Slashdot Mirror
Open Source In Public K-12 Schools?
MissMachine writes "I'm a computer science major who has been recently getting involved in local grassroots politics in my county and state. I've been discussing the idea with some of my state legislatures of submitting a couple of resolutions, opening up to the idea of switching to open source software in our state's K-12 schools. I'm looking for more information/literature about this topic, open source solutions in public K-12 education, pros and cons, studies that prove or disprove many of the assumptions of open source and linux in public schools. Any help in this field?"
You don't state a reason why you think it is a good idea to switch.
Which is why, instead of asking for "How to..." she asked for some studies on the subject, presumably so that she might determine whether it is a good idea to switch or not.
It would certainly be _free_, but would it be better?
She didn't even mention that she advocated the switch yet, just that it had been discussed and she needs more information.
Ease up, troll.
IMHO, the biggest problems with any computer deployment in our K-12 classrooms are always support and training. If a school district adopts Linux and open source then who is going to be the admin in charge of updates, patches, server, network, and desktop maintenance, etc? Competent Linux admins are harder to find than people with at least basic knowledge of Mac and Windows and are likely to cost more too. So unless someone within the district, who will not be any worse off for saying no, wants to step up and take on the task of learning to be a Linux admin who is going to manage the whole affair? Also, how many teachers know how to use Linux or are willing to invest the time required to learn? After all, they cannot teach their students that which they themselves do not know. These are not insubstantial difficulties.
Make sure you understand that you have a very, very, very wide range of users. I deal with non-tech graduate students all the time(the same age as the youngest teachers in the field) and they are not tech savvy. They can myspace and youtube, and maybe superpoke someone on facebook, but that's it. Don't expect the youngest teachers to be the most techy. You'll find good, older teachers near retirement that can give you a run for your money.
Be aware that most k-12 schools have almost no budget. They can get money for hardware/software purchases, but a *good* tech to handle some of the idiosyncrasies of F/OSS is out of their budgets. A 50 computer lab on a 4 year rotation(many schools would kill for computers that new) only costs around $15,000 a year. They'll come with an os installed and maybe a cheap educational copy of office. To hire someone, say 40k-50k a year + benefits, to put a different os on the desktops is a huge expense.
My suggestion would be to start small. Make the decision making process open and transparent. Ask schools to have a cost/benefit analysis of the software purchases. You'll see your biggest savings in server apps, not desktops.
See if you can get schools to have a traveling tech, consolidate servers, etc. This can be difficult. A lot depends on what state you are in. A midwestern state, with lots of small schools with low enrollments(30-50 in a graduating class) may be better served by server consolidation. On the other hand, if you are in a big city where the graduating class is bigger than the entire k-12 school I graduated from, you'll have a bigger budget and a better chance of getting an onsite tech.
Show them security. Student records are highly confidential. Show them how spending less on the server software can increase their security.
It really comes down to knowing your audience and what they want and expect.
You have an entrenched base of Mac and Windows-teaching teachers in the K-12 system (and *nothing* says "entrenched" like a US Public School System teacher). Who's going to convince the union that they should switch their curriculum to an Open OS and Open Apps? You? Stallman? And since the majority of parents (and teachers) view K-12 computer class as akin to Home Economics or Auto Shop (i.e., teaching the kids something "practical, real-life, that they can use") where will that sudden groundswell of support for open software come from? The children, who are anxious to play all those linux-based games? Oh, wait...
This is one change that, if it comes at all, will not arise up out of the schools, but downward from business. When the moms and dads get linux-friendly at work, and can see the value of their children learning the apps in "computer shop," you may see some change.
In my limited exposure to K-12 systems I have noted that in every district I've seen, there has been a software package in use for grade/attendance tracking, etc. that requires either Windows or Mac. Aside from the non-trivial issues of training, we really need an open-source alternative to the proprietary systems for this that are out there now. Of course, I'm no expert and there very well may be an open source project. If so, I'd be interested because the cost savings to my local school district would be huge I suspect.
If you don't read the whole message then you have no right to be offended by it.
This pops up on slashdot every couple of months. Let me outline the reasons this is difficult from the perspective of one school. It sounds like you're trying to push forward an unfunded mandate. You're going to get a lot of pushback once people realize what you're trying to do.
- Apps. Educational software is often poorly written, and is written for mac and windows, not linux. One of the k-12 schools I work with has 350 applications, perhaps 330 which would have to be replaced under your plan. The K-5 students don't use openoffice, they use Reader Rabbit, there is no OSS substitute, and forget about making it work under wine. 6-12 use some generic office type apps, but also educational software. Keep in mind that entire curriculum and courses are sometimes tied to an app. You're not just replacing an app, you're asking teachers to re-write their curriculum. We're not just talking about typing software, we need software that keeps track of students performance and can run reports showing progress, comparing classes, etc...
- Hardware. IT budgets in schools are often small. You can get E-Rate money for some servers and network gear, but printers, digital cams, etc... are often old. Will your hardware work with Linux? What about the hardware your teachers use without your knowledge. Can you afford to replace it? If you replace old printers, you'll end up throwing away all your stock of ink, plus the ink you didn't know the teachers were hoarding. Some hardware is directly tied to an app for a class, you'll have to throw it away, you run into the same curriculum issues as with the software.
- Support. You'll need to support it. This means replacing or training your existing (unionized) staff. My experience is that schools typically employee underqualified staff. Clicking on things is rough, editing text files is really rough. If the staff can't handle the new tasks, can you replace them? This is a union and politics problem, and not an easy one.
- Training. You need to retrain teachers and staff. You'll again run into union issues, teachers are only required to do x hours of professional development per year, they simply won't take training classes, no matter how easy you make it. Keep in mind that teachers are continually asked to do more work with the same or less time/money, and you'll be asking them to relearn to do things. You might not be making any friends here.
