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Real Open Source Applications for Education?
openeducation writes "I have been researching open source solutions for K-12 education pretty heavily for the past year and have been disappointed to find no real alternatives to the large administrative applications like student information systems, data warehouse, ERP, etc. But recently, I ran across Open Solutions for Education. This group appears to be making a serious effort at creating a stack of open source applications that are alternatives to the large and costly commercial packages. Centre, an open source student information system that has been around for a while, is part of the solution stack. They have a data warehouse and are proposing an open source SIF alternative and an assessment solution. While the proof is in the pudding, these guys have working demos and they look pretty good for a first run. K-12 education is in dire financial straits and solutions like these could help with lower TCO. Plus, education is a collaborative industry already, which makes it a good fit for open source."
Why are computers, student information systems, and open source required for K-12 education?
Looking forward to seeing this take off. My Uni. uses WebCT which everyone seems to absolutely hate. We're a "paperless campus" too so we're forced to use that damn thing. In the long run we need open standards in schools across the board. Not one of my professors knows what an .odt document is let alone OpenOffice. So adding to tuition and living costs, in order to get an education I need to pay the Microsoft tax or risk subtle inconsistencies in my .doc files from OpenOffice or other text editor exporting to Word format.
The best place in the world for open source and open formats is in education. They level the playing field, but only when implimented correctly.
Plus, education is a collaborative industry already, which makes it a good fit for open source.
While higher level educations may poke around with the source code and contribute, I would say that in general open source doesn't have any special appeal for K-12. Most teachers are more concerned with getting their students to pass the next state/national test, writing lesson plans, wrangling parents and students, and generally doing education to worry about the software behind it all. They just need the software to work (TM). Open sauce may be cheaper, but in the end the districts will get what they need to educate not what will "stick it to the man" or whatever.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Did you try this Sakai and Moodle? Though Sakai is developed by universities, it should be adoptable to schools. Likewise Moodle is also a maturing project with various features being builtin.
http://edubuntu.org/
There are lots of available applications that are tailored to the individual school level, especially for small and medium size schools. This is an excellent fit for private schools, parochial schools and probably even charter schools. For example, I have been evaluating Open Administration for Schools for a local Christian school. It seems like it will be a good fit.
Now, if you are talking about software to help run an entire school district, that is a different story. In such a case, you are talking about thousands or tens of thousands of students, and probably hundreds or thousands of computers and other inventory to track. I would say that you have your work cut out for you. There have been some attempts at developing open source free/Free ERP tools. However, the market for ERP solutions is much smaller (far fewer large organizations than small and medium organizations, be they schools or otherwise). So, in the same way that you will have trouble finding open source manufacturing control software, you will have trouble finding open source software that is targeted at large organizations. It is not impossible. But as it appears you have found, it can be a daunting challenge.
I speak for everyone.
The book industry is a huge SCAM.
Writing open english,math,science and more advanced books would help the pocketbook and make education more affordable.
Hell,there are cheaper books at Barnes and Noble & Borders than the bookscams pushed by the schools.
According to the US Department of Education, total money spent on K-12 schooling annually in the USA has risen from US$248.9 billion in 1990 to US$536 billion in 2005. How can an enormous industry (which is what K-12 schooling is) with a huge influential union be in dire straits when often is the main source of jobs in rural areas?
m l
l etterid=21&articleid=195
As pointed out in this article (based on a recent bipartisan study):
"To fix US schools, panel says, start over"
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.ht
for all the money (and technology) increased over that time per student, test scores (for what they are worth) have remained flat.
The problem with most K-12 schooling is not money (or technology); it is that K-12 schooling is actually very good at doing what it was designed to do (see for example John Taylor Gatto's writings).
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher"
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
Unfortunately what compulsory schooling was designed to do one hundred years or more ago (make people into compliant assembly line workers) is not really what an information age society needs anymore.
That's why efforts like by the Shuttleworth Foundation
http://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/
to make some of the sort of software you are asking about for schools is misguided IMHO. You can't fix a bad process producing undesireable outcomes by automating it or reducing its cost. You need to change it entirely.
Here is one of many groups devoted to rethinking education:
"The Alternative Education Resource Organization"
http://www.educationrevolution.org/
And a related article by the leader of that organization:
"Sustainable Education "
http://www.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?news
He writes: "Nevertheless, there is an education revolution going on, and it is long overdue. It is moving in the diametrically opposite direction of the "testing" push. The latter comes from the bureaucrats from within that dying system, who do know there is something wrong. But since they can't think "out of the box," the only remedy they can come up with is longer hours, more homework, and "teaching to the test," in other words, more of the same. The education revolution is coming from people who have created alternative schools and programs, thousands of them, and from others who have checked "none of the above" and have decided to home educate."
