6.1 Barriers to the adoption of open source: personal and professional  (Page 9/13)

eLearning is at the nexus of technology and learning. It is not enough to simply define functional requirements and hand it over to the IT department to make it work - that is unless the IT department is on board with constant change, testing new features, pushing the boundaries of online learning with new features etc. - i.e. innovating. This doesn’t necessarily mean feature development but will almost certainly mean gluing new functionality together. This is why the decision-making process for OSS vs proprietary does venture into areas beyond the IT department and thank goodness. It is precisely because it is so much more difficult (there’s longer time lags, there is little control over your immediate destiny) to innovate using a proprietary eLearning platform that the decision to opt for open source becomes a hotly debated issue and one that Faculty has a stake in.

While I don’t know the details, I think the story at Athabasca is interesting in this regard. The CIO had decided to upgrade WebCT to WebCT Enterprise - this caused an uproar from the faculty departments and they had the decision changed. My understanding of it was that this had very little to do with functional specifications and more to do with freedom going forward.

In my earlier post I stated that we barely looked at the feature set when evaluating the platform that would be central to the NZOSVLE project. Instead we were looking for an overall architecture and community that would provide flexibility for a future we couldn’t fully foresee (we knew it would be dynamic, fast-moving and demanding though). If in 2003 we had put together a functional requirements list and handed it to our IT department then they would have done a sensible thing and selected the best product to fit the functional spec. I suspect we may have ended up with Blackboard. If so then we wouldn’t have networked LMSs like we do now…maybe some proprietary platform can offer it but Blackboard can’t yet so we would be behind the 8-ball.

I agree that the “someone you really needed to have if you are going to run an open source LMS” PHP and community development session does come across as strange. I think it’s perfectly fine for end-users to have it as a turn-key, just make it work solution. Many of our institutions do just that and we have SLAs to cover that. But, and this is a big one, they are far more comfortable in the knowledge that they can commission a customisation, have it tested and deployed, and operational more cheaply and more quickly than is typical from a proprietary software vendor.

In our situation here, it was only through wresting control off of some of the IT departments that we were able to make some real headway with our e-learning infrastructures. I guess this led to a situation where we were saying we using these IT guys rather than those IT guys so perhaps the point is moot. In an attempt to clarify (and be provocative ;-) , in my experience education institutional IT departments have too much control over who can do what - e.g. Skype policies, locking down certain file types in the VLE etc. That’s in my experience, I’m not saying it’s not possible. To take your argument one step further, if the end-users were to provide their functional requirements but also add a bullet point that they want it to be open source to ensure freedom to innovate, flexibility and future-proofing (leaving aside budget issues), and then the IT dept. were to readily accept that logic and deliver the deployment and support of an OSS solution then…bingo. Ideally (smile), in other circumstances where the end-users haven’t really given any weight towards flexibility and innovation, the IT department weighs up the functionality requirements on their behalf, and selects OSS in any event (total cost of ownership, ease of integrating with other parts of the enterprise etc.). Over the past few years OSS options in the VLE market have grown in maturity to such a degree that, like you say, it comes through as a solid decision in both scenarios.