Here how this does work, it'll take a few years...
First, do your TCO studies, show how there are no licensing issues. Licensing is a huge headache, solving that issue will win you friends it makes rolling out apps faster. Make sure the administration is onboard and working toward your goal. Doing all this is pointless if the superintendent comes back from a conference and decrees that everyone should have application X, which only works under Windows.
Modify your technology plan to require that any purchased software is web based and standards compliant. I've worked with "web based" apps that only work on IE, or require special plugins and etc... You'll end up losing a lot of functionality.
Take existing apps for which there are no good web based substitutes and see if they work with wine.
Roll out both of the above to one or two labs. Run them that way for at least a month. Make sure that your lab has an assigned lab aide, someone who takes ownership of the lab and is physically present when classes are using it. Keep on top of things, people probably won't report problems. When there are problems, solve them quickly.
When I was in high school, all of the computers were extremely locked down (couldn't do anything except internet + word processing). It sucked. I'm not sure that schools would be willing to adopt a platform unless they'd be able to lock it down similarly (for reasons they'd cite as security, cost, whatever). Presenting up front the ways that you can control the user experience might be a good way to sell open source.
(to be really honest, my initial reaction was: no! open source software can't be locked down! school's will never use that! ... then I thought about it, and realized that someone had probably designed a way to do it )
Abandoning MS Office will not necessarily save your district 70,000 - MS has a great non-profit discount, and depending on whether you meet certain restrictions, I was involved in one purchase for a small private school where each disk was only 15 bucks (and before someone suggests I must have bought if from someone in a back alley, this was using MS's non-profit program).
Okay so you save $15,000 in a 1000-seat school district by switching to OpenOffice. It's still a savings and still worth doing.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Having just tried Linux myself, I didn't find it easy to use, simply because I didn't know how to use the CLI.
This paragraph is not what this thread is about, but I think it's relevant background. Not to start a holy war, and that's where this could easily go, I'll start out by saying I don't like MS windows. I am a total UNIX GEEK, and I really hate MS windows. Every time a MS computer does something UNIX would not, I say out loud (loudly) "Thank you Mr Gates, may I have another". But I've toned down my anti-MS vitriol lately... MS windows has become much more stable than what it used to be... Granted it's still not UNIX.
The usefulness of UNIX vs MS-windows is based on what you want do with your computer. If you want to do typical office stuff, email, surf the net with really cool browser apps doing really cool stuff, ...shields up Mr Sulu MS or apple is probably for you. MS or apple is like public transportation, they will take you where 95% of people want to go, and get you there and back safely. For the other 5%, the slash dot types, we want or need to go "Where no one has gone before", or at least where not many people have gone before, and UNIX is what will take us there. UNIX is like a dirt-bike, you can go past where the sidewalk has ended, out where you see things not seen by every one else. But it's a wild and dangerous world. You need to take care of your self, make the stuff you need, fix what you have broken, because Mr Gates & Mr Jobs will not come rescue you. However there is a crowd of slash dot geeks that will spend hours working on your problem, and give you the fix, and hold your hand and walk you through the rough bits, because we've all been there before. We were all newbies at one time, and needed our hands held a few times when we are doing something new.
What UNIX does for me... I work in a cutting edge part of electronics, and I need to build my own computer tools, on just about a daily basis. Not enough people do what we do to encourage a vendor to write us the software for some of our special case needs. And we sometimes don't have a good handle on how to get what we are after, so some hacking goes on to try to find some results, then we build on that. So I have a job, where I get challenges, and get to make it all up just about from scratch. But that's good because that's what I like doing, and I'm good at it. With UNIX, I can write program with PERL to drive a hardware tester to do some specialized data collection, generate sometimes huge megabytes of data, write a PERL program to reduce the data, import the reduced data into MS-Excel, generate some pretty graphs, and I make a pretty MS power-point report for my customer.
So would I be able to do the hard stuff on a MS PC? Theoretically yes, but the practice always seems to break somewhere in PC land. UNIX is almost always the bestest fastest easiest solution. However UNIX has a steep learning curve, more of a step. Once you've made it up the first step, UNIX gets real easy- well not easy, but more efficient, much more efficient. Here's the point, with a PC, the easy things are easy, but the hard things are impossible. With UNIX, nothing is easy, but nothing is impossible.
Here is another UNIX thing. In a well run UNIX shop, UNIX is the same on every machine (1), the individual UNIX user tailors his own personal UNIX account for his needs or desires. In a PC shop, each PC is individually tailored by the user. If I login to your PC, I get the tools you have installed, if I tweak something, I'm screwing you. We have about 20,000 UNIX servers at my site, everyday about 20 die. They get rebooted/rebuilt, and go back on-line, and they all come back the same as before they went down, all the tools are there, all the network disks get mounted, everything. Because in UNIX, every machine is the same. No matter which machine I login on, my window manager fvwm runs the same, all my aliases work, all my personalizat
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
I'm not comprehending why you were modded funny. Having just tried Linux myself, I didn't find it easy to use, simply because I didn't know how to use the CLI.
I call bullshit. There's no way that can be an issue if you got one of the user friendly distros.
And if you started with LFS or something, you deserve it.
You'd be surprised to know how much open source is used in schools. Granted most of it isn't at the desktop, but there are a large number of schools using things like Audacity, IPCop, Nagios, Zimbra, Moodle, Drupal, etc on Linux. So ask the question why are these apps used in schools, and it usually is because they are best of breed software in it's category. So if you want to get more free/open source software into schools, then make killer applications that give them a reason to be there.