Once you make the leap to a new process for education (primarily learner self-direction) *then* we can talk about what software makes sense to support the learner (like educational simulations, design tools, plain old access to the web, edubuntu,
http://www.edubuntu.org/
and so on).
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
It is not a foregone conclusion that any particular school board will have an up-to-date database. Our local school board can not provide information that would be easy to get if its database worked properly. Of course, then people would be able to check up on them to see if they are doing what they should be doing. In particular, I am thinking about information about special needs students. They get a grant for each special needs student but they can't account for how the grant is spent. Their system seems to be almost entirely paper based. Of course if they are trying to obfuscate the facts then a decent database would be counterproductive.
BTW, I'm guessing that our local board is not a rarity.
Claroline is one of the best CMS solutions for schools that I have seen, even when compared to commercial alternatives. It can be accessed at:
http://www.claroline.net/
"K-12 education is in dire financial straits and solutions like these could help with lower TCO. Plus, education is a collaborative industry already, which makes it a good fit for open source.""
Hmmm. interesting. Contrast the "let's help education" attitude displayed above with the current slashdot "school is just a subversive control by the man", "churn out mass-production consumers".
I work in higher ed. I don't know whether the things we use apply to K-12, but I would think they might. In addition to Sakai and Moodle, which have already been mentioned, there is a project for open source administrative systems, called Kuali. See http://kuali.org/
While our company is not educational, we have talked to a few school districts around Washington about tinyERP. Take a look at it, its based on python, has a very small core, and is easily modular. http://www.tinyerp.org/
There is good info in this post.
Link for the above mentioned US DOE statistics on total K-12 spending:x .htmlt e-chart.html#2
h ool_system_needs_revolution_not_evolu
h nologyHasFailedSchools.html
http://www.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/inde
The specific chart:
http://www.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/edli
And a related essay by someone else also commenting on Shuttleworth Foundation's SchoolTool project:
"School system needs revolution, not evolution"
http://ninjamonkeys.co.za/index.php/2005/03/07/sc
From that essay: "The Shuttleworth Foundation has been investing a lot of money in school administration and computer labs. Both of these projects are worthwhile efforts. The former allowing teachers to spend less time administrating and more time teaching, and the latter allowing kids to get involved in computers which are a critical aspect of nearly every high paying job today. But more money needs to be invested in creating engaging learning materials and in creating an environment to help students learn real life skills."
The direct link to SchoolTool itself:
http://www.schooltool.org/
A related essay by me on this topic:
"Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools"
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTec
From there: "Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Northwestern University recently upgraded their web email client from the unpopular Emumail to the open source Internet Messaging Program. Unfortunately the servers crashed on the first day of service and NUIT was forced to switch back.
I don't know if it was because of bad server administration or bad software, but I feel bad for the people who stuck their heads out to try an open source solution. They got publicly embarrassed when they messed up, but they did The Right Thing.
This is the worst fucking idea I have ever heard!
"Why are computers, student information systems, and open source required for K-12 education?"
If technology can fix healthcare, then it can fix education.
The saying is "the proof of the pudding is in the eating." The OP's (commonly mistaken) version makes no sense.
The TCO benefits of open-source are obvious, but only if wielded by the right hands, TANSTAFL!
1) Define better what you want to accomplish. (Objective, benefits, expectations)
2) Define better your resources. (Budget, Team, Time)
3) Define better your school. (Size, budget, number of students, teachers)
4) Draft a one-page document with this information, roll it up and use it to play whack-a-mole with local bean-counters.
5) Come back for more.
The openness of your source should be the least of your worries.
According to the figures in the report mentioned here:m l
x .html
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.ht
with an executive summary here:
http://www.skillscommission.org/executive.htm
here in 2002 dollars is the cost per student in the USA:
Year Cost Fourth Grade Reading Scores
1984 $5400 211
1988 $6100 212
1992 $6800 211
1996 $6950 213
1999 $7300 212
2002 $8977 217
Again from the DOE:
http://www.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/inde
"Total education funding has increased substantially in recent years at all levels of government, even when accounting for enrollment increases and inflation. By the end of the 2004-05 school year, national K-12 education spending will have increased an estimated 105 percent since 1991-92; 58 percent since 1996-97; and 40 percent since 1998-99. On a per-pupil basis and adjusted for inflation, public school funding increased: 24 percent from 1991-92 through 2001-02 (the last year for which such data are available); 19 percent from 1996-97 through 2001-02; and 10 percent from 1998-99 through 2001-02."
Those figures don't quite agree with the ones you list -- the DOE claims 24% increase adjusted for inflation and enrollment in public schools over that time period. I'm not sure where the difference is (perhaps more money spent in private schools?)
