The Open Road

Education, at least here in the United States, always seems to be underfunded. Apparently, it's much the same across the pond in the United Kingdom, where the BBC News reports on a growing furor to stretch limited education dollars with open-source software.

Although the U.K. has been under pressure to look more closely at open source, it turns out that there are some valid reasons for delaying a move to open source--or, really, to any new solution: it takes time and money to evaluate new technology, and schools don't often have much of either. It can also be costly to retrain people to use alternatives.

In the long term, however, as Gerry Gavigan, the chairman of the Open Source Consortium, points out, the cost savings from moving to open source can overwhelm the near-term difficulties of things like retraining:

Ongoing training costs don't go away merely because of a change from proprietary software to free and open-source software. What does change is liberation from the training costs associated with an externally encouraged or enforced upgrade cycle.

Something that isn't always taken into account when calculating software procurement costs is the ongoing costs arising from licensing or technology lock-in.

In sum, while it's easy for Microsoft to make the argument that sticking with the tried-and-true is the most cost-effective solution, that is a shallow, myopic answer to the ongoing problem of adequately funding technology in education. We need to take a longs-term view, whether that means shifting more resources to Microsoft and proprietary software solutions or moving money to open-source software. Short-term solutions to long-term problems won't work.

The UK's primary school education program has remained roughly the same since it was instituted in 1904. That's all about to change.

As reported in The Times, the UK will soon introduce a series of sweeping changes to the nation's primary school education, "aimed at producing a curriculum for the 21st Century" which will see information technology classes given equal standing with English and Math.

Proponents of the new system argue that it's not a matter of discarding the core subjects of English, Math, Science, etc., but rather of teaching them in new ways in order to make them more easily digestible by students.

The material is proposed to be taught around six learning areas: understanding English, communication, and languages; mathematical understanding; scientific and technological understanding; human, social, and environmental understanding; understanding physical health and well-being; and understanding arts and design.

Sir Jim [Rose, author of the report,] said that combining traditional subjects in themed "learning areas" and introducing more practical and applied teaching would help pupils to make use of their knowledge in real-life situations, such as in managing their own finances.

The idea is to give teachers more latitude to cover topics in more depth, rather than breadth, and to take a cross-disciplinary approach.

Some critics suggest that the new approach risks leaving children with shallow foundations in core subjects like Math, which provide a firm foundation for appreciating and understanding other topics.

OStatic reports on academic debate (literally) around the value of open source at the recent Educause conference. Apparently Adrian Sannier, university technology officer at Arizona State University, stirred the pot by claiming that license cost savings from open-source software will be eaten up by the consulting fees allegedly required to make it work.

Aside from being silly, ignorant, and wrong, it's a valid point. :-)

I work with a range of system integrators that work with both open-source and proprietary software. From these I hear over and over again that it costs less to deploy an open-source system because of open standards, open APIs, and, yes, open source. It turns out that the more you know about a system, the easier it is to tailor it to a university's (or to an enterprise's) needs.

Indeed, it's not truly cost savings that should drive university buying decisions between open source and proprietary software, given that universities tend to get excellent discounts from vendors in both camps. Instead, universities should be looking to buy software that maximizes their freedom to tinker and tailor, two things that I've found many of my Higher Education customers have in common.

Regardless, this whole thing is a bit of a canard, anyway. Years ago we left behind the world where customers had to give up on functionality or stability when going to open source. That was true 10 years ago. It is emphatically false today. Most categories of software now have viable, even superior, open-source products.

Universities, therefore, should buy into the software that works best, and that enables them to tailor to their needs. More often than not, these days that software is open source.

Open source has long been the ugly stepchild of UK government information technology, but in a recent turn of events, it may finally be gaining ground with the British.

As The Inquirer reports, two open-source companies, Novell UK and Sirius, have been granted access to the UK's £80 million ($149 million) Software for Educational Institutions Framework, which enables them to supply software to the UK public sector. There may be additional open-source vendors chosen but the official list won't be released until Wednesday, September 24.

How important is this selection? Very.

The UK's procurement frameworks, a fast-track process for public sector purchasers, handled £4.4bn of business in the year to April 2008. They are not meant to prevent companies not on the lists from selling to the public sector but, said (Mark) Taylor (CEO of Sirius), this had not been the experience of the Open Source community.

... Read More

Ah, to be proprietary and free from those pesky open-source projects! This is almost certainly the feeling at Blackboard, the "Microsoft of Higher Education" which is coming under increased pressure from Moodle, Sakai, two open-source alternatives for course management, as The Chronicle of Higher Education suggests.

It used to be so easy to throw one's proprietary weight around. Blackboard has launched patent attacks on competitors and has been a tough competitor in a range of different ways. Still, open source is thriving.

Blackboard is heading for a showdown with the free-software movement, according to some observers. Although Blackboard remains the clear market leader -- about 66 percent of American colleges use its software as their standard... -- there are signs that open-source alternatives are starting to gain ground. [One] survey found that the proportion of colleges using Moodle as their standard rose from 4.2 percent in 2006 to 7.8 percent in 2007, and that about 3 percent of colleges have selected Sakai.

Another survey by the Instructional Technology Council, found that its member colleges have increased Moodle adoption from 4 percent in 2007 to more than 10 percent in 2008. Blackboard, of course, will continue to compete, and should do so. But it's going to struggle in an already open-source friendly Higher Education market.

I spoke at a Higher Education conference a year ago and was surprised by how wide and deep adoption of open-source software was. It wasn't just the MITs of the world, but also community colleges, state colleges, international institutions like Oxford, as well as online-only universities. Blackboard and other proprietary vendors have their work cut out for them. Open source isn't perfect for every institution, but it's apparently more than good enough.

What if your local school district had to choose between Microsoft software licenses or education for your children? This isn't far off from the choice Windsor Unified School District in California recently faced, as LinuxWorld Magazine details.

Facing a $100,000 price tag from Microsoft (half the district's IT budget) and another $200,000 for security software from Trend Micro, the district's new IT administrator turned to open source:

Carver dramatically reduced costs by moving about 60% of software to open source, while also saving on hardware expenses by employing virtualization and thin client technology....

... Read More

Thanks to Steve Hargadon for pointing out the upcoming K-12 Open Minds Conference. Steve writes:

For me, this is the must-attend event of the year relating to Free and Open Source Software in K-12 education. There are more tracks and topics that I already want to see than I will have time to attend. There are currently over 55 planned conference sessions, covering a the use of Linux and Open Source use in classroom, teaching, technical, and leadership aspects.

The event is October 9-11, 2007, in Indianapolis, Indiana. Sounds like a great event.

I first came across this eSchools report on Dana Blankenhorn's blog, and followed Dana's link to the findings from the 2006 report:

Open source is gaining importance for schools. The growth rate is a healthy 70% per year. Beyond Linux and the well-known Indiana open-source initiative, a number of other states and districts are considering open source. Moodle, a curriculum delivery platform, is an example of a popular open-source program. Widespread open-source usage will grow eight-fold from 2006 to 2011.

Wow. I'm hopeful that increased open source will spawn fewer Microsoft-bred atrocities like this: