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Opinion
A Milestone in the Higher Ed Software Market?
8/8/2006
According to a recent report by the Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness, 57 percent of responding campuses have implemented open source software (non-proprietary, freely licensed, and modifiable) to support the campus infrastructure. Thirty-five percent are considering replacing their commercial course management systems with open source alternatives. Fifty-six percent of the CIOs polled see a cost advantage in open source software.
Should we allocate more of our revenue to new marketing strategies that reduce our choices? Should we not do as we in academia have always done and critically review these new trends with an open mind?
Many in the higher education community have been hard at work creating alternatives to proprietary software that is more capable, more flexible, more adoptable – and with no licensing fees, far less expensive. This includes projects such as Sakai (collaboration and learning environment), uPortal (campus integration), OSP (e-portfolios), and Kuali (financial and administrative systems).
Let me illustrate by example. The Appalachian College Association deserves our attention for their “Learning Asset Management Program” or LAMP. Fourteen of the 35 member institutions are meeting the curricular needs of their students with technologies developed by higher education, for higher education, in place of commercial software. I want to draw your attention to this courageous leap of faith into the community of open source software because these schools are meeting needs, saving money, gaining control over a mission-critical activity, and discovering a broad range of benefits from collaboration across a consortium.
LAMP participants are providing their faculty and students with the same popular tools found in commercial course management systems. At the same time, these schools are saving substantial sums by avoiding the costs of licensing fees for commercial software. The LAMP schools are sharing a single instance of Sakai, an approach that is not often allowed with commercial software. While this is an efficient approach, the sharing of a course management system has led to a wide range of critical successes such as shared courses, inter-campus forums, and several disciplinary content repositories.
These institutions, like most small colleges, do not have the resources to develop software. The ACA colleges are consumers of “community source software” – programs developed by universities and made available freely under a license that encourages use, feedback, and improvements.
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