::fibreculture:: WebCT, Open Source and Beyond

[Julian Knowles]

On 09/08/2005, at 6:07 PM, Chris Chesher wrote:
> I've been using Moodle <http://moodle.org> for the first time this 
> semester. After being lumbered with WebCT for so long, it's wonderful 
> to start using a learning management system which has an information 
> architecture and interaction design concepts in line with my pedagogy.

Thanks for the link Chris. Can you point me to an 'unprotected' site? 
It sounds interesting and I'd like to see it in operation on some 
course material.

> There are strategic reasons why public institutions should invest in 
> FOSS. FOSS offers educational institutions a better business model 
> than commercial software.

When you say 'invest', what exactly do you mean? If it is open source, 
the only 'investment' one can make is in the provision of human 
resources for  development/programming. Are you suggesting that 
universities hire programmers to work on FOSS development? Academics 
who have programming skills are already contributing to a number of 
FOSS projects either in their allocated research time, or via ARC type 
projects. If you think about it, there might be several hundred kinds 
of apps required to run a university... Would you see this as realistic 
(ie hiring a small army of programmers?).

It is also not clear whether you are advocating a switch to FOSS for 
all tasks... or where you wish to draw lines in relation to this 
'business model'.

> At the moment, Universities not only invest large amounts to maintain 
> software licences

true, but if it works well, then this can be seen as a decent 
investment, just like electron microscopes, or other specialised 
resources.

>  but spend even more supporting these proprietary systems.

The way I see it , support costs are the same for commercial and 
FOSS... Actually the latter is usually more expensive as the 
documentation is usually poor/incomplete and the users are often less 
able to help themselves via the RTFM method. Anyone who had to compile 
and install Pure-Data (PD) before someone got it wrapped into a single 
installer with a GUI will attest to that.

> Support tasks are restricted by the inflexibility of black-boxed 
> software (where open source can be customised or added to), and there 
> is no return from this labour to the institution.

example?

Many commercial apps have plug-in architectures with publicly available 
standards, so you can write your own plug-ins.. Furthermore, some 
commercial apps are 'toolkit' based and specifically designed for 
tool/instrument building (eg Max/MSP). I don't think the commercial = 
closed, FOSS = open comparison always holds true. Some FOSS can be 
quite closed, in that support for common standards can be poor to 
non-existent.

> When support staff learn to use and customise these systems, the 
> institution becomes even more closely tied to companies which won't 
> necessarily be there next year anyway, and don't provide comprehensive 
> support.

Which is why most large institutions avoid FOSS for mission critical 
tasks.... There is no support or service guarantee. They are not going 
to run their financial systems on FOSS if , when it goes down, they 
can't have it brought back up by tech support in a very short 
timeframe. It is often these service/support needs that drive choices. 
For what its worth, my university's e-learning unit evaluated free  
open source alternatives to WebCT recently, and decided to stay with 
WebCT, not because they thought it was necessarily superior, but 
because they could enter a very firm service/support agreement. 
Sometimes, the decisions are made according to the very real demands of 
running a very large operation with minimal tolerance of system 
downtime.

> By devoting the same resources to support and develop open source 
> infrastructures, the quality issues for FOSS will quickly disappear 
> (and where they don't, as Anna points out this doesn't necessarily 
> preclude learning)

Although an attractive proposition, I'd like to see the empirical 
evidence for this assertion. A massive development effort would be 
required. To get some perspective, one software revision of a 
commercial audio app I use for teaching included a million new lines of 
code. If we multiply that by several hundred software applications.... 
then...

Let's not forget that the FOSS community is already significantly 
populated by university researchers (and their postgrads) To put it 
bluntly, salaried academics are among the few who can devote so much 
time to developing stuff which is given away for free.  Call me a cynic 
but.... quite seriously...  I think this is a significant factor. Seen 
in this context, universities are already making a major contribution 
to the effort.

regards

julian