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Once you get to the size of school district that you need a PhD to be a leader or decision maker, all you get are a bunch of incestuous ninnies that have no guts to buck the latest fad. I've been there, I've worked with these boneheads.
Add to that all the No Child Allowed To Get Ahead crap... the NCLB is just the latest trend in class warfare. It backs public schools into a corner with impossible to meet requirements. It's like expecting pole vaulters to keep clearing the bar no matter how high up you move it. But the invevitable "failures" will lead to School Vouchers.
I hope everyone realizes that School Vouchers won't allow anyone to attend better schools, it will just allow the already wealthy enough class to get subsidies for the private schools they already attend. Then the middle and lower classes will see their education system really go to shit. The corporations will come in licking their chops, and pretty soon all the poor people will learn is to drink Coke and eat at McDonalds.
You think education is expensive? Try ignorance...
All pass beyond reach of medicine. None pass beyond the reach of love.
Ditto to the recommendation on John Taylor Gatto's writings. The first time I read his stuff, I thought this guy is just blowing hot air. Who can blame him: he was in the NYC schooling system for 30 years. But, the more time I've spent in the system myself, I keep coming back to the realization that he's right. Modern schooling in the States is foundamentally flawed. And he does a pretty good job in his writings explaining how the system has come to be, although admittedly, he doesn't formally document his claims, but I've found they're mostly verifiable. He's done a lot of research solid for his books.
So, if you're a student, a teacher, a parent, or you just have nagging subversive feeling about compulsory schooling, just read Gatto's 7 Lesson School Teacher.
So you "ran across" this organization and happened to end up with an alias of "openeducation"? At least you could say that you work for them, are a member of their team, or just wanted to help people know about you. Additionally, I'm surprised at the proposition. Who is going to support the mission-critical student information system when it is open sourced? What happens when the state requires new forms to be utilized? What programmers are guaranteed to create them on schedule? This is like telling k12 institutions that free always = better. There are already enough bad decisions in education because of FOSS being perceived as the magical silver bullet to every woe we (I work for k12 as a technology director), collectively have. I agree with the other posts that education needs to be scrapped and started over now that we are out of the industrial revolution. Books are also a total drain on resources as they keep making the books larger with more and more white space in the margins so they can charge more.
OK, 30 years in the NYC school system. Now how does that translate to the entire school system? Also how would that translate to a comparison to foreign school systems?
Not saying you're wrong, but I figured there wouldn't be a huge market on say, Lie Algebras and Representation Theory, whereas Harry Potter, a book nearly every literate kid wants sells for a more reasonable price. I have no grasp on the economics of this situation.
I'm not sure if you are looking for a pure administrative system or an educational one. If the latter then I can thoroughly recommend Moodle. It is one of the few times where I have seen a community OpenSource project wipe the floor with "professional" products (both OpenSource and commercial).
It is dead easy to set up (PHP and MySQL based) and VERY easy to get started with. I use it for all the courses (University level) which I teach and the students seem to greatly prefer it over the central admin's WebCT service.
If you want the real story of why math and science teaching in the USA is so bad, see this about the collapse of the exponentially growing PhD pyramid scheme starting in the 1970s: .132.html
"The Big Crunch"
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
and also more by the same author (Dr. David Goodstein) here:
"Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates"
http://www.scienceboard.net/community/perspectives
From that second link: "I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned, cut and polished they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result."
What good does it do to make teachers happy with their salaries if the system they work in is fundamentally broken for todays' needs? You can even have both happy teachers and happy students -- but does that mean kids are learning and growing in good ways? An example of this is when teachers become entertainers, essentially feeding students the intellectual equivalent of candy all day, but everyone is happy (at least as long as the party lasts). Now, this is very different from the "hard fun"
http://www.papert.org/articles/HardFun.html
John Holt, Seymour Papert, and others talk about (e.g. learning to play the piano well, or to build a complex robot like encouraged by Dean Kamen's FIRST programs http://www.usfirst.org/ ) and which children generally must choose for themselves to pursue if they are to get much out of it beyond misery.
Also, consider this Libertarian-oriented article on schooling:
"Enterprising Education: Doing Away with the Public School System"
http://www.mises.org/story/2216
"All the arguments in favor of a public provision of primary education prove to be unfounded and/or incorrect. The failure of the state to provide a high quality service to all (its explicit goal) has rendered public primary education illegitimate; and the immeasurable waste of resources and rejection of consumer desires has left public education borderline immoral. As well, if an educated citizenry is to be considered necessary for the operation of the republican government, then it is an inexcusable conflict of interest when elected officials are the ones in charge of providing that education. Furthermore, the argument of externalities and nonexcludability fails to buttress the case for socialist education. The only ethical, reasonable system for the provision of primary education is the fr
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
My last uni had a local book exchange site for students and I absolutely loved it! I think every school should have one but I'm not going to hold my breath since schools themselves profit from this scam.
