Piloting Open Source CMS - A Small Campus Experience
- By Scott E. Siddall
- 01/20/04
Some of us are blessed with the responsibility of helping our campus constituents
select course management software. We gather the stakeholders, match lists of
needs with possible solutions, figure out how to finance and support a solution,
and then select from available options. Only the last of these steps is not
internal to the institution. Our list of possible solutions includes CMS from
commercial software vendors, and in fact most colleges operating a CMS have
chosen to license commercial software. Typically, we've turned to commercial
interests outside the academy for one of our most fundamental tools in support
of teaching and learning.
We've been served well by this model for the past several years. A high percentage
of our faculties have embraced their campus' CMS, and most students find them
to be easy to use and effective. CMS have become one of the most successful
enterprise applications in the academic arena. Many colleges and universities
now consider the CMS a strategic element in campus IT.
In spite of this successful implementation history, recent trends have encouraged
us to look beyond commercial offerings as Denison considers its next generation
course management system. First, the pricing structure for the major commercial
CMS products has changed and costs have risen. Some of this is justified; vendors
must make a profit on product sales and support (although commercial support
is worthy of much more scrutiny than can fit into this article). Further, commercial
CMS providers must thrive to continue the expensive research and development
required to meet our changing and more sophisticated needs.
Second our faculties have conquered the first and second generation CMS and
they still need more- more features that are specific to their pedagogical approaches;
greater flexibility; better assessment tools; CMS that keep pace with rapid
advances in the disciplines; more interactive possibilities. They want more,
more, more … and they are right to do so. Our single most successful enterprise-wide
academic application should be extraordinary.
I am charged with the task of ensuring that Denison University has an extraordinary
CMS and so I like having choices. To have choices, I need accurate information
on which to distinguish among the choices. I want choices of software vendors
and plenty of trusted information about what works and what d'esn't. First hand
experience is an excellent method for gathering these data.
As a way of increasing our options, Denison University undertook a pilot program
with Stanford's CourseWork
system. We were looking for greater flexibility in a CMS and possibly lower,
long-term costs. In the spring of 2003, faculty members in English, Political
Science and Modern Languages taught courses using CourseWork. Some faculty
members were experienced with Blackboard, while for others this was their first
experience using a CMS.
Installation of CourseWork took about three weeks of effort by Denison's
systems engineer, aided at times by our Oracle DBA (neither of whom had prior
experience with Tomcat or the Java programming that underlie
CourseWork).
It took another two weeks of part-time effort to "brand" CourseWork
by removing Stanford-specific links and expressions, some of which were cosmetic
and some of which were functional (such as the embedded reference to Stanford's
e-mail server). Most installation problems took a day to diagnose and resolve
based on information gleaned from a listserv. System administration throughout
the semester was primarily to assist students recover CourseWork passwords;
we did not integrate CourseWork into our campus LDAP authentication scheme
for this pilot.
From a support standpoint, the CourseWork pilot was easy. Faculty participants
had one hour of instruction at the outset of the pilot, and we offered 30-minute
in-class introductions to students. We responded to questions, but the support
load was light. At the mid-point of the semester, we met with the faculty to
review the pilot. This meeting led to a discussion of the future of CMS at Denison
in very broad terms as our faculty colleagues imagined an a la carte approach
for selecting information tools in support of specific class functions. In all,
the pilot of actual, credit-bearing courses, involved six faculty members and
90 students.
Faculty reported that there was little difference between CourseWork
and the market-leading, commercial CMS licensed by Denison in terms of pedagogical
outcomes. Many of the challenges were not related to CourseWork, but
to CMS use in general (e.g., the digitization of faculty's own discipline-specific
materials; students' lack of fundamental technology skills). The separate portalization
of each area of college life (classes, campus homepage, events) was seen as
fragmenting the student experience, and one faculty member called for us to
extend the CMS to an academic portal that more fully integrated Denison's institutional
mission.
Managing Risk
Denison's ongoing efforts to pilot an open source CMS are about risk management.
We are gathering information about how to balance the need for reliable and
supportable systems with features that meet the faculty's and students' needs.
Given our experience with the pace of feature development for commercial systems,
the cost of support for commercial systems, and our success with carefully selected,
widely-used open source solutions (such as Apache, uPortal, Linux and others),
it is clear that a carefully selected open source strategy can be no more risky
or less productive than a commercial solution.
In fact, we are looking forward to greater flexibility, more relevant pedagogical
features and perhaps even lower costs in a future with open source products
such as those from The Sakai
Project. The Sakai Project is bringing together many of the best technical
and pedagogical features of academic software developed at Stanford, Michigan,
MIT, Indiana and the uPortal project. Sakai will create a pre-integrated collection
of open source tools for course management, assessment, workflow, etc. within
a portal framework.
Pilot Programs
In choosing a CMS for campus wide deployment, the key is having the most relevant
information to select from among many options. The most comprehensive assessments
of potential CMS are not just technical; they must involve our faculty and students
in the context of teaching and learning in real courses. For instance, this
semester several Ohio colleges and universities are running a follow-up pilot
placing full courses within Stanford's
CourseWork and Michigan's CourseTools.NG
through a program sponsored by The Ohio Foundation of Independent Colleges supported
by The Longsight Group (http://cms.ofic.org).
We cannot limit ourselves to that which is at hand. After all, teaching and
learning are our core competencies. We should expect that course management
systems created by higher education, for higher education, will be extraordinary.
Based on campus needs and support infrastructure, both open source and commercially
provided CMS should be candidates for campus adoption.
