Open Source Software in Higher Education

The higher education sector is very unlike other industries. It‘s its own processes and a special group of demands. Most commercial proprietary application vendors develop their applications focused on the wider domain spread across industries. This, academics complain, creates a distinct disconnect between software vendors and also the end-users in academia.

To beat these shortcomings, the training industry started seeking to  open source  being an alternate model. Around ten years back, institutions started debating total price of ownership in adopting an open source based community approach vis-à-vis proprietary applications, viability of open source based business models, sustainability and security issues.

The success of community developed open source software is very more successful. Linux and Apache are ample evidence of its success. An identical trend, though not that widespread in its reach, could be traced to the event of community projects in education such as the Moodle and Sakai.

With the span of its childhood, the open source community based approach in education has developed several alternative models. Some of those models and schools of thought have thrived and been implemented successfully across a big spectrum from the industry. Progress and success in open source projects such as the Sakai, Moodle, Kuali, uPortal, Shibboleth, and lots of more are now being closely watched from the industry.

Community Source Model

One school of thought believes that open source sharing is much more a philosophical approach when compared to a viable alternative. The adoption of open source in higher education appear to suggest otherwise. FLOSS (Free / Libre and Open Source Software ) communities are thriving well in learning environments too.

The FLOSS model is extensively utilized in initiatives such as the MIT OpenCourseWare and Open Source Biology. Project Gutenberg, the Wikipedia, The Open Dictionary project are prime samples of how open source is successfully adapted to education initiatives.

Inside a community source project, multiple institutions become one to partner inside the project. All partners contribute financially along with in employing human helpful information on the effort. Inside the early stages, the partnering institutions provide all design and development efforts and just in subsequent stages is that the project opened towards the broader community. This manner, the initial support is secured and also the institutions possess a substantial influence in deciding how the applying is modeled and designed.

The initial focus of community source projects is requried to be made by collaboration between institutions. The focus inside the crucial first stages is therefore to form a common economic outlook and a suitable administrative framework instead of forming a community around a shared code. Most community based open source projects slowly migrate to open source inside the later stages.

The Sakai project, for instance, started like a joint effort between four institutions (Michigan, Indiana, MIT and Stanford ). The initial agenda was to line up a framework of common goals that will produce appropriate software depending on an agreed collection of objectives. The scope for participation was later increased by forming the Sakai Educational Partners Program (SEPP ), whereby other institutions can join and participate inside the community for a little fee.

The Current Landscape

Instruction enterprise like all organization has its own needs starting from resource planning to budgeting. Additionally, they‘ve typical requirements such as the got to integrate with educational funding programs of the govt, multiple payroll cycles, and student information systems (SIS ) that handle admissions, grades, transcripts, student records along with billing. These involve robust ERP systems. Until recently, universites and colleges mostly depend on either custom-developed systems that tend to be more than 15 years of age, or have transitioned to commercial products from vendors like Oracle, SAP, PeopleSoft or vendors like SunGard which are geared in the direction of the higher education market.

Kuali Financials was borne because of the insufficient open source solutions Enterprise applications inside the higher education sector are comprised of the mixture of some proprietary application vendors and a few key open source community initiatives. PeopleSoft, Oracle, SunGard and Datatel are a few key vendors that provide tightly integrated ERP packages to the education sector.

Recent consolidation in the market, such as the acquisition of PeopleSoft by Oracle and of WebCT, Angel, etc by Blackboard, has caused considerable unease inside the education fraternity. The concern stems coming from the fear the trend of consolidation would result in the monopoly of some key vendors. The plans of those vendors to provide tightly integrated systems heightens the fear that it will provide an unfair leverage to these vendors because it would extend the community's dependence on them.

One area of concern about proprietary applications is really a seeming disconnect involving the industry and software application developers. Institutions even have strong reservations in regards to the currently available administrative software and course management systems. Those feelings is applications provided by vendors for example SAP and PeopleSoft are adapted from other industries and doesn t work well for educational enterprises. Moreover, the proprietary nature from the applications implies the source code Isn‘t available and customization efforts involve substantial costs.

Inside the context of that a large breadth of requirements, open source can turn out to be a viable alternative. Actually, these constraints provided the impetus for open source initiatives in higher education. Many of the success has helped provide a robust foundation to building an alternative support model to the education industry.

