that.
I'm a big advocate of OSS and all but applying random patches is just careless and stupid.
Of course applying "random" patches is careless and stupid. But we're not talking about "random" patches. We're talking about specific patches that will solve a specific existing problem. One great thing about OSS is that often (if you have the skill) you don't even need to wait for ANYONE to supply a patch. I can't tell you how many times I have actually gone into the code myself and fixed a problem or added a minor feature. You just can't do this with most proprietary software. If something goes to hell, I'll gladly take the blame. If something goes wrong, I'd much rather it be my fault. That way I am much more able to make it right again.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death