Here's a link to the software: http://bookexchange.sourceforge.net/
DrupalEd is a new distribution of the Drupal CMS. While I haven't used it in an educational environment, I have at one time or another used all of the contributed modules included in it. Installing DrupalEd -- as opposed to installing the Drupal base and then all of the contributed modules -- saves somewhere between 10-30 hours, depending on the skill of the person installing it.
Drupal can be made to do just about anything you want, so adding more functionality like ERP, PubCookie, LDAP integration, etc. isn't a problem. CiviCRM is, in my opinion, a must-have for most organizations and small- to mid-sized businesses.
A discussion about DrupalEd's release and what it's all about can be found in the Drupal forums and at the DrupalEd working group. More about distributions and install profiles can be found at the Distribution profiles group.
http://en.wikiversity.org/ is a possibility...
Analogously, Slashdot could be seen as being a little like a website for other cultural groups using the tag line - "New
http://www.schooltool.org/ The project is funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation and consists of administation infrastructure, student information system and skills tracking programs. It's built on Zope3 and is part of the Ubuntu distribution (comes bundled with the Edubuntu variant by default). Very well built and well conceived software. It's getting more attention in Europe right now, but there are plenty of US users. I think the skills assessment part was built for Virginia schools.
Unfortunately, pure numbers don't tell the whole story. Just because there's been an increase in spending per pupil (even adjusted for inflation) doesn't mean much. The cost of "doing business" for schools has increase, largely in the form of regulation and compliance. My understanding (though I have no data) is that compliance costs have far exceeded the increase in funding, which amounts to a decrease in money spent on actually educating the child.
Further, consider the costs involved with building new schools to house the ever increasing ranks of children. The skyrocketing costs of textbooks (far beyond inflation), etc.. Most schools these days are stuffed to over-capacity. I know my local high school has several thousand more students than the school was built to support, but it will be several years before a new school is built to accomodate that (the process has started, but for now they're having to jam more students into the same classrooms). On the bright side, teachers are still largely living below the poverty level (yes, that's sarcasm).
I agree with you about a lot of things. One of the problems is that schools don't know how to teach children that don't fit the mold. So called "advanced" classes are modeled more after harder workers than they are on fast learners. At least US schools don't beat creativity out of their students like other countries, such as Japan.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
I've worked as an engineer on a number of the "costly commerical packages" the submitter alludes to. I've followed the open source alternatives over the years. I'd love to see a competitive open source solution and would gladly develop free software instead if it could pay the bills, but if you are a technology decision maker in your district I would encourage you to still go through the bidding process, and yes, solicit a bid from this Open Solutions for Education group as well.
When you sit down and compare the value you are getting, I think you will be surprised how favorably the commercial solutions compare.
The top 3 considerations will probably be support, services, and state reporting.
The largest cost in many of these packages is the services and support component. In this respect, open source or not is largely irrelevant unless you are planning to do support and services in house. But that means supporting a product that you have limited training on, and have very limited familiarity with the codebase of. And unless you plan on doing 1st tier support on up personally, you'll be hiring additional people on staff. Add their salaries into the bid.
If you'll be relying on the vendor, they you have a different set of questions. What kind of response level does the open source provider guarantee? Do they have the staffing and budget to fly technicians and trainers out same day or next day? Can they provide the level of support your district needs? Remember, if the system inexplicably goes down printing report cards the night before parent teacher conferences, the school board isn't going to let you off the hook because you saved a few bucks by going open source.
The other place you are likely to be burned is State Reporting. The reporting requirements in many states are so elaborate that it is only by economies of scale that a vendor can afford to provide and support compliant implementations. The complexity of these requirements are increasing as the state and federal governments want information in more detail, and the requirements change every year. Does this open source provider even have an implementation for state reporting in your state? Does it satisfy the data privacy regulations of your state? Does it support the internal data auditing requirements of your state? Will your auditor agree?
And if it doesn't have a state reporting implementation for your state, how much value does it really provide you, and how will it need to integrate into your existing process in terms of export and import?
If I were starting a student information system from scratch like a lot of these open source solutions are trying to do, I would start in a single state with modest state reporting requirements and target small schools. The customization needs you are going to start seeing even in 5000 student districts will quickly leave you in need of a large services and support organization (or business partners to provide the same), only you won't benefit from the economies of scale the established vendors do. "We'll offer the same product and services as big vendor X, only we'll do it for less!" is generally a non-starter as a business plan. Probably you are going to be looking either to be bought out by one of these established vendors (not a good strategy in the current market), or targeting a niche market, such as sub-5000 student districts, or even sub-1000 student districts.
