Special Report: Open Source Vision
Increasingly, colleges
and universities are
turning to open
source as a way to
meet their technology
infrastructure and
application needs. It’s
time to weigh the
benefits—and
the challenges.
'Open source gave us a
flexible, single sign-on
portal
solution at about one-half
the cost of
purchasing the
technology from a vendor.'
-Christian Boniforti, Lynn University
Open source has changed everything about
student computing at Lynn University in Boca Raton, FL. Over the last few
years, when students wanted to utilize mission-critical systems, they had to log
in to separate systems to access basic functions such as e-mail, course registration,
and financial aid. Students couldn’t toggle from one application to another;
to switch, they had to log out of one and log in to the next. The progress was
both tedious and time-consuming. By 2005, technology officials knew they had
put up with the situation for far too long. The time had come to find a solution.
The hunt for that solution began that year. Fed up with inefficiencies in the
way the disparate portal sites were linked, CIO Christian Boniforti set out to
centralize all student-oriented systems within a unique portal, and establish a
single sign-on feature that would enable students to log in once and have
access to everything they needed. Boniforti investigated portal applications
from a number of different vendors, including Blackboard and Jenzabar. In the end, however, he opted for
uPortal, an open source application built and designed centrally
by JA-SIG, a federation of higher education institutions
interested in open source (see “Advocating Glasnost”), but
maintained locally by Lynn’s IT department. “When we started looking at offthe-
shelf applications, the cost raised red flags,” he says, noting that the small
liberal arts school could not afford six-figure solutions to solve its portal w'es.
“That’s when we discovered open source.”
Taking full advantage of the customizable nature of the open source uPortal
application, technologists at Lynn took a couple of months and created the
school’s new Intranet site MyLynn, combining all student
functions within one easy-to-access portal. Looking back, Boniforti estimates that by utilizing an open source
solution, the university probably saved up
to one-half of what it would have spent on
the technology had it been purchased
from a vendor. What’s more, he notes that
the system is so flexible, his teams have
been able to add new functions and features
every couple of weeks, always introducing
something new.
Denison University (OH) is another
institution that has embraced uPortal,
and Scott Siddall, the assistant provost
and director of instructional technology
there, says the decision was easy, considering
that the previous method of
piecing together different solutions
from different vendors was inefficient
and time-consuming, not to mention
expensive. “Lots of schools looked at us
when we started with uPortal and said,
‘How are you doing that?’ But we
demonstrated that you didn’t need to
have deep skills in a tech area in order
to use the application,” says Siddall.
“We still are ducking the issue of having
to have exotic Java programming
skills to develop portlets for our portal.
So far, so good.”
It’s no secret that in the open environment
of academia, open source applications
can have a dramatic impact,
streamlining and unifying a network
infrastructure. And while most open
source technologies are not “perfected”
(and which technologies are?), they can
offer lower-cost alternatives to pricier
vendor offerings, while improving the
ability for technologists to control their
networks. Importantly, they also can bolster
security as systems become more
unified (less disparate) and entry points
are reduced. As open source technology
becomes more and more prevalent and
sophisticated, colleges and universities
increasingly are turning to such solutions
to meet their needs. Still, if you’re considering
or evaluating such a move for
your own institution, you’ll need plenty of
background information to weigh the
pros and cons.
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.
Financial apps. Kuali, an open source take on software that
handles financials, is earning its stripes in
pilot mode at Indiana University, where
John Barry Walsh, director of university
information systems, has grown the program
virtually from scratch. The program
handles all aspects of financial management,
including general ledger, general
accounting, accounts receivable, capital
asset management, purchasing, accounts
payable, cash receipting, travel requisition,
auxiliary accounting, web-based
eCommerce, budget construction, and
pre- and post-award administration. A
critical element of the system is the
XML-based OneStart Workflow for routing
and approval of financial transactions.
OPEN SOURCE 101
'OPEN SOURCE,' as it’s bandied
about today, refers to software that is
created by an entire development
community rather than a single vendor.
The software typically is programmed
by volunteers from many
organizations, and the source code is
free and available to anyone who wants
to use it or modify it as they see fit.
This setup allows any member
organization to add a feature, rather
than hope that the vendor of a proprietary
product will implement its
suggestion in a subsequent release.
It also allows enterprising developers
the opportunity to build new tools or
improve ones that already exist.
A distinct advantage of open source
software is that as long as there are a
few devoted contributors, the program
will continue to be supported for
many years. In the commercial world,
useful software may be abandoned if
it d'es not generate sufficient profit
compared to other products.
