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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?
To simplify & reduce costs of managing students.
Okay, you can go back under the rock you came out from under.
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Because technology makes certain demonstrations easier, makes it easer to do the math of calculating grades, makes it easier to keep track of information, makes it easier to access information, makes it easier for students to do homework, and because it's a good idea for the curriculum to give some practical skills.
SRSLY.
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.
So we can analyze the source code and figure out how to change our marks. :D
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?
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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.
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/
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 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.
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.
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.
Why? Skyrocketing costs for compliance with regulations like "no child left behind" combined with growing numbers of students and less and less funding means looking for solutions that allow more money to be spent on educating the children rather than adminstration.
Have you been to a high school recently? They're little more than prisons that let their inmates go home at 3pm.
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I am a Sys Admin for a midsize K12 school district. It is a legal requisite that we gather this information to get money to pay for staff. We can't arbitrarily ask for money and have no accountability for having or not having students. There are also expectations for performance. There is trending an analysis for growth and development of projects. Mind you, tens of thousands of children have to be kept track of. What if one doesn't show up for a class? During that time period the kid could be sick in the restroom, ditching school, kidnapped, not properly recorded or dead. Quite a panorama of possibilities all of which has happened at my school district. Just an efficient attendance system (which is part of a SIS) can maybe give us time to notify police, family or whomever. Saving kids from peanut butter is a somewhat common use of the SIS. Staff for information collection and management hasen't grown significantly in the last 15 years but the amount of students and data handled is a whole magnitude higher. Now if only we had a DBA or at least someone who understood what normalization was, ah well thats another story.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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)
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.
There is a comment that is out of touch. Teachers do not get paid that much, especially considering the level of education, continuing education, work requirements and out of pocket professional expenses most teachers have. My wife is an assistant manager of a small woman's clothing store. SHe makes more money than most teachers do!
No, the problem with where the money goes in education has very little to do with how much teachers get paid. It has something to do with unfunded mandates and administrative overhead. Have you ever sat down and read through your local school systems annual budget. I have. It is interesting reading. Those little things like you will provide all day kindergarden, but you have to come up with the money. Things like you will provide free meals, and we will provide half the money. Sports are another big money item. In most cases, they cost far more than they bring in (including football, basketball and baseball). Then, for many schools, there are now security issues - normally at the locations that have the least available to spend anyway.
On top of that, there is all of the required record keeping. Do you have any idea how much that costs? And, there are special education children that can cost as much as 100 times that of a normal student - in our system, they used to be left out. It is good to include them, but the money has to come from somewhere. In many US schools now, we have a problem with non-english speaking students and parents. That adds another large cost.
The list goes on and on and on... Many teachers work as much in 8 months as most people do in 16 months. They work when at school, they work before hours, the work after hours, they work on weekends. They put up with stupid parents (someday, a group of teachers ought to write a book about the parents they have to deal with) and their children. They keep trying. Most of them for less than 60% of what a person with a similar educational background would earn. Here, a starting teacher is in the low $20k with a masters degree.
And if you think teaching is easy, you really need to try doing it for a few years. It is one of the hardest jobs you can take up. Most people judge teachers by what they saw while being a student. Kind of like judging an iceberg by that little part that sits above water.
InnerWeb
Freud might say that Intelligent Design is religion's ID.
I was being sarcastic. I thought it was obvious but I should have clarified.