For most IT projects Open Source projects can be more expensive than their equivliant out of the box vendor specific solutions. But.... The benifits are an increased level of compentancy of your IT staff (assuming you actually give them time to roll the software and train on it). And the one thing upper managment never likes to think of...an exit strategy (most open source projects are standards compliant) so you can get your information out when in a few years a better solution comes up that might be from a different vendor. Of course just try and get managment to buy into that.....
Nothing out there that suits you? Write it.
Then share it.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I've had a lot of trouble getting educational-but-fun apps for my kids. They often crash or want you to set the monitor in a very specific way (and set it back when done). The vendors act as if its the only app you will ever want or need. There is only one brand I've found that works reasonably well, but even it does odd things to the monitor settings.
Table-ized A.I.
Squeak Smalltalk http://www.squeakland.org/ and http://www.squeak.org/ are open source educational tools for K-12. eToys is in the One LapTop Per Child. It's in there because it's an open source educational tool.
I work for a small K-12 district in British Colombia, Canada. We use Linux for all of our servers (natch), and we have either created in-house, or modified slightly, pretty much everything we need. We do all of our user account admin through one system that takes care of email accounts, proxy accounts, samba directories, groups management, and so on. We have also made our own systems for proxy control (teachers can create their own groups of students or computers on the fly and allow or deny network privileges as needed); we run a multi-user install of Word press that gives every account holder their own blog(s); and we are in the process of rolling out a Moodle install that will be a large gear in our distance learning machine. There's probably more (oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention Koha, the library software), but I'm not the programmer! As for student information systems, we didn't have to make our own because our province has gone with a "universal" solution (AAL's Electronic Student Information System), which actually sucks quite bad. Really bad. But we didn't have a lot of choice in that matter, really. Hopefully the manufacturer can fix it so it works like a real application should. Feel free to contact me if you're interested in any of that stuff (we give it away, too!), at my throwaway email address: k12oss@worldsbiggestliar.com
"Apparatus dignosco occultus, satis non supernus."
Knew I'd forget something! We also developed our own system for asset tracking, which is part of our static DHCP control (we input every networked device either by scanning its barcode (in the case of our Mac products, at least) or by inputting it manually, and it gets assigned to the appropriate dhcp table for its location (or locations, in the case of roaming equipment). We also have a system for reporting trouble tickets or requesting assistance with a tech-related issue.
"Apparatus dignosco occultus, satis non supernus."
Did you run across EduForge?
http://eduforge.org/
Something in there might meet your needs.
At the TLt school and library techs IT Summit in Saskatoon last week, I picked up a free Software for Starving Students CD full of OSS goodies.
http://softwarefor.org/
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
(Sidetrack). There is an absolutely magnificient program for doing this that is used in the development of the GPL.
i me_editor
It is for text that will have every letter picked over by hundreds of different people, and I don't think it is the right tool for two people producing a document. Link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_real-t
Like hell it is. Educational expenditures have never been higher, even on a per-capita basis. We spend more on education than almost any other country, and get less for our money than almost any other country.
What's more, the school districts that spend the most, like the District of Columbia, tend to be the shittiest at actually educating their inmates.
This country needs to spend less, not more, on our schools.
We need to get rid of bloated administrative overhead.
We need to increase class size, get rid of computers and other distracting frippery in the classroom, and jettison all attempts at building "self-esteem" among little delinquents who don't deserve a particle of it. Let them earn self-respect on their own, through hard work with plenty of drills and rote memorization.
We need to bring back paddling, dunce caps, and shame.
We need to abandon "mainstreaming". Students with severe behavioral problems are causing terrible disruption of classes. They belong in segregated classes and schools. Tough shit for them, but they can't be permitted to ruin the whole educational experience for everyone else. No more social promotions, either. Either pass the requirements, repeat the year, or get the fuck on with your life of digging ditches.
We need to break up the cartel that controls education. Someone with a degree in math or business is far more qualified than the dregs and losers and nitwits that the typical College of Education churns out. He shouldn't have to sit through months of educrat babble and bilge in order to teach in a school. Teacher licensing is nothing more than rent-seeking and featherbedding and guild-gilding. Tenure should be totally abolished. Vouchers should be implemented nationwide. Worthless teachers and administrators should be hounded out of the profession. Worthless schools should be boarded up.