Inside the Sakai project, the participating institutions made a decision to integrate and synchronize their educational software into your pre-integrated collection of open source tools termed Collaborative Learning Environment (CLE ). Sakai has active implementations running at multiple institutes including the University of Michigan and Indiana University.

In parallel, Sakai also established some activity based communities which have spawned an active cooperation involving the industry and application vendors. The Sakai Educational Partners Program enables educational facilities to take part in this program for a little fee. Besides, there will be the Sakai Commercial Affiliates, who offer fee-based services for installation, integration and support..

Kuali, however, mainly addresses facets of educational administration. The Kuali Financial System (KFS ) is that the most prominent application. It handles administrative and operational tasks like general accounting, purchasing, salary and benefits, budgeting, asset management and grants. The internal system is designed around modules that enable it to become tweaked to labor with existing commercial applications. For instance, at Indiana University, Kuali applications work along side PeopleSoft's HR and student system. The Kuali Foundation is really a non-profit consortium of multiple universities and a few hardware and software companies. The Kuali Commercial Affiliate program operates on similar lines like its Sakai counterpart. The community is growing and in fact now includes the University of California, Cornell, Michigan State University, San Joaquin Delta College (Calif. ), and The University of Arizona.

Significantly, based on the 2008 Campus Computing Survey, around 13. 8 percent from the survey participants have identified an Open Source LMS - either Moodle or Sakai - like the campus standard LMS.

Besides these, several other projects offer SIS functionality. For instance, openSIS manages student demographics, scheduling, attendance, grades, transcripts, and health records, and it is parent company makes add-on modules to aid extras like disciplinary tracking, billing, food service, and bulk email / SMS messaging for emergency contact.

Other Key intiaitives are

JaSig community developing uPortal, and CAS (Central Authentication Services ) two components serving as input to Kuali Rice.

Internet2 - A consortium led by universities doing work in partnership with industry and government to develop and deploy advanced network applications and technologies including products for example Shibboleth and Grouper

Open Source Curricula

Just like any  open source  activity, open source curricula by its very definition is definitely that may be freely used, distributed and modified. A model such as this would seemingly be antithetic to the idea of higher education because it strikes in the credibility from the education environment. Campus education requires operate like a structured learning methodology. The idea of community collaboration involving academics and students on a single platform brings lots of unpredictability straight into the scenario

However, FLOSS communities (Free / Libre and Open Source Software ) in education have proved to become quite successful. A key principle of the learning approach is its root in adapting it towards the context of ones' experience. Using its stress on learners and the preferences, this learning approach focuses more about learning by collaboration, communication and sharing.

Significant initiatives include the Connexions Project at Rice University, the OpenCourseWare project at MIT and also the social learning medium of Wikipedia.

The FLOSS approach in higher education is operating in combination with traditional teacher centered approaches. The objectives from the FLOSS approach aren‘t to exchange traditional methods but to obtain synergies in combination and provide the learner an enhanced learning environment.

The 'FLOSS-like education transfer report' published in September 2008, as section of the FLOSSCOM project, notes that FLOSS communities can create effective learning environments. The study has also develop three different approaches that may be combined effectively with traditional teaching approaches.

Economic Models of Open Source

One aspect that clearly marks the adoption of open source like a winner is the point that in this, the developers are most frequently also the users from the software. This removes the perceived disconnect involving the developer community and also the end-users unlike inside the case of proprietary applications. However, this really is less evident inside the case of administrative applications like payroll or HR. In such cases, adoption of open source has to become a directed process.

Initiatives such as the Kuali project have proved that open source also can build up sustainable models that offer adequate support mechanisms. In such models, There‘s active collaboration involving the community that comprises not just developers and end-users, but additionally an extended support group comprising commercial vendors. These support groups can be found to provide timely support to mission critical applications. The community approach also ensures the code Isn‘t closed which an active community appealing helps to ensure that enhancements keep happening as necessitated.

Projects like uPortal happen to be developed with minimal resources but they are deployed across many institutions. The community approach has proved sustainable as inside the case from the Sakai project. When it comes to funding, the Sakai project garnered a good investment of $6. 8 million over 2 yrs.