Then too, an important element of the
Kuali Project software is its modular
architecture; Walsh says that institutions
can implement only those functional elements
that meet their needs. While Indiana’s
implementation of Kuali is not fully
developed, Walsh’s team has been implementing
it in pieces to test functionality
and operation speed. So far, Walsh says,
he likes what he sees. He adds that when
the first phase of the software comes out
later this summer, Indiana will reevaluate
to see if the program is worth keeping.
Other apps. Of course, open source is
the foundation for other types of applications,
too. The Open Source Portfolio
Initiative focuses
on student portfolios, while the Lion-
Share project at
Pennsylvania State University is an
open source, legal, peer-to-peer file sharing
initiative.
Benefits: Cost, Control, Security
Lower cost. The general perception of
open source is that it costs less to operate
than traditional closed-source products;
many schools would agree. At
Bryant College (RI), Art Gloster, VP of
information services, recently conducted
an in-house study and found that the
total cost of ownership (TCO) for his
open source solutions was roughly 20
percent lower than the TCO for his more
traditional technologies. For Bryant, the
big savings came in the form of maintenance.
Other schools experience equally
large savings in the area of licensing
fees: Because open source is available
for anyone to use, colleges and universities
that embrace it no longer have to
purchase per-user licenses each year.
Reduced licensing fee outlay means
fewer dollars heading to vendors such as
Microsoft, IBM, Blackboard, and Sun-
Gard Higher Education. In addition to
saving money here, colleges and universities
embracing open source software
also can save the money they would pay
for expensive upgrades to software packages
purchased from traditional vendors.
Indiana’s Walsh calls this vicious payout
cycle the “upgrade carousel,” and notes
that with open source, his school has
been able to save big bucks by avoiding it
altogether. “Upgrading is the most costly
and disruptive aspect of vended systems,”
he says. “It still costs to implement
and maintain Kuali, but in our case,
the costs are dramatically lower.”
Control. Money issues aside, there are
other reasons why open source has so
many fans. For one thing, many campus
technologists and administrators see open
source as a way to have better control over
their own software application destiny.
Furthermore, open source developers
claim that a broad group of programmers
produces a more useful and more bugfree
product; through an informal peer-review process, a greater number of individuals (directly connected
to the application users) are constantly reviewing the
code. This process is an important safeguard against poorly written
code, and a virtual guarantee that all bugs or glitches will be
ironed out quickly.
'Open source has been hyped to the
point
that some people are moving in
that direction
without respect for the
factors that might
make
an institution
stay with commercial software.'
—John Bucher, Oberlin College
Security. Another benefit of peer review is more secure software.
Because open source applications are refined by hundreds
of programmers every month, the likelihood of a security
vulnerability going undetected is slim to none. Abel at IMS says
that on the infrastructure side, one of the big drivers for Linuxbased
solutions from vendors such as Novell and Sun Microsystems is that they are viewed
as more secure than some of the commercial alternatives.
Abel says this perception has carried over to the open source
application realm, too.
“It seems counterintuitive: You’d think that if something is
open source, it must be easier to exploit,” he says. “That’s not the
case, though. Open source solutions have proven to be some of
the safest out there today, and this has become a huge selling
point that has convinced higher education to embrace them.”
Challenges: Cost, Skills, Sustainability, Interfaces
Cost perception, skills. Open source may boast myriad benefits,
but that d'esn’t mean there is no downside. Perhaps the
biggest challenge to open source apps in higher education is the
misconception that the technology is free. Yes, the price is zero.
Yes, licensing fees are zero. But the cost of the project is far
from zero. In some cases, it takes special skills to be able to get
into open source code and tinker around, and these skills are
quite different from those that most programmers possess when
they move into a basic programming job. Most schools embracing
open source find that they must spend money to hire specialists
to build and maintain open source offerings, or at least
pay to send current programmers to special training programs.
Last year, John Norman, director of the University of
Cambridge Centre for Applied Research in Educational
Technologies (UK), conducted an informal study of US institutions
to determine how many full-time programmers were
required in a standard higher ed IT department to complete
day-to-day programming tasks. He found that each school
needs at least two technical support people for every 20,000
users. According to the IMS study, however, out of approximately
4,000 leading institutions in the US, only the top 300
have the human resources necessary to implement software;
the other 3,700 need help.
“Open source is less expensive than closed source, but it’s
not nearly as inexpensive as people think it can be,” says Siddall,
the technologist at Denison. “The bottom line is: No matter
how you look at it, open source has a cost.”
‘New model’ anxiety; sustainability. Another potential problem
for open source is that it is a new model. While some schools
have embraced the technology enthusiastically, others have been
apprehensive. The laggards express some fear and anxiety about where open source fits into their IT environments:
Because the technology is still
fairly new, skeptics quite legitimately
wonder if open source is a sustainable
model for the long haul.