Most of all, we have to CRUSH the teacher's unions. These lazy, stupid, greedy lard asses put the education of our kids about tenth on their list of priorities, far behind fattening their bloated salaries, gold-plating their lavish pensions, padding the length of their 3-month summer vacations, salting the calendar with "inservice" junkets, diverting public money to shiftless in-laws and mobbed-up vendors and left-wing non-profits, and working the phone banks for whichever Democrat makes the most promises to shovel even more taxpayers' money onto the gravy train.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
A truly visionary project that might change education on a global scale. If they succeed, the XO-computer and/or Sugar will be as natural in the learning process as books, pen and paper are today. I realy belive it is the way to go in education. It is open source and much much more. Check out: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/41?gcli d=CK7El-aP4IsCFSayEAodJSKiYA , http://wiki.laptop.org/ and http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Human_Interface_Gui delines
Education is an industry that cares about TCO? What's next, a principal getting fired by the board because he puts student education over shareholder value? The curriculum being reduced to stuff not relying on resources like books and experiments because cheaper teaching = higher ROI? Seriously, when education is being seen as an industry that's a sign of seriously screwed up values.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
'The largest cost in many of these packages is the services and support component'
..
..
..
..
support fud
'Do they have the staffing and budget to fly technicians and trainers out same day or next day?'
support fud
'The reporting requirements in many states are so elaborate that it is only by economies of scale that a vendor can afford to provide and support compliant implementations'
compliance fud
Sounds to me like that was written by a lawyer rather then a software 'engineer'
was Re:As a "costly commercial package" engineer... (Score:2)
davecb5620@gmail.com
'Open Source projects can be more expensive than their equivliant out of the box vendor specific solutions .. assuming you actually give them time to roll the software and train on it'
This is how most people use Open Source. Decide on a particular distro and sign a support contract. Any problems are dealt with upstream, by the software developers themselves. They are interested in bug reports but that is the sum total involvment of your IT staff in rolling software.
Open Source is about control of your IT and independence from vendors as well as reduced TCO, up to 90% according to the French DGI.
'it allows us to cut our software costs We are trying to evaluate the software TCO implied by our policy. It's probably a bit more than an overall factor of 10'
'Companies with at least 2,000 employees can reduce their total cost of ownership (TCO) by as much as 26 percent over three years by using Linux servers over Windows'
was Reply to: Open Source != Lower TCO
davecb5620@gmail.com
tl;dr
Glad to see interest in education on /. Don't forget about http://schoolforge.net./ A careful and highly skilled group working on both software and texts. We are the coalition of groups interested in FLOSS and Education and our membership is international. Here are the apps I currently see as the stack:
Server-based:
* Open Admin for Schools by Les Richardson in Canada, http://richtech.ca/ (mentioned by someone else, too.)
* KOHA, http://koha.org/, the Library OPAC/ILS from New Zealand
* Manhattan, http://manhattan.sourceforge.net/, the WebCT alternative which is a lot easier than Moodle from New England (in the U.S.)
* Moodle if you like the blog look instead.
* http://atutor.ca/ -- Just great.
We also recommend IMP/Horde and Drupal. Can't go wrong.
I recommend schools use Debian on the server and Edubuntu on the desktop. The latter comes with a great start on what you need in the classroom, including TuxPaint, TuxMath, Open Office, The GIMP, Firefox, etc. The great thing about it is that you can choose whether to set it up as a thin client or a stand-alone box and updating is easy using apt-get.
Joining Schoolforge is something anyone really interested in FLOSS/education can do to help.
--
http://iteachnet.org/
I have seen a lot of people who mention systems like Moodle, Sakai, Atutor and alike (Blackboard/WebCT alternatives). I would like to add Dokeos to this list: http://www.dokeos.com/. Dokeos has only just released its 1.8 version which can include a videoconferencing module besides all the other 'classic' course management modules.
My university uses a self-built open source system, fenix to manage several thousand students. It's heavy and complex to install and configure, but it's great for the users. It's used in other universities and also powers our public site.
Why should a young child have to lug those heavy books around? Why waste the paper?
While I love open source software and their are many mature offerings out there, the school district has to be able to maintain and use that open source software. Remember that while the school districts are scrapping by for textbooks, teacher salary, and even toilet paper, finding talented IT personel is few and far between. Having worked for a large district and a small district, I can tell you that the good "techs" don't stick around long. So you usually end up with the not so talented people sticking around and not being able to upgrade/install/backup al of this open source software. So what happens? You end up with third-party, closed software with a support plan. Could open source save lots of money? Yes, but only with the right staff and pay to support it.
Check it out...
"SchoolForge's mission is to unify independent organizations that advocate, use, and develop open resources for primary and secondary education. SchoolForge is intended to empower member organizations to make open educational resources more effective, efficient, and ubiquitous by enhancing communication, sharing resources, and increasing the transparency of development. SchoolForge members advocate the use of open source and free software, open texts and lessons, and open curricula for the advancement of education and the betterment of humankind."