The viability from the open source, community based model stems not coming from the monetary or cost aspects but principally the adaptability it offers. The talk over price of ownership between commercially available proprietary software and open source applications is yet to become proved empirically. However, the undeniable fact that the code is open means it could be easily adapted to suit new requirements and doesn t involve significant investments when it comes to customization or enhancements. This does make significant economic sense inside the longer term.

The case for open source in higher education is nicely documented inside a study from the Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness. Inside a 2005 study report titled, 'Will Open Source Software Become an Important Institutional Strategy in Higher Education? ' Rob Abel notes how open source is really a great fit for higher education. The study, depending on an analysis of open source projects in education, opines the community-based approach is definitely an interesting model that also helps decrease the inherent risks in adopting an open source approach.

As for the value model, the study notes that while open source has helped generate cost savings inside the choice of 20 to 30 percent to the commercial sector, a similar might not be entirely true in education. The community-based approach, the author notes, using its associated participation fees, may prove only marginally beneficial when it comes to costs. Institutions which have their very own infrastructure and resources may however, take pleasure in substantially reduced costs from their open source initiatives.

The Future

Open source has proved to become adaptable and also a reliable platform for collaboration and learning. With their quest for ideal application software to handle administrative, operational and education platforms, most CIOs are taking a look at interoperability, reliability and scalability of applications. Applications such as the Sakai and Kuali have proved beyond doubt that open source applications offer great configurability.

Development communities and also the support of commercial vendors, as inside the case of Kuali and Sakai, fuel a greater rate of innovation. Moreover, the advantage that‘s provided by collaboration also provides an impetus to continued improvement from the system. Support systems and enhancements for future requirements are ensured.

Upon the question of how you can approach or adopt open source like a model, the answer would depend upon the needs, the infrastructure and also the means available for an institution. The community development model has shown that costs could be broadly distributed amongst participants. Experience has shown that universities and colleges can collaborate to supply open source software that caters on their needs in a manner that is superior to some commercial products. The collaborative model enables educational facilities to pool their financial and technical resources. Moreover, a bigger community ensures the applications are tested in a number of testing environments, thus aiding in building robust solutions.

In term of core academics, learning systems will evolve to support formative assessments and evaluation outside the classroom. Many higher education institutions have used command of MIT and therefore are offering web based course materials which are accessible by anyone, free of cost. It really has been adopted at Yale, Notre Dame, Tufts and Stanford School of Engineering, to name a couple of. The United Nations has launched an initiative that will leverage social media technologies and ideas to provide higher education possibilities to people that would otherwise not have the ability to afford the costs.

Commercially, open source projects have used their first steps inside the marketplace. The model is evolving aided by some significant commercial vendor backing. To the community-based open source approach to prosper, substantial financial backing is definitely an absolute necessity to avoid it from faltering and also to steer clear of the pitfalls that arise form source code being easily modifiable and rebranded by a special vendor. Coming from the commercial perspective, projects like Sakai and also the Kuali Foundation are prone to thrive as they‘ve substantial stakeholders from both the academic and also the corporate world.

What could derail further adoption? There are many potential risk areas :

Insufficient knowledge of entry points for adoption
Insufficient support to adopt the applications
Minimal staff to aid the applications
Insufficient training / documentation to train staff
A runaway project that consumes much press and develops a damaging bias toward the project
A lot of these risks can be mitigated though co-operative initiatives involving the foundations developing the open source solutions and commercial affiliates looking to aid the solutions - and develop complementation solutions. Some examples :

Further publicity through conventional, non-education related channels for example Google and industry-based sites for example edu1world
Furrther innovation and cooperation - whether through 'summer of code' collaborations ; or community collaborations that could transform the current listservs to more accessible forums
Commercial affiliates offering training and webinars
Commercial affiliates offering simple use entry points, for example pre-installed servers or virtual images that may be downloaded and used from the box
To summarize, open source initiatives in higher education possess a long strategy to use before they go into the commercial mainstream inside a significant fashion. However, with industry and academic collaboration, it features a great potential to affect the higher education landscape inside the longer term.

About Innovativ Consulting Partners : Innovativ Consulting Partners is among the leading education consultants in the nation. Innovativ provides consulting services to clients inside the Higher Education and Public Sector industries. Innovativ is really a premier Open Source consultant and provides products and services to aid Kuali solutions. The Innovativ team have delivered Drupal consulting services and led successful implementations for clients inside the Education and Public Sector industries Innovativ is definitely an Oracle Partner