Special Report: Open Source Vision

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Special Report: Open Source Vision

6/26/2006

By Matt Villano

The Apps

Currently, there exist two flavors of open source solutions prevalent in the world of higher ed: infrastructure software and software applications. The infrastructure solutions are developed in Linux, Unix, and Java; nitty-gritty programming codes that few individuals (outside of IT managers and programmers) ever see. Corporate- world examples of the use of these solutions are Apache web servers, Sendmail mail servers, and JBoss application servers. A recent study by the FL-based IMS Global Learning Consortium, a nonprofit organization of more than 50 contributing members and affiliates from every sector of the global eLearning community, indicates that as of spring of this year, 57 percent of the approximately 4,000 institutions of higher education are using open source within their IT infrastructures.

'Upgrading is the most costly and disruptive
aspect of vended systems. It still costs to
implement and maintain Kuali, but in our
case, the costs are dramatically lower.'
-John Barry Walsh, Indiana University

Open source use within the IT infrastructure, however, is nothing new; newer uses of open source are cropping up on the application side, as well. Rob Abel, CEO of the IMS Global Learning Consortium and president of the Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness, says that the most exciting iterations of open source in higher ed today are applications that institutions are using to replace software they once purchased from vendors. “There’s a real interest in this and real potential for this stuff to come in and help schools better manage the technology they’re using,” he says. “To call open source the wave of the future would be an understatement.”

Course management apps. Currently, there are two prominent types of open source applications being adopted in higher ed: The first is course management systems that are open source alternatives to products from vendors such as Blackboard, SunGard Higher Education, and Campus Management. One of the alternatives gaining worldwide attention is an application called Moodle. Then there is the Sakai collaboration and learning environment, which originated as a community source project among a handful of institutions, and has skyrocketed on the scene.

Of all the open source applications on the market today, Moodle is perhaps the most sophisticated. The application has a large and diverse user community with more than 100,000 registered users speaking more than 700 languages, spread across 150 countries. Here in the US, a big Moodle adopter is Humboldt State University (CA), where Michael Penney, learning management systems project manager, says the school has built a brand-new course management system around it. Another big user: the University of Portland (OR), where a Moodle application dubbed Learning@UP is enabling professors to teach in new and exciting ways, including holding additional discussion sections online.

“Moodle facilitates my ability to interact with students outside of class,” says Nick McRee, a professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Portland. “On Moodle, I can run chat rooms that supplement discussion sections and I’m able to target some discussions in a way that I wouldn’t be able to do in person.”

The idea behind Sakai is much more complicated. This project, launched in 2004, is a community source software development effort to design, build, and deploy a new Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) for higher education. To date, the Sakai Project has put out three major software releases (1.0, 1.5, and 2.0), and developed the Educational Partner’s Program to test the software as it is released. The software works with uPortal, and schools including Denison, Arizona State University, the University of Missouri, and Georgetown University (DC) currently are piloting some form of this technology, and all are planning to roll it out across their campuses by September.