John Bucher, CTO at Oberlin College
(OH), is one of the skeptics. While Bucher
has embraced open source on the infrastructure
level, he says there’s too much at
stake for his school to rely on unproven
open source applications that could falter
at any moment. The school has been
using a learning management system
from Blackboard since 2000, and just
re-upped its long-standing contract. In
describing his reliance on Blackboard,
Bucher swears by the cliché, “If it ain’t
broke, don’t fix it.” He explains, “Since
we have a six-year history with Blackboard,
I put some value on the lack of a
need to migrate to a different product,” he
says. “I’m not a critic of open source, but
it seems to me that it’s been hyped to the
point that some people are moving in that
direction perhaps without total respect for
the factors that might make an institution
stay with commercial software.”
Advocating Glasnost
FOR COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIESinterested in learning more about open source,
fear not: There is an organization to help. It is
JA-SIG, an international
consortium of higher education institutions
focused on promoting and sponsoring open
source projects that serve colleges and universities.
Its four-fold mission:
- To provide education and research in the applied use
of open technology architectures and systems in higher education.
- To develop a global academic community of interest
among practitioners and institutions, and to inform that community of
international activities, projects, and opportunities in the field of open
technology architectures and systems in higher education.
- To educate by coaching, collaborating, and sharing
good practices, and disseminating the results of innovative approaches in this
field.
- To create, through its various activities —
including conferences, projects, and outreach— an atmosphere of trust, goodwill, and mutual
respect among all participants.
On top of these activist goals, the group also is
credited with launching the uPortal initiative earlier this decade; it also now
oversees open source applications, including
HyperContent and the Central Authentication Service,
or CAS. The organization’s annual summer
conference was held June 4-6 in Vancouver.
Poor interfaces. Finally, some academic
technologists assail open source for
shoddy interfaces—a flaw that could
scare off technology coordinators at
smaller schools who are familiar with
the comfy click-and-go functionality of
Microsoft Windows and Apple applications. Bucher, in particular,
insists that the applications are
not even close to equal, and that until
open source interfaces are as easy to navigate
as the interfaces on market software,
he d'esn’t see the technology
achieving mainstream adoption in higher
education at all.
The Future
New strides. Improvements to shortcomings
in the area of open source application
interfaces already are underway.
Drupal, a new and
improved spin on the UPortal content
management platform, is revolutionizing
the way schools aggregate and access
content, offering a more intuitive graphical
user interface than any of the open
source applications before it. OpenOffice, an open source
project through which Sun Microsystems
is releasing and coordinating the technology
for the popular StarOffice suite, has
made great strides in improving its interface
in recent months. Even Chandler, the
Open Source Applications Foundation’s new application
for managing personal information,
has emphasized the graphical user interface
(GUI) as a priority.
Another open source technology that
appears to be gaining traction in the
higher ed space is the wiki. Made
famous by Wikipedia, a wiki is a website that, with simple
formatting rules, can be quickly edited
by its visitors. The technology was
developed by computer programmer
Ward Cunningham in the mid-1990s to
provide collaborative discussions, and
today there are several tools on the market
for creating such sites, including
TWiki and FlexWiki. Among colleges
and universities, wikis are just now
being used to facilitate discussions and
communities online.
“We’re always trying new things with
open source,” says Michael Johnson, systems
administrator for the web group at
Wagner College (NY), which has vowed
to incorporate wikis on campus sometime
soon. “There’s so much out there,
the biggest challenge is keeping up.”
Interoperability. Of course, in the real
world, none of these open source developments
will mean much unless technologists
figure out a way to get them to work
with traditional, closed-source apps. The
name of this game is interoperability, and
it’s a top priority for open source programmers
and adopters alike. At Lynn
University (where uPortal is utilized to
deliver MyLynn), technologists had to
write up a number of “translation” programs
to ensure that their application
would interact with Blackboard, the
learning management system still in
place. Other schools have had to resort to
similar measures.
The challenge Lynn met is one that all
schools embracing open source will tackle
sooner or later. Jonathan Markow,
board chair of JA-SIG, says open source
will make the much-needed open standards
a reality and force schools to
become more plug-and-play with applications
of all kinds. Markow predicts that
higher education institutions will devise
new strategies to make sure old systems
work with new open source applications
and that the functionality available to students
d'esn’t suffer at all.
“Open source and open standards can
go hand-in-hand,” he says. “With open
source, you won’t be tied to one vendor’s
proprietary technology anymore. The
whole world will be wide open.”