Slashdot Mirror
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?
To simplify & reduce costs of managing students.
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.
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.
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.
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/
One place to look for them is the Assayer.
Preventive War is like committing suicide for fear of death. - Otto Von Bismarck
http://wikibooks.org/
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/
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.
The cost depends on a lot of factors, but four-color printing is indeed very expensive. The other big factor in PPB (paper, printing, and binding) costs is the length of the press run. Printing costs are almost entirely setup costs, so the unit price of producing a copy of Harry Potter is extremely low, but the unit price can be very high for a book that isn't going to sell many copies. If a black and white textbook costs $100-150, it's probably because it's specialized and doesn't sell a lot of copies. That's not to say that textbook publishing isn't a scam; it's just that color really is expensive to produce.
Find free books.
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.
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.
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.
I was being sarcastic. I thought it was obvious but I should have clarified.