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
...are you saying that everyone is not entitled to a free and appropriate educaton? The law says everyone must attend school through age 16. Up to that point, you get what everyone else get. Afterwards, usually 11th grade or so, you get to decide if you want a HS diploma or you can drop out. Why complicate things by trying to decide who should get more eduation or less education before society and teh realities of life in America force students and families to self-select thier educatyional options.
It sounds like you have a bone to pick with education, and have taken the outsiders usual strategy for dealing with it, which is only educate the smart and the willing. No one will agree to lettings 8yr olds run wild in the streets to quit school to work, but we are perfectly happy to throw a 17yr old to the wolves. Funny enogh though is that he students commonly thrown to the wolves (wolves meaning McDonalds, jail, drugs, the street, gangs, Walmart, etc) are the students who are the least docile, who require extra support to meet teir needs, or who just through happenstance have a serious probelm occur in thier lives (most often beyond thier control). As a society we need to decide that we are serious abot educating our youth, and then commit to doing so equally.
Your comment seems to me to say that you are not committed to educating all children fairly and appropriatly, and that's fine. Justremember that they will need much mroe *help* from the government in the form of voluntary and involuntary services as they and thier offspring grow older. it's much cheaper to educate them now so that they can be self supporting full citizens as oppossed to the marginalized that we all seem to complain about so much.
Mod me up: Troll
Heybiff
Even the Sun goes down.
Sites that are adopting the notion of education through collaboration are becoming pretty popular. I've seen several pop up the past couple of months, but one of the first ones has always been We the Teachers. Many of the sites out there seem to be pushing resources and a wiki-approach, but this one has always been focused on building community around resources. You can't have education without community, otherwise people have little motivation to participate.
I work in educational technology and use an open source SIS solution called Focus/SIS. Focus is a fork of Centre created when the miller group (the same ones who started the site mentioned in the article) stole the intellectual property that was open sourced by one of its developers. This site, created by the miller group is just a front to push their inferior sis (whose creator left it) and expensive support contracts. While FOSS in schools is a great asset to those of us who run them, this website will not help anybody trying to get the best FOSS for their schools.
whois the domain os4ed.com. miller-group dns servers. nslookup www.os4ed.com and www.miller-group.net.. same C-block hosted in texas. jack miller and bob ghosh are the only people listed in the contacts at os4ed. http://www.bobghosh.com/ investor, etc. domain created on 9/06. mmmmhmmm.
i've heard quite a bit, and it is true that the lead developer for years left the centre project and started focus.
i believe in open source, but this is deceptive and is not in the best interest of the community.
OpenOffice.org is probably the easiest one to implement, and it has the benefit of even returning money to the district in the form of lack of licensing fees.
K-12 Linux is harder to implement, but can save a district a *LOT* of money, because it makes hardware last a few years longer, and cuts out licensing costs. (And if you have a dedicated volunteer publicize an "install day" to the local Linux User Groups, you can get lots of install labor for free. Hell, it'll even have the side benefit, if you write Microsoft telling them of your impending switch, of having Microsoft donate software to you for the few computers that you want or have to keep on Windows.
(Disclaimer, K-12 Linux was created and is actively developed in the high school I attended, so I may be a bit biased; although I graduated way before the project started.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Consider the following:
I have an extant CAE course created prior to the net designed to teach 1st year College Algebra, but not in an open source stack that I can support at this point. Pass the CAE course and I could just about guarantee you that you can pass just about any accredited 1st year College Algebra course. Now then, once converted to a good open source stack, I would be glad to "sell" the course for about $10US a credit hour in terms of registering it as an online course as part of a course set IF I had an accreditation source acceptable to the major accreditation organizations so that a person doesn't have to pay the $100 per credit hour over and above my meager $ request or more to test out of the course at their local university.
Assuming I got that, and could then add say, most of the general education requirements at the same cost, using the same stack, etc. and have the same accreditation.
This would mean that anyone with a) access to a computer (say via the ODPC or local library?), b) the source of the coursework via the web, and c) a sponsoring proctoring organization (also maybe the library?) could now do about 40% of their bacclaureate college education for what, about $600?
That doesn't even begin to match the significance of an accredited K-12 set of courses on a single online app stack.
That's why computers + an open source stack are so useful.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
If oyu are talking about a large school district with thousands of hundreds of thousands of students ... I say you need to split it up. The bigger the scope the mor ebloat and waste you have. Yes, it's an application of the UNIX philosophy.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Something like the SCT Banner system which runs many universities and community colleges like City College of San Francisco. City College paid something like $1.5 million dollars for this POS. They pay around $150,000 for "support" - then have to pay another $200,000 or more for consultants to actually provide "support".
