6.1 Barriers to the adoption of open source: personal and professional  (Page 7/13)

Why would these issues be of concern for faculty, instructional technologists and others evaluating the functionality and usability of learning management systems? If this had been a presentation on migrating to Angel from Blackboard, would the second half of the presentation be seen as important, even relevant, with issues like; how to set up IIS, SQL Server, using Visual Studio, Nuggets development and .NET? I doubt it. I suspect most in the crowd would have assumed that their campus’ IT department would just set it up and support it.

Like customization, collaboration is also frequently cited as a reason to adopt OSS. The idea is that because OSS is developed in an open community where achievements are shared, end-users can leverage this development to increase functionality. And this is true. Scrolling through many open source project forums yields plenty of how to’s, fixes and patches, tips and tricks, etc. Last year, a debate arose about who the Sakai community was and who it best served. I added to the debate within the Sakai discussions:

I have found Sakai, the community, to be a welcome discussion (and often education) on many of the issues I am dealing with in my organization such as: legitimacy of Open Source, portals/frameworks, scope of services (redundancy of functionality across systems), technology issues, etc. The knowledge base and experiences of the people within the Sakai community, whether they are actually contributing code or not, or whether they are even running Sakai on their campus, is a valuable resource for me as I work within my own organization.

As a technologist, I would not define myself as an educator. I have never held a faculty position and the only teaching I have done has been technical workshops. So while I find both the Sakai discussions, as well as the Sakai community, extremely valuable, I wonder if what we are discussing, and is of interest to me, would also be useful to others with different interests and backgrounds?

I was essentially asking, how valuable is the community and collaboration for end-users? In order to find out I researched the discussion forums and measured the number of posts per topic, from the very technical such as “development” where code was discussed to areas like “pedagogy” where instructors discussed the use of Sakai in the classroom.

The results showed that technical discussions dominated, for example the “development” discussion accounted for just over 71% of the total Sakai discussions, while pedagogy accounted for 1.58%. I don’t know if this is typical, but I suspect other open source forums would yield similar findings, think of SourceForge. Now I can think of several examples where there are great, end-user driven discussions taking place that provide users with best practices. Keeping to the LMS theme, the LAMS global community is a website for teachers where they can share LAMS sequences. But I would assume many find Blackboard’s users groups where, “thousands are standing by,” helpful as well.