Banner is based on Oracle technology, using a Java-based front-end. Interestingly, it includes openEAI, an open source Enterprise Application Integration project to which SCT contributes, supposedly. But mostly, it appears to be an old mainframe application "downsized" first to a client-server architecture and now to a Java-based architecture. The screen layouts are a nightmare, and the documentation is pathetic, despite being several hundred megabytes of PDF files.
Worse, the product is "upgraded" practically every year and every college is forced to upgrade as support for the previous version is dropped within a year - and you NEED support for this thing. Thus the colleges IT departments are in a constant state of "churn" - either finalizing the installation of the previous version or preparing for the installation of the next version.
Having worked with Banner, I see no reason why it couldn't be completely reproduced as a much better open source project using PostgreSQL, and the same Java technology it uses now - but with more modern development methods and user interface design.
Such a project would not be trivial. Banner has a couple thousand data entry screen Oracle forms, and is a huge and complex application that has to deal with an incredible variety of legal, financial and educational requirements involved in running a large university or college.
However, anybody developing such a project which could compete reasonably with Banner could make a ton of money providing support and custom modifications. And the colleges using it would save a ton of money every year.
This is the kind of open source enterprise infrastructure project which could really make a difference in a given market.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Centre is a copyrighted software of The Miller Group.
Focus is a "fork" of Centre who's developer was an employee of The Miller Group and worked to develop parts of Centre entirely at our direction. This developer has NO copyright interest in Centre, never has and never will.
Be careful of the software you use, you may end up with legal issues and a very angry group of stakeholders.
Before you go mouthing off about the IP of Centre, I would check my facts. Before you get sued for slander, liable, defamation of character look around\Google Centre.
Andrew checked his story with several FOSS lawyers and they told him he didn't have a leg to stand on. Are you sure you are not cutting off one of your own legs?
I understand your proud of your system, but , don't flame without real fuel. this is a kindly warning, continued offenses will be met with truth and justice!
This story is the sour grapes and tantrums of a young, unhappy boy!
You fellow tech Director and former Andrew customer.
I can see several issues when it comes to open source solutions for K-12:
1) Licensing issues. You have to make sure that any portions that *must* remain secure due to legislation *stay* secure and are not exposed.
2) More fractious than a herd of cats. They all want to do things their own way - even in states where there is some kind of oversight.They're *not* that collaborative. Many of them actively resist even the most basic steps that would allow for data to be used to benefit those they are supposed to be working for - the students. Case in point: a teacher's union that disallows the district from having any visibility of data that could allow a teacher's performance to be measured. In short, the district could not have any data that would tie the student to the teacher in their SIS. The school knew which teachers were teaching which students, but the district couldn't.True story!
I've been in the trenches for three years now working at a technology company dedicated to school improvement; I've worked with people working for other companies. Everywhere I go, I hear the same things. Some districts are fantastically proficient. Most are horribly, horribly deficient (such as a technology director not knowing what an FTP site is - another true story). School districts need everything spoon fed to them as much as possible, and hand holding the entire time they are your clients. I just can't see open source helping out a whole lot until those underlying issues are fixed.
... but you don't have to own the copyright of GPL'd code to use it in another GPL'd system.
As long as focus is GPL and derived from a GPL version of centre, its fine.
GPL Term 2, part b:b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
GPL Term 6:6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License.
There are many OS projects in education, and many (schooltool, claroline, sakai, moodle, drupaled, edubuntu, etc) have been mentioned in this thread.
Tom Hoffman, the lead on the schooltool project, has had an open source SIF Zone Integration Server for over a year: http://www.tuttlesvc.org/2007/03/wye-zone-integrat ion-server.html -- this latest version is the successor to TinyZIS
Center SIS and the Miller Group ( the folks behind os4ed -- see http://www.miller-group.net/content/view/113/1/ ) had a dust up last year with one of the original developers. For details, see http://arcknowledge.com/law.gpl.violations.legal/2 006-03/msg00008.html and http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=32423
As a result of this issue, we also have Focus/SIS as another open source alternative: http://www.focus-sis.org/
So, we have a plethora of possible solutions -- what would be nice to see is some collaboration between these different groups, with clearly defined APIs and code examples to simplify data transfer between apps. Tom Hoffman's SIF ZIS has a lot of potential in this area.
NOTE/DISCLAIMER: I am active in DrupalEd -- not that it has any relevance to this post, but some might claim that my involvement in an OS project eliminates any possibility of objectivity :)
'If you've worked anywhere near education, you'd know you need to be a lawyer to be a software engineer when working with them. The man is right in many, many ways
..
How about just writing code and releasing it under the GPL and leaving the shystering to the lawyers.
"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers"
- Dick the Butcher, Henry VI, part 2, Act IV, Scene II.
was Re:Fast.FUD
davecb5620@gmail.com